Page 23 - The Buddha‘s Noble Eightfold Path

how people either suffer or find happiness as a consequence of
their previous actions, and how they are reborn in accordance

with the way in which they lived their past lives.

The doctrinal categories so far mentioned, i.e. the Four Noble

Truths, the Three Characteristics of Conditioned Existence, and
Karma and Rebirth, are all attempts to give conceptual expression

to a Perfect Vision of the nature of existence. They are all
doctrinal categories derived from the Hinayana tradition. But
Perfect Vision can also be expressed, more profoundly perhaps,

in terms of the Mahayana. One of the most important of these is
that of the Four Sunyatas.

(g) The Four Sunyatas
Sunyata literally means 'voidness', 'emptiness', but it is really

much more than that. According to context, the word can mean
'real', or 'unreal', or 'neither real nor unreal', so that it is quite a

bewildering word. Let us then go through the four kinds of
Sunyata, bearing in mind that they are not just figments of the
metaphysical imagination but attempts to communicate in

conceptual terms a vision, or something the Enlightened Ones
have actually seen and experienced.

(i) Samskrta Sunyata, or Emptiness of the Conditioned. This
means that conditioned, phenomenal. relative existence is

devoid of the characteristics of the Unconditioned, the
Absolute, the Truth.

The characteristics of the Unconditioned are first of all happiness,
secondly permanence (not that it persists in time, but that it

occupies, as it were, a dimension within which time itself does
not exist), and thirdly true being, Ultimate Reality.

23