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20 EASTERN HORIZON | TEACHINGS

What Do Buddhists

Mean When They Talk

About Emptiness?

By Ajahn Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff) is an American Buddhist monk of
the Kammatthana (Thai Forest) Tradition. After graduating from Oberlin
College in 1971 with a degree in European Intellectual History, he traveled
to Thailand, where he studied meditation under Ajaan Fuang Jotiko,
himself a student of the late Ajaan Lee. He ordained in 1976 and lived at
Wat Dhammasathit, where he remained following his teacher’s death in
1986. In 1991 he traveled to the hills of San Diego County, USA, where
he helped Ajaan Suwat Suvaco establish Metta Forest Monastery. He was
made abbot of the Monastery in 1993.

Emptiness is a mode of perception, events influence one another in the in them, the more you get distracted
a way of looking at experience. It immediate present. Thus they get in from seeing the actual cause of
adds nothing to, and takes nothing the way when we try to understand the suffering: the labels of “I” and
away from, the raw data of physical and solve the problem of suffering. “mine” that set the whole process
and mental events. You look at in motion. As a result, you can’t find
events in the mind and the senses Say, for instance, that you’re the way to unravel that cause and
with no thought of whether there’s meditating, and a feeling of anger bring the suffering to an end.
anything lying behind them. toward your mother appears.
Immediately, the mind’s reaction is If, however, you adopt the
This mode is called emptiness to identify the anger as “my” anger, emptiness mode—by not acting on
because it is empty of the or to say that “I’m” angry. It then or reacting to the anger but simply
presuppositions we usually add to elaborates on the feeling, either watching it as a series of events,
experience in order to make sense working it into the story of your in and of themselves—you can see
of it: the stories and worldviews relationship to your mother or to that the anger is empty of anything
we fashion to explain who we are your general views about when and to identify with or possess. As
and the world we live in. Although where anger toward one’s mother you master the emptiness mode
these stories and views have their can be justified. more consistently, you see that this
uses, the Buddha found that the truth holds not only for such gross
questions they raise—of our true The problem with all this, from the emotions as anger, but also for even
identity and the reality of the Buddha’s perspective, is that these the most subtle events in the realm
world outside—pull attention away stories and views entail a lot of of experience.
from a direct experience of how suffering. The more you get involved