A study of Śūnyatā concept

Abstract

In Mahayana Buddhism, there are books written about sunyata or emptiness. Mahayana Buddhism greatly elaborates sunyata, because their forefathers could not understand the concept of Nibbana. Unfortunately, many people who are introduced to Mahayana teachings believe that Nibbana is an abstract concept. It is a very simple concept if one understands the pure Buddha Dhamma Emptiness is relative. There is no absolute “emptiness”. It is meaningless to say “this is emptiness” because there may be something there that we are not aware of. Still, one could say that “deep space is empty of tangible matter” to a good approximation. The Buddha said when the mind becomes empty of greed, hate and ignorance it becomes empty of those defilements and that mind has attained Nibbana. That is emptiness, sunyata with respect to defilements. When one attains the Arahantphala, one’s mind becomes sunya of raga, dosa, moha. But one still has sanna (perception), vedana (feelings), etc. and lives like a normal human being until death. At the death of an Arahant, “this world of 31 realms” becomes devoid of any trace of that life stream, except for the Arahant ‘snamagoththa’ there is no rebirth. So that is another sunyata. There is a sutta in Tipitaka that is about sunnata, and was delivered by the Buddha, called the Cula-Sunnatasutta. When I got to know about the sutta, I was glad to see that the sutta described emptiness very similar to the way I described it. This shows that the Dhamma is internally self-consistent. In the Cula-SunnataSuttaBuddha has preached. There is no need to write books on emptiness that are full of meaningless words. In a recent online discussion forum, I saw a comment saying that emptiness describes paticcasamuppada. This is surprising because in Mahayana texts it is not explained what paticcasamuppada is. The Buddha said “One who understands paticcasamuppada, understands Dhamma” The Mahayana sects have moved so far away from Buddha Dhamma, I cannot fathom why they still call it Buddha’s Dhamma.