​Emptiness

Dynamic Interconnectedness
and Self-Emptying
​​

This page features two essays by Nicole Bea Pastoukoff, independent scholar and Zen practitioner. They are Emptiness as Dynamic Interconnectedness and Emptiness as the Practice of Self-Emptying.

​The essays originally appeared in her website Buddhism: The Way of Emptiness, and are reposted with her permission. Indeed she has developed two websites which are treasure troves for understanding Buddhism. I heartily encourage readers to visit them and learn from them:

The Kyoto School of Philosophy

Buddhism: The Way of Emptiness

I offer these essays here because Buddhism is itself an original yet immensely relevant process philosophy from which process thinkers around the world can learn. Process philosophy today is influenced by, but not limited to, Whitehead's philosophy. One of its key teachings, in whatever iteration, is that there are no self-contained substances: all realities contain within themselves links with, and dependence on, others.

A Buddhist process philosophy articulates this perspective in a unique way. It recognizes that Emptiness (which Whitehead called Creativity) is the ultimate reality to which people can awaken with help from meditation, and that this awakening opens them inter-becoming or dynamic interconnectedness of all things. Whitehead speaks of this interconnectedness as the principle of relativity. One of its expression is deep listening; hence the image of the woman above, listening to her friend.

​A recognition of inter-becoming or relativity can include belief in God (Amida Buddha) as an expression of Emptiness, as in Pure Land Buddhism. See Samantha and Michiko: Christianity and Pure Land Buddhism in Dialogue. But it can also be non-theistic in tenor; see The Kyoto School: A Process Philosophy Grounded in Emptiness not God​. One value of Buddhist process philosophy is that it is open to theistic and non-theistic points of view, showing how they can be two paths toward a similar awakening. From a Buddhist process perspective, we belong to one another as individuals, each with our own suchness. Suchness itself is relational.

​- Jay McDaniel

​Emptiness as Dynamic Interconnectedness

​Nicole Bea Pastoukoff

The concept of emptiness has been a cornerstone of Buddhism throughout its history, during which it has taken many forms, as the term was often misunderstood and required repeated clarifications by successive generations of Buddhist scholars and practitioners. On this page, I follow the evolution of this concept from the philosophical standpoint. On the next page, I look into the impact of its evolution in terms of the practice.

Anatman – the self is empty of own-being

According to tradition, the concept of emptiness was introduced in the context of the Buddha’s challenge of the Upanisads’ doctrine of atman, the individual self, said to share the essential nature of brahman, the Cosmic Self, the uncaused, unchanging, substratum that was the original cause of all that exists. Challenging atman’s existence was therefore paramount to challenging brahman’s ultimate existence, a revolutionary move indeed, perhaps not unlike Nietzsche’s announcement that “God is dead.” It is said that the Buddha kept silent when asked directly about atman and brahman, but he did assert that, based upon his meditative experience, he had come to see that there was no unchanging atman within us, what I called “my self” was neither unchanging nor substantial – it was therefore called “anatman,” translated as “no own-being.” It was also called “no-abiding self” to highlight the fact that it was at each moment the product of changing conditions – in an apprehension of reality experienced as taking place here and now. There was indeed a subjective experience, but there was no lingering entity remaining the same behind it. That experience of subjectivity was later described as composed of five “heaps” (Skt skandhas) similarly devoid of substantial existence, and instead, the products of conditions.

What the Buddha taught, however, was not new. It was a revival of the shamanistic worldview based on the insights of the yogis Gautama had met and learned from when he joined the sramana communities in the forest. These were the descendents of the refugees from the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation after its collapse, and they, like the Daoists in China, the Shinto in Japan, as well as the native Americans, and all other so-called “traditional” (that is, “pre-literate”) peoples, saw the world as alive with interconnected forces, with which one had to interact, rather than control and exploit.

Gombrich notes that, with anatman, the Buddha “was refusing to accept that a person had an unchanging essence,” adding that “it was something very few westerners have ever believed in and most have never even heard of.” Yet, anatman as the lack of abiding (unchanging) self, often shortened to “no-self,” has again and again led to the erroneous belief that Buddhism teaches that we had no selves.

The Prajnaparamita Sutras and Nagarjuna

In the centuries following the death of the Buddha, Abhidharma scholars undertook a systematisation of the teachings of the Buddha. As Bret W. Davis explains, they saw themselves as “taking up where the Buddha left off when he analyzed the self into five skandhas …They broke each of these down further until they reached what they considered to be the ultimate physical and mental constituents of reality, which they called dharmas. Whether these dharmas were understood to be permanent (as in Sarvastivada Abhidharma) or momentary (as in the Sautrantrika Abhidharma), they were taken to be real existents, the atomistic building blocks of the universe, so to speak.”

In parallel with this development, the many versions of the Prajnaparamita sutras had been composed to support the practice of Buddhist monks where emptiness occupied centre stage. The same preoccupation with a clarification of the concept of emptiness prompted Nagarjuna to revisit the Buddha’s claim that the self and all things were empty of “own-being.” This led him to criticise what he saw as a philosophical drift, and articulate the equation of sunyata (emptiness) with dependent origination. In Davis’ words, “There are no substantial building blocks of the universe; nothing has independent existence; everything depends for its existence on causes and conditions; and everything is essentially interconnected. This radical teaching of the emptiness of own-being lies at the core of the Prajnaparamita Sutras and Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka school of thought, which established the initial philosophical basis of the Mahayana tradition.” Nagarjuna’s own famous statement reads: “It is dependent origination that we call emptiness. It is a dependent designation and is itself the Middle Path” (Nagarjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā). The statement could not be clearer: emptiness is dependent origination, i.e., interconnectedness. To avoid any misunderstanding, Nagarjuna specifically asserted that emptiness as he defined it, did not mean that nothing exists at all on any level. Things did exist, but as conditioned, not as inherently existing independent substances. The message, however, was not always properly heard, and a belief remained among Buddhist sanghas as well as the general public, that Buddhism claimed that all the things we see are not really real, because they are the products of conditions, and would disappear when the conditions come to an end. 

Yogacara and the Alaya-consciousness

While the disciples of Nagarjuna in the Madhyamaka school elaborated on the equation of emptiness with dependent origination, the Yogacara school, founded in the 4th century by Asanga, a monk, and his more philosophically inclined half-brother Vasubandhu, engaged in a parallel investigation of the concept of emptiness. Their starting point was a  concern that the Madhyamika view of emptiness as dependent origination left “phenomena supported by nothing but other unsupported phenomena” (Peter Harvey). In other words, it was too nihilistic. 

They consequently embarked on a study of the “mechanics of consciousness.” In the early Abhidharma “consciousness (Skt vijnana) …was seen to be of seven types: consciousness related to each of the five physical senses, mind-consciousness, and mind-organ (Skt manas) with the latter processing the input from the senses” (Harvey). Yogacara took these layers to merely referring to “the surface of the mind,” and added a deeper eigthth layer. “Devoid of purposive activity and only indistinctly aware of objects, it is an underlying unconscious level of mind known as alaya-vijnana, the “storehouse consciousness” (Harvey). This deeper consciousness “stored” the accumulated (good and bad) karmic material shaping the way we see the world. 

A lengthy controversy erupted as the Madhyamikas criticised the scholars of the Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha schools for having “relapsed” into substantialism, now seen in terms of  a non-dual “unconscious” level of  consciousness taken to be a substratum underlying phenomena.

To be fair, the Yogacara scholars did accept the criticism about the apparent substantiality of the alaya-consciousness. Their argument – that their teachings, as all Buddhist teachings, were only skilful means – though correct to a point, failed to satisfy the purists who insisted on a total absence of anything  underlying – whether sub-stance or sub-stratum – behind conditioned phenomena.

Tathagatagarbha – the non-dual Buddha-nature within us is interpreted differently in India and in China

In the Prajnaparamita sutras, the “brightly shining citta” within ourselves appears as the “thought of awakening” (bodhi-citta), the heartfelt aspiration to embark on the Bodhisattva path. It is, however, in the Tathagatagarbha Sutra that the concept of buddha-nature was fully developed. The word Tathagata means “thus gone” or “thus come.” It was originally used when referring to the historical Buddha. In Mahayana it refers to Buddhahood itself. Garbha means either “embryo” or “womb.” It refers to the presence within us of a potential Buddhahood. It is said in the Lankavatara Sutra that “the alaya-vijnana is also known as the Tathagata-garbha”(Harvey). The fact is that the scholars of both schools were similarly concerned about the way Nagarjuna’s equation of emptiness with dependent origination left “phenomena supported by nothing but other unsupported phenomena” (Harvey).
​
Francis H. Cook notes that the notion of womb, embryo or seed of Buddhahood was regarded in the Indo-Tibetan cultural zone as “merely a seed, the undeveloped source or cause of the fully grown fruit of Buddhahood.” A lengthy training was required to bring this seed to full Buddhahood. In China, however,  it “often came to be seen as a pre-existent reality waiting to be uncovered” (Harvey). Steeped in the view of a non-dual Dao also conceived as a womb (in the sense of source and flow of life giving shape to all things), Chinese Buddhists were not concerned about the need to avoid confusion with Brahmanical essentialist views! In that new cultural context, the concept of buddha-nature escaped considerations of substantiality. Instead, in keeping with the East Asian apprehension of reality as change, buddha-nature, together with its association with the alaya-consciousness, was soon redefined as non-dual prajna, and explored in terms of “process” or “activity.” 

The Huayan School

Though one of the most influential schools in East Asia, the Huayan school is still relatively unknown in the West. Encapsulated in the metaphor of Indra’s Net, “a massive net representing the universe, in each knot of which lies a jewel reflecting all the others” (Cook, quoted by Davis), its core teaching of “mutual identity and interpenetration of all phenomena” first appears to be an expanded interpretation of dependent origination, emphasizing the relation between the part and the whole, as well as the relation between each part. It is said that, not only does the whole include the part, but the part includes the whole. This seemingly modest alteration reflects a momentous shift in the way reality is apprehended. Dependent origination was meant to describe how “things” did not exist independently. Mutual identity and interpenetration of all phenomena, with each part necessarily including the whole, turns each part into a function of the whole. Take, for instance, a pair of eyeglasses, an example used by B. Allan Wallace in one of his online lectures, disassemble it into its parts – the frame, the lenses, the hinges, the temples, the ear pieces, and lay them on the table, do you still have eyeglasses? You definitely cannot put them on to read the text in front of you. You only have parts of a pair of eyeglasses. To have eyeglasses that enable you to see, the parts need to be re-assembled, and “function” as eyeglasses.  With this switch from “thing” to “function,” a dynamic dimension has been introduced. 
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In Madhyamaka texts, dependent origination has been called upon to explain how phenomena including the self, come about as the products of conditions, arguing that seeing them as inherently independent substances resulted from a “cognitive default.” Because the Indian Brahmanical mainstream culture was based on an essentialist/substantialist worldview, a similar (ontological) language had to be used in order to challenge it. In the Huayan apprehension of reality as a dynamic network, or system, of interconnected relations, a positive understanding of how the world works comes into view. Davis writes that, in the Huayan worldview, “each phenomenon of the universe contains, and is contained in, all the others. No phenomenon could be what it is without the support of every other, and the universe could not be what it is without the support of each phenomenon.” While, for the Yogacara and the Tathagatagarbha, phenomena had appeared to be “supported by nothing but other unsupported phenomena,” with the introduction of a dynamic dimension, phenomena are supported by all other phenomena. 

Nishitani Keiji: the field of sunyata is a “field of force” emanating from a system of circuminsession

In the modern era, the thinkers of the Kyoto school, whose philosophical inquiries were pursued in parallel with a Zen practice, have deepened this dynamic view of emptiness as a system of interconnectedness. Nishitani elaborated on the Huayan concept of reality when he described what he calls “a system of circuminsession or circuminsessional interpenetration.” Nishitani writes:  

“Not a single thing comes into being without some relationship to every other thing … On [an] essential level, a system of circuminsession has to be seen here … In this system each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself … To say that a thing is not itself means that, while continuing to be itself, it is in the home-ground of everything else. Figuratively speaking, its roots reach across into the ground of all other things and help to hold them up and keep them standing. It serves as a constitutive element of their being so that they can be what they are, and thus provides an ingredient of their being. That a thing is itself means that all other things, while continuing to be themselves, are in the home-ground of that thing; that precisely when a thing is on its own home-ground everything else is there too; that the roots of every other thing spread across into its home-ground … It enables us for the first time to conceive of a force by virtue of which all things are gathered together and brought into relationship with one another, a force which, since ancient times, has gone by the name of “nature.”

What Nishitani calls the “field of emptiness,” is a “field of force.” “The “force” … by virtue of which all things make one another exist – the primal force by virtue of which things that exist appear as existing things – emanates from this circuminsessional relationship.” Thanks to this force, Nishitani says, using a term borrowed from Heidegger, the world “worlds.”

As Davis notes, talking about a field of force in the 1960s when Nishitani was writing Religion and Nothingness, brought to mind what science calls an electromagnetic field, or even a quantum field, and we must keep in mind that any word we use is but a metaphor, that is, a skilful means. It is an irony of history that the language of dynamics, energetics, or simply “activity,” is also that of the East’s own ancient , but still alive, traditional view of the world. Davis recalls that the word “field” had already been used by Ikkyu, a Zen Buddhist monk of the 15th century, when he spoke of emptiness as “a formless “original field” from which everything arises and to which everything returns.” That view obviously reflected the traditional view of the Dao, out of which all things arise and to which they return. Nishitani himself says that this force “since ancient times, has gone by the name of “nature.”

Nishida Kitaro: basho, self-contradictory identity and the self-determination of absolute nothingness 


Nishitani’s field of emptiness also echoed the notion of “basho,” developed by Nishida, the founder of the Kyoto School, and Nishitani’s mentor. Nishida had also sought a support for “unsupported phenomena” in the guise of a spatial metaphor, which, since he had set himself the task of using the terminology of Western philosophy, he found in the Timaeus, where Plato speaks of chora, in the sense of a “receptacle or matrix”, not unlike the Dao, as a place (topos) out of which being arises out of nonbeing, which he translated in Japanese as “basho.” Basho is the self-conscious self, the place where, through each act of consciousness, absolute nothingness – the formless – self-determines as the forms of phenomena. Nishida writes: “That I am consciously active means that I determine myself by expressing the world in myself … The world that, in its objectivity, opposes me, is transformed and grasped symbolically in the forms of my own subjectivity. But this transactional logic of contradictory identity signifies as well that it is the world that is expressing itself in me.” The world as it appears in our consciousness is “the many as the self-negation of the One and the One as the self-negation of the many.”

Note that Nishida’s use of the term “absolute nothingness” was motivated by a concern that the word “emptiness” could have misled his readers into thinking that his philosophy only applied to practitioners of Buddhism having achieved a particular “state” of consciousness.

Robert E. Carter explains the logic of contradictory identity – also referred to as the “self-identity of absolute contradictories,” or, simply as “the unity of opposites”-  as follows: “The one is self-contradictorily composed of the many, and the many are self-contradictorily one. The world can be viewed in two directions – the double aperture – and its unity is not the unity of oneness, as the mystic would likely express it, but the unity of self-contradiction. It is both one and many; changing and unchanging; past and future in the present. Nishida’s dialectic has as its aim the preservation of the contradictory terms, yet as a unity.” Though Nishida had worked out the concept of self-contradictory identity in the context of his own philosophical inquiry, in the last five years of his life, through conversations with his lifelong friend D. T. Suzuki, he came to see it as a close parallel to the Prajnaparamita’s logic of sokuhi, “the absolute identification of the is, and the is not. In symbolic representation: A is A; A is not-A; therefore A is A. I see the mountains. I see that there are no mountains. Therefore I see the mountains again, but as transformed. And the transformation is that the mountains both are and are not mountains. That is their reality.” 

The above is, of course, a reference to the well-known epigram by Qingyuan Weixin, where it is said, in a nutshell: As a novice, I believed that mountains and waters were inherently existing entities as given in ordinary self-consciousness; after years of training, I realised that “mountains” and “waters” were just names, and not inherently existing entities outside my mind; when I attained awakening, I again saw that mountains and waters were indeed real, but “lined with nothingness,” both real objects and names at once, to be seen through the “double aperture,” which is two and, at the same time, one.  

Even though, when describing sokuhi as a logic of self-contradictory identity, Nishida uses the word “logic,” he does not see “logic” as a mere static principle the way Aristotle saw his logic of “non-contradiction” as a principle of reason. Because for Nishida, as for other East Asian thinkers, reality is the unfolding of change as experienced here and now, there is a dynamic dimension in that logic. Absolute nothingness “is the dynamic principle of affirmation by way of absolute self-negation” (Davis).

Nishida sees absolute nothingness as the activity of self-negation in terms of the “self-determination of the dialectical world,” a world which continually moves according to the principle of “from created to creating.” “From the created to the creating (from creatus to creans), from the formed to the forming is how [Nishida] describes our situation: we are created by our inheritance and our environment, and yet, we also are capable of re-shaping our environment and of altering our inheritance both for ourselves, and for our offspring” (Carter).

Emptiness is the activity of interconnectedness 

Since the word “ontology” literally means the discourse (logia) on being (onto), Davis suggests that the Buddhist view of ultimate reality as emptiness should be called a “kenology” (from the Greek kenotes meaning emptiness). But the final definition of Buddhist emptiness must give pride of place to the notion of interconnectedness. Whether you call it “dependent origination,” “mutual identity and interpenetration of all phenomena,” “circuminsessional interpenetration,” or “self-contradictory identity,” this is what positively defines what the word emptiness stands for in Buddhism, where it is most clearly elucidated in Zen. “The self-emptying of emptiness occurs as the interdependent origination of all things” (Davis). Emptiness as the activity of self-emptying is the dynamic interconnectedness of all phenomena.

Sources

Richard F. Gombrich – How Buddhism Began (1996)
Bret W. Davis – “Forms of Emptiness in Zen” (Research paper)
Bret W. Davis – “The Kyoto School” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Peter Harvey – An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practice (2013)
Francis H. Cook – Hua-yen Buddhism – The Jewel Net of Indra (1977)
Keiji Nishitani – Religion and Nothingness (English translation1982)
Kitaro Nishida – Last Writings (English translation 1987)
Robert E. Carter – The Nothingness Beyond God (1997)

​Emptiness as the Practice
of Self-Emptying

​
Nicole Bea Pastoukoff
​

“The point at which emptiness is emptied to become true emptiness is the point at which each and every thing becomes manifest in possession of its own suchness”

​- Nishitani Keiji

Meditation as a path to emptiness

For many Buddhists today, meditation is the practice whereby emptiness is realised and embodied in the way we encounter the world. This may be due in part to the popularity of Zen, but it is a fact that emptiness has been associated with the practice of meditation from the days of the Buddha. As a sramana, Gautama had learned and practiced an intensive type of meditation including eight levels of concentration (jhana). Meditation is one of the practices listed in the Eightfold Path and the Dhammapada. 
Bret W. Davis tells us that the specifics of the relationship between meditation and emptiness have, however, evolved over time. “The Theravada has maintained that such states of meditative concentration (P. samatha) are merely preparatory to the more analytical forms of insight meditation (P. vipassana) which lead to liberating wisdom (P. panna). The Zen tradition, by contrast, holds [that] there [is] a more direct relation between non-discursive meditative concentration and enlightenment. Huineng in fact explicitly links – even identifies – meditative concentration (Skt dhyana) with liberating wisdom (Skt prajna).”

In other words, the concentration practice of samatha which, in Theravada, was seen as a training of the mind in preparation for the practice of the liberating analytical activity of vipassana, has become in Zen the practice leading directly to enlightenment. One could argue that both Dogen’s shikantaza and Linji or Hakuin’s koan practice are much more sophisticated concentration practices than samatha has ever been. The point here is that Theravada – as well as – Madhyamaka, tend to rely on analysis as a path to, at least, get glimpses of emptiness. And there is also truth in Zen’s stated reliance on a “pointing directly to [one’s] mind,” whereby one sees “into [one’s own true] nature and [thus] attain Buddhahood.”

The emphasis on analysis found in the Theravada and the Madhyamaka is congruent with their understanding of the cause of suffering. The Theravada saw it as our attachment to “things” which we erroneously believe to exist outside ourselves, and taught that we should cut our attachments in order to overcome our erroneous view of reality. Nagarjuna and his followers in the Madhyamaka revisited the issue from the side of the erroneous view, labeling it a “cognitive default,” a sort of trick consciousness plays on us, which leads us to see forms that are the mere constructs of our minds as “things” outside ourselves, and consequently causes us to crave for these “things,” and become attached to them. In both cases, analytical meditation was expected to allow us to “see through” the trick, and access the truth of the emptiness of all things.

Zen, on the other hand, though owing much to Madhyamaka, was also influenced by Yogacara’s non-dual alaya-consciousness, which led to the concept of a non-dual buddha-nature within us, in the guise of a “radiant pure mind.” Huineng, whose Platform Sutra is regarded as the text that launched the Zen tradition, explicitly identified meditation and wisdom (prajna) when he said: “don’t make the mistake of thinking that meditation and wisdom are separate … Meditation is the body of wisdom, and wisdom is the function of meditation. And wherever you find meditation, you find wisdom .… What this means is that meditation and wisdom are the same … Don’t think that meditation comes first and then gives rise to wisdom or that wisdom or that wisdom comes first and then gives rise to meditation …” (Platform Sutra – Ch. 13).  Whereas meditation had been for centuries associated with “seated meditation” – the familiar lotus posture with a straight back and hands resting on the knees – Huineng, argues that only deluded people think that “sitting motionless, eliminating delusions, and not thinking thoughts are One Practice Samadhi … If that were true, a dharma like that would be the same as lifelessness and would constitute an obstruction of the Way instead. The Way has to flow freely. Why block it up? The Way flows freely when the mind doesn’t dwell on any dharma.” Instead he proposes that “One Practice Samadhi means at all times, whether walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, always practicing with a straightforward [honest, sincere] mind.”

Meditation as engagement with the things and events of the world

With the new focus on the mind/consciousness came a frequent use of the metaphor of the mirror, as seen in the verse contest between Huineng and Shenxiu narrated in the Platform Sutra. Insofar as the Northern School did actually teach “gradual awakening” as described by Shenhui, this appears to have been its understanding of meditation: the mind had to be kept clean, it should not be allowed to gather dust.

As Davis notes, even though Huineng did not reject the metaphor of the mirror, he already went beyond the analogy with a mirror that needs to be cleaned – purified of all defilements – when he said, “Buddha nature is always clean and pure; where is there room for dust?” which, Davis tells us, was changed in the later standard version of the text to “Originally there is not a single thing” … “the remnant of an ontological duality between a pure and unchanging mirror and the impure and changing images reflected in it needs to be let go of; even the empty mirror needs to be emptied out into the world.”

After Huineng, “the teaching of the mirror mind increasingly gave way to the teaching that the mind – or rather the “no-mind”… is inseparable from the things and events of the world” (Yanagida Seizan, quoted by Davis).

At that point, the view of a passive “mirroring” occuring during meditation gave way to that of a dynamic process whereby the empty non-dual buddha-nature empties itself into the things and events of the world. It is as if the buddha-nature inspired us to meditate in order to actualise its enlightened nature in our very lives. 

Soto Zen School – Shikantaza, opening up to the flow 

Of the two main Zen schools that developed out of the Platform Sutra, the Soto Zen lineage seems to have followed most closely the ideal of blending meditation and everyday life. Dogen, its co-founder with Keisan, is known for his claim that “training is enlightenment,” which echoes Huineng’s claim that meditation and prajna are the same thing. 

Of course, Dogen is also known for the transmission and elaboration of what could be regarded as a new type meditation he called shikantaza, “just sitting,” which, at first sight, seems to be the sort of motionless seated practice Huineng had rejected. Many Soto Zen teachers, however, insist that shikantaza is not meditation, in the sense of a (deliberate) “contemplation” of one’s thoughts, or an attempt at managing thoughts in one way or another, suppressing them or directing them. Shikantaza is an opening up to whatever takes place in the mind. It is a self-emptying to allow experiences and thoughts to flow freely. It is probably easier to do seated on the cushion, but we are invited to do it at all times, while engaging in our everyday activities, either in the routine of monastic life, or in the many tasks jostling for attention in the lives of lay practitioners.  
 
Shohaku Okumura describes the practice of shikantaza as follows: “Just as the function of a thyroid gland is to secrete hormones, the function of a brain is to secrete thoughts, so thoughts well up in the mind moment by moment. Yet our practice in zazen is to refrain from doing anything with these thoughts; we just let everything come up freely and we let everything go freely. We don’t grasp anything; we don’t try to control anything. We just sit.” He also adds that it is a “very simple practice,” but it is also a “very deep” practice, and not an “easy” one. In such a practice, “we let go of the individual karmic self,” that which constructs the narrative, and allow “the true self, the self that is one with the entire universe [to] ‘manifest’.” This is the “presencing” Dogen referred to as genjokoan, “the presencing of things as they are.”  Dogen’s practice of “just sitting” is meant to allow  “something akin to a “stream of awareness” in sync with the stream of ever-changing phenomena … and “a form of full engagement in which self and reality overlap and (ideally) fully interpenetrate” (Thomas P. Kasulis).

In the context of a culture where reality is assumed to be “change,” as life energy arising from the empty Dao flows through all things, shaping and animating them as it goes through them, it is especially important, as Huineng had said, not to “block” it by dwelling on any particular thing. Instead the mind must flow with it, and become “inseparable from the things and events of the world.” Dogen famously said: “Conveying oneself toward all things to carry out practice-enlightenment is delusion. All things coming and carrying out practice-enlightenment through the self is realization.” The second sentence encapsulates the self-emptying and opening up which will allow all things to, as it were, enter the self and enlighten it.

Rinzai Zen School – Koans to break through all dualities 

The Rinzai Zen school, founded by Linji Yixuan “with its use of koans, teaches a more dramatic route through an intense state of meditative concentration …in order to cultivate the “great ball of doubt” (Davis). Koans are apparently irrational statements or stories presented as short exchanges between master and disciple, meant to shock the mind into “glimpses” (kensho) wherein the non-dual nature of the mind is directly intuited. Instead of being encouraged to “open up” to a “self-emptying,” Rinzai practitioners are called on “to break through all dualistic oppositions, of subject/object, inner/outer, pure/defiled, being/nothingness, speech/silence, etc …[the] Gordon knot [of duality] cannot be teased apart with the fingers of the intellect; it must be cut directly and holistically with the sword of intuitive wisdom” (Davis).

Both, however, are known to lead to the dissolution of dualities, the former through a blending with things as they present themselves, the latter by breaking through duality as it emerges again and again in one’s encounter with the world.

No-mind in the Action of Non-Action

With shikantaza and koans specifically designed to overcome duality, a return to the place of thinking – that is, the activity of creating conceptual “constructs” misinterpreted as “things” outside ourselves – had to be re-examined. No longer could it be simply dismissed as a “cognitive default,” as Nagarjuna had done. Davis writes: “What Huineng calls “no thought” (Ch wunian, Jp munen), and what later is often referred to as “no-mind” (Ch wuxin; Jp mushin), does not exclude thinking; rather,” quoting Huineng, “no-thought is not to think even when involved in thought …if you give rise to thought from your self-nature, then, although you see, hear, perceive, and know, you are not stained by the manifold environments, and are always free.”

What is meant by “no-mind” is the ability to “flow” with things and events, without “lingering in” any of them. “No-mind is akin to what athletes or musicians experience when they are “in the zone,” utterly absorbed in an activity of the here and now (including when the “here and now” involves remembering, planning, or otherwise thinking of the “there and then”). A Zen master, however, would live all of life in the zone, whether listening or laughing, crying or dying, and would be able to shift effortlessly between different activities, at once absorbed in and yet unattached to any of them” (Davis).

Davis argues that this  is also true of intellectual activity: “Not only when one is absorbed in a train of thought, also when one effortlessly switches one’s focus from one train of thought to another, this too is an instance of no-mind.” No-mind is not “thoughtlessness.” To get a thoughtless mind, you need to deliberately block all thoughts. But then you get a blank vacuum, not a free flow of thoughts. Thomas P. Kasulis described no-mind as “a heightened state of non-dualistic awareness in which the dichotomy between subject and object … is overcome.”

Davis’s translation of no-mind as wuxin, one of the wu forms widely used in Daoism, along with wuwei (non-action), wushi (non-interfering when going about one’s business), wuming (naming without fixed reference) and others, makes it clear that wu does not refer to the objective absence of something, but to the absence of deliberate interference with a process. A more explicit translation of wuxin would be “unmediated thinking and feeling.” Xin is usually translated as “heartmind,” hence the dimension of “feeling.” Feeling here refers to a natural, spontaneous, arising thought in the sense of intuitive insight.

“To think and act in a state of no-mind is to be at once free and natural; it is to exist in a state of natural freedom” (Davis).  Wuwei is a “naturally free action” also referred to as the “action of non-action” – wei-wu-wei – and again, it “indicates not a lack of action but rather pure activity, in other words, activity that is empty of willfulness and artificiality” (Davis).
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All these apparently negative terms – no-mind, non-thinking, non-action – refer to processes which are allowed to occur naturally, and are to be taken as “the affirmation of a liberated and liberating way of life.” Davis suggests that such words as “freedom” or “openness” would be better at conveying what it means to think and live from the standpoint of no-mind.

“The field of sunyata is nothing other than the field of the Great Affirmation” (Nishitani)

Davis said above that “no-mind is akin to what athletes or musicians experience when they are “in the zone,” adding this refers to a state where one is “at once absorbed in and yet unattached” to any activity. 

The same blend of absorption and non-attachment allowing a heightened positivity towards all things is found in Nishitani’s description of the field of sunyata as the field of the Great Affirmation. Nishitani explains:  “The double negation of things and self results in a restoration of both things and self on the field of emptiness, which could be called “the field of ‘be-ification’ or, in Nietzschean terms, the field of the Great Affirmation, where we can say Yes to all things.” In a more traditional language, Nishitani also writes: “The point at which emptiness is emptied to become true emptiness is the point at which each and every thing becomes manifest in possession of its own suchness.” Each act of consciousness enacts the self-emptying of emptiness into the empty phenomena that we see as the things of the world. It could also be said that the self-emptying, or self-negation, of a dynamic emptiness is the “activity” or “function” of consciousness, which we live as the affirmation of phenomena as phenomena. “Impermanence is the Buddhahood” (Dogen).

Sources
Bret W. Davis – “Forms of Emptiness in Zen” (Research paper)
Red Pine (Bill Porter) – The Platform Sutra – The Zen Teaching of Hui-neng (2006)
Shohaku Okumura – Realizing Genjokoan, The Key to Dogen’s Shobogenzo (2010)
Thomas P. Kasulis – Engaging Japanese Philosophy (2018) 
Thomas P. Kasulis – Zen Action, Zen Person (1981)
Keiji Nishitani – Religion and Nothingness (English translation 1982)