[Buddha-l] Acting on emptiness

[Richard Hayes]

On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 09:36 -0400, Richard Nance wrote:

> >> one who acts on emptiness is
> >> compassionate toward all beings and responds to try to eliminate all
> >> suffering wherever it may be and no matter who thinks (falsely, it
> >> turns out) that the suffering is his.
> 
> But, as you go on to note:
> 
> > That answer also seems
> >> inadequate, since universal love can be based on things other than an
> >> awareness of emptiness
> 
> Inadequate for what purpose, exactly?

What I said was the product of faulty reasoning. If I had been thinking
more carefully I would not have said that. Alas, I pressed the SEND
button prematurely.

> (Why not simply say, "I don't know
> why this person acts has he or she does -- but one reason could
> perhaps be that he or she has developed an awareness of emptiness. So
> it's not a bad idea to cultivate such an awareness"?)

Yes, that is exactly the sort of thing one should simply say. It reminds
me of when I was attending a long conference in Israel on the topic of
religious conversion. There had been a fair amount of subtle but very
real "my wisdom is bigger than your wisdom" and "your intolerance is
bigger than my intolerance" posturing among the participants. In my
final communication to the group I told the story of how the night
before I had been taking a walk through the streets of Jerusalem with a
Christian. Just as I was about to step unwittingly on a beetle, the
Christian grabbed my arm and pointed to the ground, thereby preventing
me from stepping on the beetle. I told of this incident and said we
could have a long discussion about whether the beetle owed its life to
Christian love or Buddhist compassion. In the final analysis, I
concluded, the only thing that matters is that the beetle didn't die.
(I'm guessing the beetle eventually died in some other equally
unsatisfactory way. It may have been reborn as a human being who will be
one of our students in a couple of years.)

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Compassionate Entomology 
University of New Mexico