Emptiness means to be full of everything
but empty of a separate existence.
Imagine, for a moment, a beautiful flower. That flower might be an orchid or a rose, or even a simple little daisy growing beside a path. Looking into a flower, we can see that it is full of life. It contains soil, rain, and sunshine. It is also full of clouds, oceans, and minerals. It is even full of space and time. In fact, the whole cosmos is present in this one little flower. If we took out just one of these “non-flower” elements, the flower would not be there. Without the soil’s nutrients, the flower could not grow. Without rain and sunshine, the flower would die. And if we removed all the non-flower elements, there would be nothing substantive left that we could call a “flower.” So our observation tells us that the flower is full of the whole cosmos, while at the same time it is empty of a separate self-existence. The flower cannot exist by itself alone.
We too are full of so many things and yet empty of a separate self. Like the flower, we contain earth, water, air, sunlight, and warmth. We contain space and consciousness. We contain our ancestors, our parents and grandparents, education, food, and culture. The whole cosmos has come together to create the wonderful manifestation that we are. If we remove any of these “non-us” elements, we will find there is no “us” left.
EMPTINESS: THE FIRST DOOR OF LIBERATION
Emptiness does not mean nothingness. Saying that we are empty does not mean that we do not exist. No matter if something is full or empty, that thing clearly needs to be there in the first place. When we say a cup is empty, the cup must be there in order to be empty. When we say that we are empty, it means that we must be there in order to be empty of a permanent, separate self.
About thirty years ago I was looking for an English word to describe our deep interconnection with everything else. I liked the word “togetherness,” but I finally came up with the word “interbeing.” The verb “to be” can be misleading, because we cannot be by ourselves, alone. “To be” is always to “inter-be.” If we combine the prefix “inter” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, “inter-be.” To inter-be reflects reality more accurately. We inter-are with one another and with all life.
There is a biologist named Lewis Thomas, whose work I appreciate very much. He describes how our human bodies are “shared, rented, and occupied” by countless other tiny organisms, without whom we couldn’t “move a muscle, drum a finger, or think a thought.” Our body is a community, and the trillions of non-human cells in our body are even more numerous than the human cells. Without them, we could not be here in this moment. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to think, to feel, or to speak. There are, he says, no solitary beings. The whole planet is one giant, living, breathing cell, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis.
THE INSIGHT OF INTERBEING
We can observe emptiness and interbeing everywhere in our daily life. If we look at a child, it’s easy to see the child’s mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, in her. The way she looks, the way she acts, the things she says. Even her skills and talents are the same as her parents’. If at times we cannot understand why the child is acting a certain way, it is helpful to remember that she is not a separate self-entity. She is a continuation. Her parents and ancestors are inside her. When she walks and talks, they walk and talk as well. Looking into the child, we can be in touch with her parents and ancestors, but equally, looking into the parent, we can see the child. We do not exist independently. We inter-are. Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest—whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me.
I remember one time when I was in London, doing walking meditation along the street, and I saw a book displayed in a bookshop window with the title My Mother, Myself. I didn’t buy the book because I felt I already knew what was inside. It’s true that each one of us is a continuation of our mother; we are our mother. And so whenever we are angry at our mother or father, we are also being angry at ourselves. Whatever we do, our parents are doing it with us. This may be hard to accept, but it’s the truth. We can’t say we don’t want to have anything to do with our parents. They are in us, and we are in them. We are the continuation of all our ancestors. Thanks to impermanence, we have a chance to transform our inheritance in a beautiful direction.
Every time I offer incense or prostrate before the altar in my hermitage, I do not do this as an individual self but as a whole lineage. Whenever I walk, sit, eat, or practice calligraphy, I do so with the awareness that all my ancestors are within me in that moment. I am their continuation. Whatever I am doing, the energy of mindfulness enables me to do it as “us,” not as “me.” When I hold a calligraphy brush, I know I cannot remove my father from my hand. I know I cannot remove my mother or my ancestors from me. They are present in all my cells, in my gestures, in my capacity to draw a beautiful circle. Nor can I remove my spiritual teachers from my hand. They are there in the peace, concentration, and mindfulness I enjoy as I make the circle. We are all drawing the circle together. There is no separate self doing it. While practicing calligraphy, I touch the profound insight of no self. It becomes a deep practice of meditation.
Whether we’re at work or at home, we can practice to see all our ancestors and teachers present in our actions. We can see their presence when we express a talent or skill they have transmitted to us. We can see their hands in ours as we prepare a meal or wash the dishes. We can experience profound connection and free ourselves from the idea that we are a separate self.
YOU ARE A RIVER
We can contemplate emptiness in terms of interbeing across space—our relationship to everything and everyone around us. We can also contemplate emptiness in terms of impermanence across time. Impermanence means that nothing remains the same thing in two consecutive moments. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus said, “You can never bathe in the same river twice.” The river is always flowing, so as soon as we climb out onto the bank and then return again to bathe, the water has already changed. And even in that short space of time we too have changed. In our body, cells are dying and being born every second. Our thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and state of mind are also changing from one moment to the next. So we cannot swim twice in the same river; nor can the river receive the same person twice. Our body and mind are an ever-changing continuum. Although we seem to look the same, and we are still called the same name, we are different. No matter how sophisticated our scientific instruments, we cannot find anything in our person that remains the same and that we can call a soul or a self. Once we accept the reality of impermanence, we have to also accept the truth of no self.
The two concentrations on emptiness and impermanence help free us from our tendency to think that we are separate selves. They are insights that can help us step out of the prison of our wrong views. We have to train ourselves to sustain the insight of emptiness while we’re looking at a person, a bird, a tree, or a rock. It’s very different from just sitting there and speculating about emptiness. We have to really see the nature of emptiness, of interbeing, of impermanence, in ourselves and others.
For example, you call me Vietnamese. You may be quite sure that I’m a Vietnamese monk. But in fact, legally speaking, I don’t have a Vietnamese passport. Culturally speaking, I have elements of French in me, as well as Chinese culture and even Indian culture. In my writing and teachings, you can discover several sources of cultural streams. And ethnically speaking, there’s no such race as the Vietnamese race. In me there are Melanesian elements, Indonesian elements, and Mongolian elements. Just as the flower is made of non-flower elements, so am I made of non-me elements. The insight of interbeing helps us touch this wisdom of non-discrimination. It sets us free. We no longer want to belong just to one geographical area or cultural identity. We see the presence of the whole cosmos in us. The more we look with the insight of emptiness, the more we discover and the deeper we understand. This naturally brings compassion, freedom, and non-fear.
PLEASE CALL ME BY MY TRUE NAMES
I remember one day in the 1970s, while we were working for the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation in Paris, some terrible news came in. Many people had been fleeing Vietnam by boat, which was always a very dangerous journey. Not only was there the danger of storms and not having enough fuel, food, or water, but also there was the risk of getting attacked by pirates, who were active along the coast of Thailand. The story we heard was tragic. Pirates had boarded a boat, stolen valuables, and raped an eleven-year-old girl. When her father tried to intervene, he was thrown overboard. After the attack, the girl threw herself overboard too. Both perished in the sea.
After I heard this news, I couldn’t sleep. The feelings of sadness, compassion, and pity were very strong. But as a practitioner, we cannot let the feelings of anger and helplessness paralyze us. So I practiced walking meditation, sitting meditation, and mindful breathing to look more deeply into the situation, to try to understand.
I visualized myself as a little boy born into a poor family in Thailand, my father an illiterate fisherman. From one generation to the next, my ancestors had lived in poverty, without education, without help. I too grew up without an education, and perhaps with violence. Then one day, someone asks me to go out to sea and make a fortune as a pirate and I foolishly agree, desperate to finally break out of this terrible cycle of poverty. And then, under pressure from my fellow pirates, and with no coastal patrol to stop me, I force myself on a beautiful young girl.
My whole life I have never been taught how to love or understand. I never received an education. Nobody showed me a future. If you had been there on the boat with a gun, you could have shot me. You could have killed me. But you wouldn’t have been able to help me.
Meditating that night in Paris, I saw that hundreds of babies continue to be born under similar circumstances and that they will grow up to be pirates, unless I do something now to help them. I saw all of this, and my anger disappeared. My heart was full of the energy of compassion and forgiveness. I could embrace not only the eleven-year-old girl in my arms, but also the pirate. I could see myself in them. This is the fruit of the contemplation on emptiness, on interbeing. I could see that suffering is not only individual; it is also collective. Suffering can be transmitted to us by our ancestors, or it can be there in the society around us. As my blame and hatred dissipated, I became determined to live my life in such a way that I could help not only the victims, but also the perpetrators.
So, if you call me Thich Nhat Hanh, I will say, “Yes, that is me.” And if you call me the young girl, I will say, “Yes, that is me.” If you call me the pirate, I will also say, “Yes, that is me.” These are all my true names. If you call me an impoverished child in a war zone with no future, I will say, “Yes, that is me.” And if you call me the arms merchant selling weapons to support that war, I will say, “Yes, that is me.” All of these people are us. We inter-are with everyone.
When we can free ourselves from the idea of separateness,
we have compassion, we have understanding,
and we have the energy we need to help.
TWO LEVELS OF TRUTH
In everyday language, we say “you” and “I” and “we” and “they” because these designations are useful. They identify who or what we are talking about, but it is important to realize they are only conventional designations. They are only relative truths, not the ultimate truth. We are so much more than these labels and categories. It is impossible to draw a hard line between you and I and the rest of the cosmos. The insight of interbeing helps us connect with the ultimate truth of emptiness. The teaching on emptiness is not about the “dying” of the self. The self does not need to die. The self is just an idea, an illusion, a wrong view, a notion; it is not reality. How can something that is not there die? We do not need to kill the self, but we can remove the illusion of a separate self by gaining a deeper understanding of reality.
NO OWNER, NO BOSS
When we think of ourselves as having a separate self, a separate existence, we identify with our thoughts and our body. We have the impression that we are the boss or owner of our body. We might think “This is my body” or “This is my mind” in the same way we might think “This is my house,” “This is my car,” “These are my qualifications,” “These are my feelings,” “These are my emotions,” “This is my suffering.” In fact, we should not be so sure.
When we think or work or breathe, many of us believe there must be a person, an actor, behind our actions. We believe there must be “someone” doing the action. But when the wind blows, there is no blower behind the wind. There is only the wind, and if it does not blow, it is not the wind at all. When we say “It is raining,” there does not need to be a rainer in order to have the rain. Who is the “it” that is raining? There is only raining. Raining is happening.
In the same way, outside of our actions, there is no person, no thing we can call our “self.” When we think, we are our thinking. When we work, we are the working. When we breathe, we are the breathing. When we act, we are our actions.
I remember once seeing a cartoon depicting the French philosopher René Descartes standing in front of a horse. Descartes was pointing his finger up in the air, declaring, “I think, therefore I am.” Behind him the horse was wondering, “Therefore you are what?”
Descartes was trying to demonstrate that a self exists. Because, according to his logic, if I am thinking, then there must be a “me” that exists in order to do the thinking. If I am not there, then who is thinking?
We cannot deny that there is thinking. It is clear that thinking is taking place. Most of the time the problem is that too much thinking is taking place—thinking about yesterday, worrying about tomorrow—and all of this thinking takes us away from ourselves and from the here and now. When we are caught up in thinking about the past and the future, our mind is not with our body; it is not in contact with the life within us and around us in the present moment. So it might be more accurate to say:
I think (too much),
therefore I am (not there to live my life).
The most accurate way to describe the process of thinking is not that there is “someone” thinking but that thinking is manifesting, as the result of a remarkable, wondrous coming together of conditions. We do not need to have a self in order to think; there is thinking and only thinking. There is not an additional separate entity doing the thinking. Insofar as there is a thinker, the thinker comes into existence at the same time as the thinking. It is like the left and the right. You cannot have the one without the other, but you also cannot have the one before the other; they manifest at the same time. As soon as there is a left, there is also a right. As soon as there’s a thought, there’s a thinker. The thinker is the thinking.
The same is true with the body and action. Millions of neurons work together in our brain, in constant communication. They act in concert, producing a movement, a feeling, a thought, or a perception. Yet there is no conductor of the orchestra. There is no boss making all the decisions. We cannot locate a place in the brain or anywhere else in the body that is controlling everything. There are the actions of thinking, feeling, and perceiving, but there is no actor or separate self-entity doing the thinking, feeling, and perceiving.
In 1966, in London, I had a very powerful experience contemplating a corpse in the British Museum. It had been naturally preserved in sand, lying in the fetal position, for more than five thousand years. I stood there for a long time, very concentrated, contemplating the body.
A few weeks later, in Paris, I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night and wanted to touch my legs to check that I had not become a corpse like that. It was two o’clock, and I sat up. I contemplated the corpse and my own body. After sitting for about an hour, I felt like water raining down on a mountain—washing, washing. Finally, I got up and wrote a poem. I called it “The Great Lion’s Roar.” The feeling was so clear and the images flowed freely; they gushed out, like a huge water container being overturned. The poem opened with these lines:
A white cloud floats in the sky
A bouquet of flowers blooms
Floating clouds
Blooming flowers
The clouds are the floating
The flowers are the blooming
I saw very clearly that if a cloud is not floating, it is not a cloud. If a flower is not blooming, it is not a flower. Without floating, there is no cloud. Without blooming, there is no flower. We cannot separate the two. You cannot take the mind out of the body, and you cannot take the body out of the mind. They inter-are. Just as we find the flower in the blooming, we find a human being in the energy of action. If there’s no energy of action, there’s no human being. As the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously said, “Man is the sum of his actions.” We are the sum of everything we think, say, and do. Just as an orange tree produces beautiful blossoms, leaves, and fruit, so do we produce thinking, speech, and action. And just like the orange tree, our actions are always ripening over time. We can find ourselves only in our actions of body, speech, and mind, continuing as energy across space and time.
NOT IN A STUPA
Over ten years ago, one of my disciples in Vietnam had a stupa—a Buddhist shrine—built for my ashes. I told her that I didn’t need a stupa for my ashes. I don’t want to be stuck in a stupa. I want to be everywhere.
“But,” she protested, “it’s already built!”
“In that case,” I said, “you’ll have to put an inscription on the front, saying, ‘I am not in here.’” It’s true. I won’t be there in the stupa. Even if my body is cremated and the ashes are put in there, they aren’t me. I won’t be in there. Why would I want to be in there when outside it is so beautiful?
But in case some people misunderstand, I told her they might need to add another inscription, saying, “I am not out there either.” People won’t find me inside or outside the stupa. Yet they may still misunderstand. So there may need to be a third inscription that reads, “If I am to be found anywhere, it is in your peaceful way of breathing and walking.” That is my continuation. Even though we may never have met in person, if, when you breathe in, you find peace in your breathing, I am there with you.
I often tell a story from the Bible, from the book of Luke, about two disciples traveling to Emmaus after Jesus had died. They met a man along the road and began to talk and walk with him. After some time, they stopped at an inn to eat. When the two disciples observed the way the man broke the bread and poured the wine, they recognized Jesus.
This story teaches that even Jesus is not to be found only in his physical body. His living reality extends far beyond his physical body. Jesus was fully present in the way the bread was broken and in the way the wine was poured. That is the living Christ. That is why he can say, “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I among them.” It is not only Jesus or the Buddha or any other great spiritual teacher who is with us after their death; all of us continue as energy long after our physical body has changed form.
YOUR BELOVED IS NOT A SELF
When we prostrate before the Buddha or we bow to Jesus Christ, are we bowing to the Buddha who lived 2,500 years ago or to the Christ who lived 2,000 years ago? Who are we bowing to? Are we bowing to a self? We have learned that the Buddha and Jesus Christ were human beings like us. All human beings are made of the five ever-changing, ever-flowing rivers of the physical body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. You, me, Jesus Christ, and the Buddha—we are all continually changing.
To say that today Jesus Christ is exactly the same as he was 2,000 years ago is a mistake, because even in the thirty years of his life, Jesus Christ was never exactly the same. He changed every month and every year, and the same is true for the Buddha. At the age of thirty, the Buddha was different from how he was at the age of forty. And at the age of eighty, he was different again. He, like all of us, constantly evolved and changed. So which Buddha do we want? The one at eighty years old or at forty? We may visualize the Buddha with a certain kind of face or a certain kind of body, but we know that his body is impermanent and ever changing. Or we might think that the Buddha doesn’t exist anymore or that the Jesus Christ of the past is no longer here. But that would also be incorrect, because we know that nothing can be lost.
The Buddha is not a separate self; he is his actions. What are his actions? His actions are the practice of freedom and awakening in the service of all beings, and these actions continue. The Buddha is still here, but not in the form we usually imagine.
Each one of us can be in direct contact with the Buddha as a kind of action. When we are able to walk happily on the Earth, in touch with the wonders of life—with the beautiful birds, trees, and blue sky—feeling happy, at peace, and at ease, then we ourselves are a continuation of the Buddha. The Buddha is not something outside us. He is a kind of energy within us. Every day the living buddha is evolving and growing, manifesting in new forms.
HOW OLD WILL YOU BE IN HEAVEN?
In our Buddhist Peace Delegation office in Paris in the 1970s there was an English woman who volunteered to help us in our work. Although she was over seventy years old, she was in very good health, and every morning she would climb up the five flights of stairs to our office. She was Anglican and had a very strong faith. She firmly believed that after she died she would go to heaven, where she would be reunited with her very kind and handsome husband, who had died when he was thirty-three.
One day I asked her, “After you die and go to heaven and meet your husband again, will he be thirty-three or seventy or eighty? And how old will you be? It would be strange for you, over seventy, to meet him at thirty-three.” Sometimes our faith is very simple.
She was confused, because she had never asked herself that question. She had just assumed that they would meet again. With the insight of interbeing—the insight that we inter-are with one another and with all life—we don’t need to wait to meet our beloved ones again in heaven. They are still right here with us.
NOTHING IS LOST
There are those who believe that an eternal self continues to exist after the body disintegrates. We could call this belief a kind of “eternalism.” Others believe that after death there is nothing. This is a kind of “nihilism.” We need to avoid both these extremes. The insight of impermanence and interbeing tells us there cannot be an eternal, separate self, and the first law of thermodynamics—the law of conservation of energy—tells us that nothing can be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed. So it’s not scientific to believe that after our body decomposes we become nothing.
While we are alive, our life is energy, and after death, we continue to be energy. That energy is continually changing and transforming. It can never be lost.
We cannot assert that after death there is nothing.
Something can never become nothing.
If we have lost someone who is very close to us and we are grieving, the concentrations on emptiness and signlessness help us look deeply and see the ways in which they still continue. Our loved one is still alive within us and around us. They are very real. We have not lost them. It is possible to still recognize them in a different form or in even more beautiful forms than in the past.
In the light of emptiness and interbeing we know they have not died or disappeared: they continue in their actions and in us. We can still talk to them. We can say something like, “I know you are there. I’m breathing for you. I’m smiling for you. I’m enjoying looking around with your eyes. I am enjoying life with you. I know that you are still there very close to me, and that now you continue in me.”
LIFE FORCE
If there is no boss, no owner, no actor, behind our actions and no thinker behind our thoughts, then why do we have this sense of self? In Buddhist psychology, the part of our consciousness that has a tendency to create a sense of self is known in Sanskrit as manas. Manas is equivalent to what Sigmund Freud in psychoanalysis called the “id.” Manas manifests from deep in our consciousness. It is our survival instinct, and it always urges us to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Manas keeps saying, “This is me; this is my body; this is mine,” because manas is unable to perceive reality clearly. Manas tries to protect and defend what it mistakenly thinks is a self. But this is not always good for our survival. Manas cannot see that we are made of only non-us elements and that what it considers to be a self is not actually a separate entity. Manas cannot see that its wrong view of a self can bring us a lot of suffering and prevent us from living happily with freedom. Contemplating the interconnectedness between our body and our environment, we can help manas transform its delusion and see the truth.
We don’t need to get rid of manas; manas is a natural part of life. The reason manas calls this body “me” and “mine” is because one of manas’s roles is to maintain our life force. This life force is what the twentieth-century French philosopher Henri Bergson called élan vital. Like all species, we have a will to live and a strong desire to cling to and protect our life and to defend ourselves from danger. But we have to be cautious not to let our instinct of self-preservation and auto-defense mislead us into thinking we have a separate self. The insight of interbeing and no self can help us make use of our life force—what Freud called sublimation—to take action in life to help and protect others, to forgive and to reconcile, and to help and protect the Earth.
I remember I once left a piece of ginger in a corner in my hermitage and didn’t tend to it. But then one day I discovered that it had sprouted. The stem of ginger was giving rise to a plant of ginger. There was life within it. The same thing can happen with a potato. Everything has this vitality of wanting to go forward and be continued. This is very natural. Everything wants to live. So I put the ginger in a pot with some earth and let it grow.
When a woman becomes pregnant, there is already a life force driving that child’s development. The life force of the mother and of the fetus are neither the same nor different. The life force of the mother enters the child and the life force of the child enters the mother. They are one, and little by little they separate from each other. But sometimes we think that when the baby is born, it is as if the child now has a separate self, as its body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness are different from those of the mother. We may think that we can separate the child from the mother, but the truth is that there remains a relationship of continuation. Looking at the child we see the mother, and looking at the mother we see the child.
PRACTICE: YOUR MOTHER’S HAND
Remember the times you were sick with a fever when you were a little boy or girl? Remember how awful it felt to be so sick? But then your mother or father, or perhaps a grandparent, would put their hand on your burning forehead and it felt so wonderful. You could feel the nectar of love in their hand, and that was enough to comfort and reassure you. Just knowing they were there, beside you, brought relief. If you do not live close to your mother anymore, or if your mother is no longer present in her usual bodily form, you have to look deeply to see that she is in fact always with you. You carry your mother in every cell of your body. Her hand is still in your hand. If your parents have already passed away and you practice looking deeply like this, you can have an even closer relationship with your parents than that of someone whose parents are still alive but who cannot communicate easily with them.
You may like to take a moment now to look at your hand. Can you see your mother’s hand in your hand? Or your father’s? Look deeply into your hand. With this insight, and with all the love and care of your parents, bring your hand up to your forehead and feel the hand of your mother or father touching your forehead. Allow yourself to be cared for by your parents in you. They are always with you.
LIVING BEINGS
We have a tendency to distinguish between animate and inanimate life-forms. But observation shows there is life force even in the objects we call inanimate. Life force and consciousness are in a stem of ginger or in an acorn. The ginger knows how to become a plant, and the acorn knows how to become an oak tree. We cannot call these things inanimate, because they know what to do. Even a subatomic particle or a speck of dust has vitality. There is no absolute dividing line between animate and inanimate, between living matter and inert matter. In so-called inert matter there is life, and living beings are dependent on so-called inert matter. If we took the so-called inanimate elements out of you and me, we would not be able to live. We are made of non-human elements. This is what is taught in the Diamond Sutra, an ancient Buddhist text that could be considered the world’s first treatise on deep ecology. We cannot draw a hard distinction between human beings and other living beings, or between living beings and inert matter.
There is vitality in everything.
The entire cosmos is radiant with vitality.
If we see the Earth as just a block of matter lying outside of us, then we have not yet truly seen the Earth. We need to be able to see that we are a part of the Earth, and to see that the entire Earth is in us. The Earth is also alive; it has intelligence and creativity. If the Earth were inert matter, it could not give birth to countless great beings, including the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Muhammad, and Moses. The Earth is also mother to our parents and to us. Looking with the eyes of non-discrimination, we can establish a very close relationship with the Earth. We look at the Earth with our heart and not the eyes of cold reasoning. You are the planet, and the planet is you. The well-being of your body is not possible without the well-being of the planet. And that is why to protect the well-being of your body we must protect the well-being of the planet. This is the insight of emptiness.
ARE YOU A SOULMATE OF THE BUDDHA?
At the time of the Buddha, there were countless religious and spiritual teachers, each advocating a different spiritual path and practice, and each claiming their teachings were the best and the most correct. One day a group of young people came to ask the Buddha, “Of all these teachers, whom should we believe?”
“Don’t believe anything, not even what I tell you!” replied the Buddha. “Even if it’s an ancient teaching, even if it’s taught by a highly revered teacher. You should use your intelligence and critical mind to carefully examine everything you see or hear. And then put the teaching into practice to see if it helps liberate you from your suffering and your difficulties. If it does, you can believe in it.” If we want to be a soulmate of the Buddha, we need to have a discriminating, critical mind like this.
If we do not allow our beliefs to evolve, if we do not maintain an open mind, we risk waking up one day to discover that we have lost faith in what we once believed. This can be devastating. As practitioners of meditation, we should never accept anything on blind faith, regarding it as absolute, unchanging truth. We should investigate and observe reality with mindfulness and concentration, so our understanding and faith can deepen day by day. This is the kind of faith we cannot lose, because it is not based on ideas or beliefs but on experienced reality.
IS THERE REINCARNATION?
Many of us are resistant to the idea that one day we will die. At the same time, we want to know what happens when we die. Some of us believe we will go to heaven and live happily there. For others, it seems life is too short and we want another chance, to do better next time around. This is why the idea of reincarnation seems very appealing. We may hope that the people who have committed acts of violence will be brought to justice in the next life and be made to pay for their crimes. Or perhaps we’re afraid of nothingness, of oblivion, of not existing anymore. And so, when our body starts to age and disintegrate, it’s tempting to think we might have the opportunity to start again in a young and healthy body, like discarding worn-out clothes.
The idea of reincarnation suggests there is a separate soul, self, or spirit that somehow leaves the body at death, flies away, and then reincarnates in another body. It’s as though the body is some kind of house for the mind, soul, or spirit. This implies that the mind and body can be separated from each other, and that although the body is impermanent, the mind and spirit are somehow permanent. But neither of these ideas is in accord with the deepest teachings of Buddhism.
We can speak of two kinds of Buddhism: popular Buddhism and deep Buddhism. Different audiences need different kinds of teachings, so the teachings should always be adapted in order to be appropriate to the audience. This is why there are thousands of different points of entry into the teachings, enabling many kinds of people to benefit and experience transformation and relief from their suffering. In popular Buddhist culture, it is said there are countless hell realms that we can fall into after dying. Many temples display vivid illustrations of what can happen to us in the hell realms—for example, if we lie in this lifetime, our tongue will be cut out in the next. This is a kind of “skillful means” to motivate people to live their lives in more ethical ways. This approach may help some people, but it may not help others.
Although these teachings are not in accord with the ultimate truth, many people benefit from them. Nevertheless, with compassion, skill, and understanding, we may be able to help one another gradually release our current views and deepen our understanding. If we want to open up to a new way of looking at life and death and what happens after death, we need to let go of our present views in order to allow a deeper understanding to emerge. If we want to climb a ladder, we have to let go of one rung in order to reach the next one. If we cling to the views we presently hold, we cannot progress.
In the beginning, I had certain ideas about mindfulness, meditation, and Buddhism. After ten years of practice, I had a much better understanding. Then after forty or fifty years, my insight and understanding had become even deeper. We are all on a path, we are all making progress, and along the way we need to be ready to abandon our current view so we can be open to a new, better, and deeper view, one which brings us closer to the truth; one which is more helpful for transforming our suffering and cultivating happiness. Whatever views we hold, we should be careful not to get caught up in thinking that our view is the “best” and that only we have the truth. The spirit of Buddhism is very tolerant. We should always keep our hearts open to the people who have different views or beliefs. Practicing openness and non-attachment to views is fundamental in Buddhism. That is why, even though there are dozens of different schools of Buddhism, Buddhists have never waged a holy war against each other.
THE CREAM OF THE BUDDHA’S TEACHING
The spiritual context of ancient India had a strong influence on the Buddha’s teachings. Buddhism is made of non-Buddhist elements in the same way that a flower is made of non-flower elements. In the West, Buddhism is often associated with the ideas of reincarnation, karma, and retribution, but these are not originally Buddhist concepts. They were already well established when the Buddha began teaching. In fact, they were not at all at the heart of what the Buddha taught.
In ancient India, reincarnation, karma, and retribution were all taught based on the idea of the existence of a self. There was a widely held belief in a permanent self that reincarnated and received karmic retribution for actions in this lifetime. But when the Buddha taught reincarnation, karma, and retribution, he taught them in the light of no self, impermanence, and nirvana—our true nature of no birth and no death. He taught that it is not necessary to have a separate, unchanging self in order for karma—actions of body, speech, and mind—to be continued.
According to the Buddha’s core teachings on no self, impermanence, and interbeing, the mind is not a separate entity. The mind cannot leave the body and reincarnate somewhere else. If the mind or spirit is taken from the body, the spirit no longer exists. Body and mind depend on each other in order to exist. Whatever happens in the body influences the mind, and whatever happens in the mind influences the body. Consciousness relies on the body to manifest. Our feelings need to have a body in order to be felt. Without a body, how could we feel? But this doesn’t mean that when the body is dead, we disappear. Our body and mind are a source of energy, and when that energy is no longer manifesting in the forms of body and mind, it manifests in other forms: in our actions of body, speech, and mind.
We don’t need a permanent, separate self in order to reap the consequences of our actions. Are you the same person you were last year, or are you different? Even in this lifetime, we cannot say that the one who sowed good seeds last year is exactly the same person as the one who reaps the benefit this year.
Unfortunately, many Buddhists still hold on to the idea of a self to help them understand the teachings on reincarnation, karma, and retribution. But this is a very diluted kind of Buddhism, because it has lost the essence of the Buddha’s teachings on no self, impermanence, and our true nature of no birth and no death. Any teaching that does not reflect these insights is not the deepest Buddhist teaching. The Three Doors of Liberation—emptiness, signlessness, and aimlessness—embody the cream of the Buddha’s teaching.
In Buddhism, if you touch the reality of interbeing, impermanence, and no self, you understand reincarnation in quite a different way. You see that rebirth is possible without a self. Karma is possible without a self, and retribution is possible without a self.
We are all dying and being reborn at every moment. This manifestation of life gives way to another manifestation of life.
We are continued in our children, in our students,
in everyone whose lives we have touched.
“Rebirth” is a better description than “reincarnation.” When a cloud turns to rain, we cannot say that a cloud is “reincarnated” in the rain. “Continuation,” “transformation,” and “manifestation” are all good words, but perhaps the best word is “remanifestation.” The rain is a remanifestation of the cloud. Our actions of body, speech, and mind are a kind of energy we are always transmitting, and that energy manifests itself in different forms again and again.
Once a young child asked me, “How does it feel to be dead?” This is a very good, very deep question. I used the example of a cloud to explain to her about birth, death, and continuation. I explained that a cloud can never die. A cloud can only become something else, like rain or snow or hail. When you are a cloud, you feel like a cloud. And when you become rain, you feel like the rain. And when you become snow, you feel like the snow. Remanifestation is wonderful.