If things have no intrinsic nature, does an apple lose its taste?
When we sat down together again after the Chuseok holiday, I brought up a question from a viewer. Sorge Sorrow had left it under the video “A Twenty-First-Century Reflection on the Question of Existence.”
Can “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” hold from the perspective of dependent arising?
There were two accompanying points to consider. The first was whether saying that things have no intrinsic nature means that they have no distinctive fragrance or taste. A ripe persimmon tastes like a ripe persimmon, and an apple tastes like an apple. How, then, can they have no intrinsic nature? The second was that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” seemed to express the ancient Hindu unity of Brahman and atman rather than the Buddha’s dependent arising. I did not know precisely whether the viewer had written the passage, copied something they had written elsewhere, or quoted someone else. But I could address these two central perspectives.
I understand why the question arises. When people hear that there is no intrinsic nature, they may take it to mean that hydrogen has no properties, helium has no properties, and I have no characteristics. Atoms and molecules have properties, and so do diamonds. Is Buddhism saying that those properties do not exist? Apples plainly have a taste and a fragrance. Does it mean that apples have no characteristics? That is not what I mean by the absence of intrinsic nature.
If you see a word but miss the direction in which it points, you can end up on an entirely different path. Cling to the single Chinese character for emptiness or the two characters translated as intrinsic nature, and you may attribute to Buddhism something it never said. Then you either declare it nonsensical or treat it as some extraordinary secret. First, we must be clear about what is being denied.
We need two kinds of context. The first is the historical situation in which the teaching of emptiness emerged. The second is the direction of the Heart Sutra as a whole. Once we understand the overall movement, we can see which translations are mistaken, which words we have misunderstood, and how we should read them. Defining a single word is not enough.
I call the teaching of emptiness another name for dependent arising. Explaining their respective beginnings involves somewhat different levels of discussion, but what emptiness ultimately points to is dependent arising. Emptiness is simply dependent arising. We must not lose that direction at the outset.
The emphasis is on “existing by itself,” rather than on “properties”
The first word to examine is svabhāva, translated into Korean as jaseong, or intrinsic nature. Once it is rendered in Chinese characters, people’s attention tends to turn toward properties. They understand it as a thing’s own nature or distinctive characteristics and ask why those characteristics are said not to exist. I think that translation can invite misunderstanding.
Divide the word, and sva is self, while bhāva is close to being. In English, I explain it as self-being: existing by itself. Bhāva can also mean a property or a state. But we must ask what is being opposed here. The fact that a dictionary includes “property” does not mean we should cling to that meaning and ignore the context.
The pronunciation of bhāva is not something I can render effortlessly either. The V is similar to an English V, and writing an H does not mean it makes the H sound we might expect. I have seen explanations involving a voiced unaspirated sound, or a sound somewhat stronger than a Korean b with a flow of voice accompanying it, but I cannot pronounce it exactly myself. That is why I sometimes render it as bu-ha-ba. What matters is not whether I imitate the pronunciation perfectly, but what the word points to.
I explained bhāva by comparing it with the verb be and its noun form, being: to be, to exist, to become. Etymologically, too, it can be explained as branching from an old Indo-European word. Put sva and bhāva together, and the emphasis becomes visible. It is existing by itself. In the Chinese-character translation, the emphasis falls less on “nature” than on “self,” on existing on one’s own.
Thus, having no intrinsic nature does not mean having no characteristics of one’s own. It means that nothing exists by itself. I explain it as the absence or negation of self-existence: nothing exists independently, from the outset, and without changing. In that sense, it is no different from no-self.
Throw a rock into water and it sinks. It has that property. Hydrogen has its properties, oxygen has its properties, and a helium balloon rises because of its particular properties. Buddhism is not denying those individual characteristics. I have a height and my own characteristics, and apples taste different from oranges. That is not what is being denied.
The question lies elsewhere. Has that rock existed by itself from the beginning? What is an apple? Do all apples taste the same? Is there something unchanging in what we call an apple that exists independently of everything else? That is the question at which the absence of intrinsic nature is directed. It is not saying that an apple has no taste. It asks whether we are treating an apple as an unchanging substance that exists by itself.
The conflict between the name Gwanjajae and dependent arising
I have said on several occasions that the name Gwanjajae Bodhisattva is anti-Buddhist. Why say that about the name at the very beginning of the Heart Sutra? Because the direction of jajae, self-existence, in that name is opposite to the direction of the statement that follows: all five aggregates are empty.
Gwanjajae is Avalokiteśvara. When I unpack the name, I explain ava as downward, loki in terms of seeing, like the English look, and īśvara as a self-existing deity or lord. It is a self-existing being looking down, a lord who exists by himself. Pay attention to īśvara, to self-existence. It carries the idea of a god who exists by himself.
Suppose Shiva is called Īśvara. He is described as a supreme Hindu deity, a god of destruction and regeneration. Then I ask: does Shiva himself undergo neither destruction nor regeneration? Has he always existed? Does he exist by himself? Did he possess intelligence from the beginning? Is he truly unchanging?
If we look at the world in Buddhist terms, we cannot stop asking those questions when we reach a god. Calling a being Shiva does not make him self-existing. That is because we see the world through dependent arising. A god who simply existed from the outset, alone and dependent on nothing, cannot be accounted for from that perspective.
Consider dependent arising. I explain pratītya-samutpāda as arising together in dependence on something, through something, because of something. In discussing śamatha and samādhi, I have also spoken of gathering, bringing together, and being together. Something arises in relation to other things. It does not arise independently.
If a phenomenon appears and disappears, it does so because of something. When this exists, that exists; when this arises, that arises. Things emerge in mutual dependence on conditions. We must therefore ask the same of a god: because of what did that god arise? Confronted with that question, we cannot accept a god who has existed by himself from the beginning.
So this is not a discussion about eliminating properties. It asks whether anything can be self-existing. The absence of intrinsic nature, the absence of self-existence, emptiness, and dependent arising are, in this direction, effectively saying the same thing. If someone misses that direction and asks whether an orange must therefore have no properties, I can only say again: that is not what it means.
Before discussing emptiness, ask what it sought to break down
The translation “emptiness” presents a similar problem. The Sanskrit śūnya can be explained as the adjective empty, and śūnyatā as a noun referring to the state or quality of being empty. In Buddhist usage, it is sometimes rendered with the Chinese characters for the quality of emptiness. Compress it into the single character for empty, however, and people may be left with only the impression of a void or of nothing being there.
When Buddhism speaks of śūnyatā, I focus on the absence of intrinsic nature: the absence of an independently existing, fixed and unchanging substance. Saying that something is empty of substance prompts us to reexamine what we thought existed by itself. Its purpose is to break down concepts.
When I say that Buddhism is freeing myself from mistaken assumptions, those mistakes include treating concepts as substances. What, then, was the teaching of emptiness trying to break down? Why did this discussion emerge in the Prajñā teachings within Mahāyāna Buddhism? We must understand that historical direction to see where the word empty is pointing.
I suppose that Mahāyāna was already present while the Buddhist schools were flourishing. Not everyone can state precisely when Mahāyāna arose. Among those schools was the prominent Sarvāstivāda school. It held a substantial place and developed a system centered on doctrinal study.
Sarvāstivāda maintains that the substance of all existents, or dharmas, exists through the three times: past, present, and future. This is expressed as existence throughout the three times and the constant existence of the substance of dharmas. Even though phenomena change, the essence or substance composing them does not disappear across the three times. Here, too, I say that dharma should be read in terms of concepts. If we cling only to translations such as existent or law, confusion returns.
The school presents a system of seventy-five dharmas in five categories. It distinguishes the five faculties and the five objects, faculties such as the eye and ear faculties, the mind or consciousness, and the mental factors that accompany it. It distinguishes feeling, representation, contact, desire, discernment, mindfulness, concentration, and so forth. It also distinguishes wholesome mental activities, faith, diligence, a sense of shame, delusion, heedlessness, sloth, unwholesome mental factors, and lesser afflictive factors. One mind dharma, forty-six mental factors, and the other categories together make seventy-five.
Of these, the seventy-two conditioned dharmas arise and perish from moment to moment, but the essential nature of the elements is taken to exist throughout past, present, and future. That is where the problem begins. Concepts used to distinguish and explain phenomena begin to be spoken of as substances existing in their own right. The Heart Sutra’s teaching of emptiness did not simply appear without such a context.
Is there a separately existing eye faculty?
I used Kumārajīva as a representative example. The Diamond Sutra commonly recited in Korea is his Chinese translation. Also known in Korean as Gumarajip, he was taken captive to China and later translated scriptures there. The Heart Sutra we recite is Xuanzang’s later translation. Xuanzang traveled to India and is known as the model for the Tripitaka monk in Journey to the West. Wonhyo also attempted to travel to China to see Xuanzang but did not meet him.
Kumārajīva’s translations are sometimes called the old versions, and Xuanzang’s later translations the new versions. The same scripture can have multiple translations. I did not bring up Kumārajīva so that people would memorize a translator’s name. I wanted us to examine a concept he had treated as a substance and how his thinking changed.
Kumārajīva originally followed what Mahāyāna adherents disparagingly called the Lesser Vehicle. His thinking was close to the Sarvāstivāda view that an eye faculty existed separately and independently. Then, in an exchange with another person, he encountered the claim that no such substantial eye faculty exists.
We are told that the eye contains a faculty enabling sight, and that this is why we see. But does such a substance really exist separately? If the eye faculty you describe exists independently, should you not be able to see with your eyes closed? Can you see without a body? Can you see without consciousness?
Seeing is a phenomenon that arises dependently through light, the eyes, the brain, and various other conditions coming together. Isolating something that supposedly makes sight possible and claiming that it exists by itself is another matter. The existence of the term eye faculty does not establish an independent substance corresponding to it.
I presented Kumārajīva’s move toward Mahāyāna through understanding this point as an example of breaking down a concept. From beginning to end, that is at the heart of Buddhism.
If everything is empty, why leave storehouse consciousness standing?
Many people think Yogācāra differs from Sarvāstivāda. There are indeed differences within their systems. I am not saying that Vasubandhu alone founded Yogācāra. I am referring to him as someone who systematized its theory and organized the hundred dharmas in five categories in the Mahāyāna Treatise on the Hundred Dharmas. Yet this was also the man who had diligently organized the seventy-five dharmas of Sarvāstivāda in a book.
Later, he saw things that did not fit and turned toward Yogācāra. Accepting arguments against Sarvāstivāda, he constructed another five-category system, this time with one hundred dharmas: eight mind dharmas, fifty-one mental factors, material dharmas, unconditioned dharmas, and so on. Previously there had been seventy-five; now there were one hundred.
The mind dharmas include consciousness related to the senses, such as eye and ear consciousness, mental consciousness, manas, and ālaya-vijñāna, or storehouse consciousness. These hundred dharmas are said not to be separate, independent, unchanging substances. Up to this point, one can say the position differs from Sarvāstivāda. But what is left standing after that? They are described as virtual phenomena produced by a single mind called storehouse consciousness.
I think this brings the position close to Hinduism. Even if it does not literally call the world an illusion, describing it as phenomena produced by one mind moves in the same direction as saying that everything is made by mind. It says there is something within called storehouse consciousness. To me, that looks no different from atman under another name. That is why I criticize Yogācāra as making almost the same claim as Hinduism.
The yoga in Yogācāra is yoga. If it locates everything within, seeks something like atman, and pursues only yoga and meditative absorption for that purpose, how does its thinking differ? I say that Yogācāra is no different from speaking of yoga and atman. Both are placed under the name Mahāyāna, yet there are points at which Yogācāra and the teaching of emptiness oppose each other.
From the standpoint of emptiness, the challenge is this: you say everything else is empty, changing, and not an independent, unchanging substance. Then what is this storehouse consciousness? If consciousness exists, what is it? Does it not change?
The other side may answer: “You bastards say everything is empty. Then how can anything work without a subject? Why should we practice?” They attack emptiness, asking what we are supposed to do if there is no subject. I describe this as having a fit when the claim that there is no self pushes their button. Taking dependent arising as the basis, a Yogācāra that leaves such a subject in place is itself non-Buddhist.
This is why I discuss the historical background. One side says the substance of dharmas continues to exist through the three times; another insists that storehouse consciousness exists. Before these claims, the Heart Sutra asks: have the form, feeling, representation, formations, and consciousness you speak of always existed separately? Is representation something apart from everything else? Is consciousness something existing independently, without any relation to anything?
Are the words “five aggregates” the same as five substantial things?
People in the past spoke of souls. They said souls visited ancestral offering tables or that something watched from the heavens. They said there was karma, rebirth, a psyche, spirits, God, and gods. When a word points to something and we keep using it, we easily come to think that a corresponding thing must exist.
What, then, is consciousness when we say it exists? Examine one by one the form, feeling, representation, formations, and consciousness said to compose a person. We may imagine each as existing individually. But does feeling not arise in the relationship between the physical and the mental? Can we completely separate it from consciousness, formations, representation, and form?
Think in twenty-first-century terms. Are your cognitive and mental activities not aspects of bodily activity? Do feeling, distinguishing, and cognizing occur apart from form? Can mental and bodily activity be completely separated? The fact that feeling, representation, formations, and consciousness each have a name does not guarantee their independent existence.
We speak for convenience. We say there is cognition, feeling, touch, and the bringing of images to mind. We make distinctions and use words for them. Later, however, we imagine that something corresponding to those words exists separately and will continue to exist. Because there is a word, we assume there must also be a substance. That is precisely the thought I am asking us to examine.
The word dharma is no different. We translate it as law, then as existent, then speak of all dharmas, creating more and more accounts. At that point I say: stop talking nonsense and look at what you mean. Here, dharma is a concept. It is something abstract that specifies that things are so or ought to be so. From its old foundations, Buddhism already tells us not to be bound by dharmas: not to be bound by abstract concepts.
Look first at the thought that you will become something by making something pure and accumulating merit. What is merit? Where are you supposedly going after death? What does it mean to go there? Freedom from concepts begins with such questions. Do not imagine that each of the five aggregates exists individually, independently, and without changing.
That is why I say “all five aggregates lack intrinsic nature,” or “all five aggregates have the quality of emptiness,” makes the meaning clearer than simply “all five aggregates are empty.” None of the five is self-existing. There is no separate, self-existing thing corresponding to each name. Cognition is a dependently arising phenomenon. If you slice off one part and claim that consciousness has always existed regardless of anything else, you are talking nonsense. Breaking down that mistaken assumption is what the absence of intrinsic nature and emptiness mean.
Reading the opening of the Heart Sutra again
Now let us follow the Heart Sutra as a whole. It begins with Gwanjajae Bodhisattva practicing profound prajñāpāramitā and clearly seeing that all five aggregates are empty. Form, feeling, representation, formations, and consciousness are those five aggregates. Their emptiness must be read in the direction of each being neither unchanging in itself nor an independent existent.
Yet Gwanjajae at the opening is a name for a self-existing being. I think the name contains a direction opposed by the rest of the scripture. A text saying that nothing can exist by itself contains a name meaning self-existence. There may have been various reasons for introducing it, including making the text speak to people in India, but the word itself points opposite to the wisdom I am explaining. That is why I call it an anti-Buddhist name.
I cannot simply pass over the next phrase, crossing beyond all suffering and calamity. Does realizing that the five aggregates you thought composed you are not substances free you from every suffering and calamity? How could you escape all the world’s suffering and misfortune? Stated that way, it is nonsense.
Then come “form is not different from emptiness,” “emptiness is not different from form,” “form is emptiness,” and “emptiness is form.” I say these phrases have been translated in a way that readily invites misunderstanding. Matching character counts and parallel phrases to arrange the Chinese beautifully turned the process into verbal matching rather than a clear communication of meaning. That is why I describe it as close to a kind of invention.
One might try to explain “form is not different from emptiness” as form being no different from something possessing the quality of emptiness. Even rendered that way, however, it sounds odd. Reversing and repeating form and emptiness makes it easy to read the lines as form being vacant and vacancy becoming form. It is hardly surprising if that gives readers the Hindu impression of the world as an illusion. This explains why the questioner read it in that direction.
For now, take only “form is emptiness” from those four phrases. Even that statement does not make its meaning clear on its own. I read it this way: do not treat what the word and concept form point to as a substance that has always existed by itself. Form is not self-existing. The same is true of feeling, representation, formations, and consciousness. The concept of form is broken down, and so are each of the other concepts.
Why read it this way? Continue through the following lines and you will see. “Śāriputra, all dharmas bear the character of emptiness” follows. It says that no concept possesses substance. Words, language, concepts, images, and what we call dharmas are things we make and use. We perceive them as if they were substances, but they do not exist by themselves. Follow that movement, and there is no reason to understand emptiness only as a vacant space containing nothing or as the illusory nature of the world.
Does “neither arising nor perishing” mean that birth and death never happen?
The next concept to examine is arising and perishing. We use the words coming into being and disappearing helpfully. We say an egg appeared and then disappeared because we ate it. Arising and perishing are words we use in everyday life. But is arising a substance? What is supposed to have come into being?
The egg emerged through changes within its mother’s body. We think it disappeared when we ate it, but it was digested and entered our bodies or returned to nature. Did it disappear, appear, or change? To deconstruct the concept of arising is to examine this process.
“Neither arising nor perishing” does not mean that we must stop using the word arising or insist that nothing is ever born. It asks us to see that arising is not a perfectly defined substance but a concept we use. We feel that something has suddenly come into existence, yet we call one part of a dependently changing process arising. We must examine disappearing in the same way.
A sun appears and disappears; a planet appears and disappears; someone is born and someone dies. You may point to such events and ask whether arising and perishing are not real. Yes, we use those words. But look closely from the standpoint of dependent arising, and coming into being is change, while disappearing is also change within the relationships among countless things. We are being asked to unpack what the concept points to, not to deny what is happening before our eyes.
Deconstructing purity and impurity, increase and decrease
The same applies to dirty and clean. If nothing is dirty or clean, will you eat anything and drop dead? Will you eat something filthy? That is not the point. The question is what the dirty and clean we use for convenience actually mean, and whether the distinction itself is an absolute substance.
A pit that is filthy to us may be the finest habitat for certain microorganisms. Some poisons also act as medicine in our bodies. Where, then, did our notions of dirty and clean come from? What do we call dirty, and what do we call clean? Can we set conditions and relationships aside and say there is something intrinsically dirty that has always existed by itself?
Later, returning to the same question, I put it more bluntly. If nothing is dirty, will you feed your son anything, whether something dropped on the ground or feces? Of course that is not what I mean. I am not asking you to abolish practical distinctions concerning dirtiness. I am asking you not to be bound by the concept and mistakenly believe in some substance.
I also discussed removing harmful things from another person’s feces and using the bacteria within it. This did not mean eating the feces as it is, but using its beneficial bacteria for someone who lacks them in their gut, restoring the state of their gut bacteria. It was an example of how a single word, dirty, cannot settle every relationship and effect.
The same question applies to “neither increasing nor decreasing.” Has something really increased? Are we calling it an increase or decrease because we are looking only at the water inside a cup? Viewed more broadly, it may be a change. We reconsider, within the whole web of relationships, what we called an increase from a narrow perspective.
In this way, the Heart Sutra repeatedly deconstructs one word and one concept after another. It deconstructs arising and perishing, dirty and clean, increase and decrease. That does not mean these words are useless in everyday life. We can use them helpfully without grasping them as fixed, unchanging substances.
What happens if “in emptiness there is no form” means “there is no matter in a vacant place”?
The phrase “therefore, in emptiness there is no form” is particularly easy to misunderstand. Translated as there being no form inside emptiness, it can sound as if there were a vacant space somewhere with no matter in it. I call that a shitty translation. What needs to be expressed here is the direction of a standpoint of emptiness.
From the standpoint that there is no self-existing substance, can that concept be defined perfectly? Was it there from the beginning? We are being asked to examine form from this standpoint of breaking down concepts. People translate form as matter and assume matter is a word they clearly understand. Is it?
Is light matter or not? If light is both a particle and a wave, what will you call it? Is the mind matter? Is sound matter or a wave? What, then, will you classify as matter and what as not matter? Is only what has form matter, and is what lacks form not matter?
At a family gathering over Chuseok, I heard that an elementary-school test had asked which things were matter and which were not. I said, “Hey, that is an elementary-school question, but it is really hard.” We can give an elementary-school pupil an explanation within a certain scope. But what happens if we ask one step further? Is light not matter? Could even my wife, who graduated from engineering at Pusan National University, answer that properly? Could you?
What are matter and energy? If we discuss E=mc² and say mass and energy convert into one another, will we also call energy matter? I raise these questions to make us see how limited our definitions in language are. Because we have the word form, we mistakenly assume that there is also a clearly identifiable substance corresponding to it. Feeling, representation, formations, and consciousness are no different.
We readily say that someone cognizes or fails to cognize. We use these expressions because they are convenient and necessary. Look into them, however, and they are not individual self-beings. Using a word differs from believing its object to be an independent substance. “In emptiness there is no form” must be understood from that standpoint.
From the senses to the twelve links and the Four Noble Truths
The deconstruction continues. Do the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind exist separately? Do form, sound, smell, taste, touch, and mental objects exist separately? When the sutra says there is no eye realm through to no realm of mind-consciousness, does each of the eighteen realms exist as a substance? Naming them one by one, it examines the thoughts bound to those names.
The twelve links of dependent arising are no exception. We say there is ignorance. I explained ignorance through the word avidyā. If vidyā is knowledge gained by seeing, avidyā is the state of lacking that knowledge. The word is also used in Hinduism. But does ignorance itself really exist separately? What does it mean for ignorance to disappear? What are aging and sickness, and what does dying mean?
Suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path face the same questions. What is suffering? What is its origin? What is the state of cessation said to be suffering’s complete disappearance? We invent these terms, imagine what they mean, and say they exist. But are they substances?
You may object: “Why is there no suffering? It hurts if someone stabs you.” It hurts when your mother dies, and it hurts to part from a friend, a wife, or a lover. I am not saying that pain does not occur. I am asking what the supposed substance called suffering is. If suffering is our convenient name for what arises through several conditions coming together, can we posit it as a fixed, unchanging substance?
And can it be eliminated completely? Is there a separate state in which it has wholly disappeared? No matter how often we say the world is dependently arisen, some people cling to the existence of such a perfect state. Others insist that the entire world is an illusion but that they themselves exist. The Heart Sutra’s deconstruction of concepts is not intended to leave such exceptions in place.
That is why I call the Heart Sutra a scripture that deconstructs concepts from alpha to omega. It explains the sequence of no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, or mind; no form, sound, smell, taste, touch, or mental objects; and no suffering, origin, cessation, or path. Instead of debating existence and nonexistence only through words, we need to see from what standpoint, and against what, the deconstruction is directed.
When the mind is unobstructed, look to disturbance rather than fear
What changes after concepts are broken down? We become free of being caught and attached because of them. That is where the unobstructed mind enters the discussion. I say the phrase following “the mind has no obstruction” should be read as “there is no disturbance.” I regard the usual rendering, “there is no fear,” as a mistranslation.
We have continually imagined and named arising and perishing, impurity and purity, suffering and the state in which suffering has disappeared. Believing those concepts to be substances, we try to attain them and suffer because of them. Once we break down the concepts, however, the reason to cling to them disappears. There is less for the mind to catch on.
Something must be caught or held for the wind to shake it. If nothing catches, the wind simply passes through. There is nothing to resist it. That is why I say that an unobstructed mind is not shaken. This connects with peace, equanimity, and an unmoving mind. Is the opposite of an unmoving mind not a mind that is shaken?
The words tremble and shake can also carry the meaning of being afraid. That is why I brought up the English trem- as an example. Because someone may tremble in fear, trembling can be rendered as fear. But we must examine whether the context concerns fear alone or the disturbance of the mind. If something obstructs it, the mind is shaken whenever something comes along. Without an obstruction, things pass through. That is why I read the line as “because there is no obstruction, there is no disturbance.”
This is a point I raised independently. I did not adopt it after seeing someone else explain it that way; at least, I had not encountered such an explanation. Toward the end of the broadcast, Venerable Dao said there was also a passage translated in terms of disturbance in a version of the Dhammapada. I responded, “Oh, really? I see.”
Next comes moving far away from inverted, deluded thoughts and dreams. Caught in a mistaken assumption and shaken by it, I come to see that I was longing for something misguided. What disappears? I turn back toward the mistake that had caught and shaken me. I do not agree with turning this into the substance of an absolute state called complete nirvana. If the word ultimate makes us imagine a perfectly complete state, that too becomes nonsense.
What purity, what perfection, am I bound to now?
Read this way, the Heart Sutra turns a very concrete question back toward me. What concept am I caught by now? Am I caught by the idea that something is dirty? Then is it really a dirty thing?
People invoke the rule that boys and girls should not sit together after age seven and ask how men and women dare sit close to one another. But what goes wrong if they are together? People insist on premarital chastity. What is chastity? If it means purity, what is pure? We conveniently use human agreements and concepts, then at some point accept them as absolute substances.
Once I understand that a concept was made by humans, I begin reconsidering what I pursue. I said I desperately wanted to obtain this, but what is it that I want? Does its substance exist? Am I bound by some word and longing for the wrong thing? Am I bound by the word cessation and imagining something that has completely disappeared?
I criticize many people who call themselves Buddhist practitioners for being caught precisely there. They are bound to souls, karma, and rebirth, and to a state in which something has vanished perfectly and completely. If there is a god, how did that god arise? If intelligence was there from the beginning, what is intelligence? They set a word in the place where a question belongs and stop there.
“Form is emptiness” does not mean that the world is an illusion. It asks us not to be caught by the concept of form or feeling, but to see the world through dependent arising. Do not mistakenly imagine an independent substance. It is not the Yogācāra-style bullshit that the world was made by mind. What mind is supposed to make the world? Are semiconductors not manufactured if you do not look at them? Do mobile phones stop being made when you close your eyes?
I do not read the Heart Sutra as a scripture proposing some new absolute thing. Before putting difficult talk about Madhyamaka or its treatises first, we must understand what Buddhism does. It deconstructs concepts and dharmas. That is the Heart Sutra’s discussion, and that is the alpha and omega of the Buddhism I describe.
Do not get caught again by saying there is no awakening
By this point, considerable time had passed. I had poured water an hour earlier to make coffee and still had not made it. Explaining a single question had taken that long. While catching my breath and reading the viewers’ comments, I came across the statement that we must realize there is neither awakening nor anyone who awakens.
I said that I particularly dislike such statements. Awakening exists. There are particular awakenings. Realizing that I had been suffering needlessly over something is also an awakening. After I have explained that we should not treat concepts as substances, immediately grasping “there is no awakening” as the correct answer misses my direction.
During the broadcast, I also read a viewer’s account of still having a headache after dealing with an obnoxious customer while working as a designated driver. I acknowledged how hard that must have been.
Different people fall into different mistakes when they read words. One asks whether the absence of everything is too nihilistic and heads toward meaninglessness; another heads toward some perfectly complete attainment. I am asking us not to fall into either mistake. There is no need to turn emptiness into an unknowable something and bring in quantum mechanics to explain it. Ask what consciousness is, what representation is, what dirty means, and what arising and perishing mean.
The heart of the Heart Sutra is not a difficult, complicated secret. Layers of mistranslation, misunderstanding, and interpretation have made it difficult. Read it from beginning to end in the direction of deconstructing concepts, and it is very simple. Yet even after hearing that simple explanation, we easily grasp another phrase and fall into another mistake.
The question of where this explanation came from
Pyeongbeom asked me where my teaching was rooted. Did it come from books or from thinking on my own? They had never heard an explanation like this. At first I replied, “How could you never have heard it? Surely that cannot be.”
Much of what I discuss can be found elsewhere. Dividing svabhāva into sva and bhāva, discussing Sarvāstivāda and Yogācāra, and examining the name Gwanjajae Bodhisattva are all things people can look up. I did not create everything anew. But if the viewer meant they had not encountered a lecture connecting these matters through the context of the whole Heart Sutra, then that could be so.
The terms emptiness of self and emptiness of dharmas already exist. The former is the absence of an independent and unchanging substance in what we call me. The latter is the absence of a fixed substance in existents, dharmas, or concepts. They explain emptiness from the two directions of subject and object. This is not a secret I invented. People may become confused, however, depending on how it is understood and expressed.
Suppose a definition of intrinsic nature says inherent essence. Divide the word again: sva is self, and bhāva is being. The direction of an independent mode of existence becomes apparent. Emphasize only properties, and you veer off toward saying that an apple must have no taste. I keep explaining that the emphasis is on existing by itself.
The point I have independently emphasized is that “there is no fear” should be read as “there is no disturbance.” I also say that “form is not different from emptiness,” “emptiness is not different from form,” “form is emptiness,” and “emptiness is form” must be read within the scripture’s overall movement of deconstructing concepts. Instead of judging a few isolated characters, follow the context through to no feeling, representation, formations, or consciousness, and no suffering, origin, cessation, or path.
During the broadcast I recalled a Joseon-era Confucian scholar who had said, in effect, that “form is emptiness” could be understood but “emptiness is form” made no sense. I could not remember the name immediately. Was it Choe Hyeon or someone else? I failed to find it. I could not establish that memory as the words of a specific person. My point was that the two expressions feel different and that I was not suddenly raising this problem for the first time that day.
Even the translation “form is emptiness” invites misunderstanding if left as it is. I think that, even had the text stopped at “all five aggregates are empty,” its emptiness should have been unpacked as all five lacking intrinsic nature or having the quality of emptiness. The single character empty first suggests vacancy to us. But the direction carried by the Buddhist term śūnyatā is the absence of self-existence: the concept is not something independent and unchanging. A mixture of different negative expressions does not mean that every one of them should be read as nothing existing at all.
This is also why I discussed Chinese poetry and parallel phrasing in relation to Xuanzang’s translation team. When people writing classical Chinese poetry seek beautiful rhythm and matching phrases, their effort may go more into producing words that recite smoothly than into explaining the meaning precisely. In fact, the opening sequence of the Heart Sutra—from Gwanjajae Bodhisattva practicing profound prajñāpāramitā to seeing the emptiness of the five aggregates and crossing beyond all suffering—fits the mouth well. There was an effort to make it that way. But ease of recitation and conveying meaning without misunderstanding are not the same thing.
Someone also asked whether I was squaring off against Professor Lee Jung-pyo. I said I did not know about squaring off and briefly remarked that Professor Lee, too, stood too firmly within an early-Buddhist position.
I too have arisen through countless influences
I wanted to add one final point to the question about the source of my teaching. If you imagine that I am so exceptional and intelligent that I awakened entirely on my own, please do not make that mistake. Countless influences bring a person to their present state. Whether that state is called a buddha or a fool, the same is true.
I have been influenced by twenty-first-century science and by Korean Buddhism. I have been influenced by my father, by people I have met, and by YouTube. There are the internet, books, artificial intelligence, and the accounts of countless people. The materials I find and show come through those sources as well. Those materials also add grounds for what I say. The person I am now has emerged amid innumerable influences.
No being can suddenly pop up one day, all alone, and say, “I have realized everything in the world.” Nor does this mean that everything I said today is the truth. What I have proposed is a direction for understanding the Heart Sutra, emptiness, and the emptiness of dharmas.
That direction returns to a question. What concept am I bound to? What am I mistakenly taking to be a substance that exists by itself? Only when we turn those questions toward ourselves does Buddhist study begin. Even for a single moment today, I hope we will examine what concept we were caught in and where we were bound.
I thank Sorge Sorrow for the thoughtful question. It allowed me to unfold this discussion at length. I do not know whether the answer was satisfying, but I put considerable preparation into it. I hope our questions to one another become opportunities to look back at ourselves. May you become a buddha.
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