[Buddha-l] Re: Emptiness

[curt]

Richard Hayes wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-10-21 at 11:25 -0400, mc1 at aol.com wrote:
>
>   
>> But deep sleep is what? Sankara says Consciousness (with a tricky
>> difference). His evidence is waking up with the memory of a good
>> sleep. Thus memory = Consciousness. How might Madhayamika relate
>> Emptiness to this model? 
>>     
>
> Emptiness has no connection at all with the four-stage model of
> Sankara's interpretation of the upanishads. Emptiness means nothing more
> nor less than the fact of being conditioned. Seeing the emptiness of
> something entails seeing that it is completely conditioned and therefore
> is empty of any nature that it can call its own. The fourth stage that
> the upanishads talk about is given as an example of something that is
> unconditioned; but in Madhyamika Buddhism nothing is unconditioned.
>   

I am still struggling my way slowly through Paul Williams' fascinating 
"The Reflexive Nature of Awareness". Williams definitely seems to come 
down on the side that orthodox Madhyamaka fails to answer the criticism 
that "conditioning" requires *something* (as in something "real") that 
ultimately causes the conditioning. Korean Buddhism appears to be 
heavily influenced by Yogacara on just this point. It seems to me no 
accident that Sosan Taesa uses "the one thing" as the organizing theme 
for his "Mirror of Zen" (the 16th century classic still studied avidly 
by Korean Buddhists). My own grand-teacher, Seung Sahn, often spoke of 
this "one thing" - and made it clear that it is *not* conditioned. I can 
almost feel him hitting me from beyond the grave as I say that! Ouch!

> Something you may be interested in looking at is Buddhist discussions of
> how the consciousness continuum boots up again after a meditator has
> been in the deep samadhi in which there is no awareness of either
> subject or object. This is not a trivial problem for Buddhism, because
> if everything is conditioned, what are the conditions that enable
> consciousness to reboot after deep sleep? (The correct answer, of
> course, is the body, but Buddhists, like Cartesian dualists, could not
> abide the idea of consciousness being fully dependent on bodily events,
> especially bodily events taking place outside the range of direct
> subjective awareness.) A very good book on this dilemma, and Buddhist
> attempts to solve it, is Paul Griffith's On Being Mindless.
>
>   

The body can never be perceived directly - so what you are describing 
amounts to believing in ghosts - and, worse yet, believing that ghosts 
cause everything! I think this is the fundamental reason why western 
scientism has to be rejected as a valid "take" on Buddhism: because it 
insists on a crude and unexamined reductionism that is nothing but an 
unsupported metaphysical supposition masquerading as the incarnation of 
reason. The answer to the question "who am I?" has many possible 
interesting answers, but "this body" is not one of them.

Curt Steinmetz