The interpretation of shunyata which we have been discussing is the view of the Madhyamika or “Middle Way” philosophical school founded by Nagarjuna. It is a description of an experiential reality which can never be accurately described because words simply are not the experience. Words or concepts only point to partial aspects of experience. In fact, it is dubious that one can even speak of “experiencing” reality, since this would imply a separation between the experiencer and the experience. And finally, it is questionable whether one can even speak of “reality” because this would imply the existence of some objective knower outside and separate from it, as though reality were a nameable thing with set limits and boundaries. Thus the Madhyamika school simply speaks of the tathata, “as it is.” Nagarjuna much preferred to approach truth by taking the arguments of other philosophical schools on their own terms and logically reducing them ad absurdum, rather than by himself offering any definitions of reality.
There are several other major philosophical approaches to the problems of truth and reality which preceded and influenced the development of the Madhyamika school. These lines of thought find their expression not only in the earlier Buddhist philosophical schools but also in the approaches of theistic Hinduism, Vedantism, Islam, Christianity, and most other religious and philosophical traditions. From the point of view of the Madhyamika school, these other approaches can be grouped together into three categories: the eternalists, the nihilists, and the atomists. The Madhyamikas viewed the first two of these approaches as being false, and the third as being only partially true.
The first and most obvious of these three “misconceptions of the nature of reality” is eternalism, an approach which is often that of the more naive versions of theism. Eternalistic doctrines view phenomena as containing some sort of eternal essence. Things are born and die, yet they contain an essence which does not perish. The quality of eternal existence must adhere to some thing, so the holders of this doctrine usually subscribe to belief in God, a soul, an atman, an ineffable self. Thus the believer asserts that something does exist as solid, ongoing, and eternal. It is reassuring to have something solid to hang onto, to dwell upon, a fixed way of understanding the world and one’s relationship to it.
However, eventually the believer in eternalistic doctrines may become disillusioned with a God he has never met, a soul or essence he cannot find. Which brings us to the next and somewhat more sophisticated misconception of reality: nihilism. This view holds that everything is generated out of nothingness, mystery. Sometimes this approach appears as both theistic and atheistic assertions that the Godhead is unknowable. The sun shines, throws light upon the earth, helps life to grow, provides heat and light. But we can find no origin to life; there is no logical starting point from which the universe began. Life and the world are merely the dance of maya, illusion. Things are simply generated spontaneously out of nowhere. So nothingness seems important in this approach: an unknowable reality somehow beyond apparent phenomena. The universe takes place mysteriously; there is no real explanation at all. Possibly a nihilist would say that the human mind cannot comprehend such mystery. Thus, in this view of reality, mystery is treated as a thing. The idea that there is no answer is relied upon and dwelt upon as the answer.
The nihilistic approach evokes the psychological attitude of fatalism. You understand logically that if you do something, things happen in reaction to it. You see a continuity of cause and effect, a chain reaction over which you have no control. This chain reactive process springs from the mystery of “nothingness.” Therefore, if you murder someone, it was your karma to murder and was inevitable, fore-ordained. For that matter if you do a good deed, it has nothing to do with whether or not you are awake. Everything springs from this mysterious “nothingness” which is the nihilistic approach to reality. It is a very naive view: one leaves everything to mystery. Whenever we are not quite certain of things which are beyond the scope of our conceptualized ideas, then we begin to panic. We are afraid of our own uncertainty and we attempt to fill the gap with something else. The something else is usually a philosophical belief—in this case, the belief in mystery. We very eagerly, very hungrily search for nothingness, surveying every dark corner in our attempts to find it. But we find only the crumbs. We find nothing more than that. It is very mysterious. As long as we continue to look for a conceptual answer there will always be areas of mystery, which mystery is itself another concept.
Whether we are eternalists or nihilists or atomists, we constantly assume that there is a “mystery,” something which we do not know: the meaning of life, the origin of the universe, the key to happiness. We struggle after this mystery, trying to become a person who knows or possesses it, naming it “God,” the “soul,” “atman,” “Brahman,” “shunyata,” and so on. Certainly this is not the Madhyamika approach to reality, though the early Hinayana schools of Buddhism to some extent fell into this trap, which is why their approach is considered only a partial truth.
The Hinayana approach to reality sees impermanence as the great mystery: that which is born must change and die. However, one cannot see impermanence itself but only its manifestation in form. Thus the Hinayanists describe the universe in terms of atoms existing in space and moments existing in time. As such, they are atomistic pluralists. The Hinayana equivalent of shunyata is the understanding of the transitory and insubstantial nature of form, so Hinayana meditation practice is two-fold: contemplation of the many aspects of impermanence—the processes of birth, growth, decay, and death, and their elaborations; and mindfulness practice which sees the impermanence of mental events. The arhat views mental events and material objects and begins to see them as momentary and atomistic happenings. Thus he discovers that there is no permanent substance or solid thing as such. This approach errs in conceptualizing the existence of entities relative to each other, the existence of “this” relative to “that.”
We can see the three elements of eternalism, nihilism, and atomistic pluralism in different combinations in almost all the major philosophies and religions of the world. From the Madhyamika point of view, these three misconceptions of reality are virtually inescapable as long as one searches for an answer to an assumed question, as long as one seeks to probe the so-called “mystery” of life. Belief in anything is simply a way of labeling the mystery. Yogachara, a Mahayana philosophical school, attempted to eliminate this mystery by finding a union of mystery and the phenomenal world.
The main thrust of the Yogachara school is epistemological. For this school the mystery is intelligence, that which knows. The Yogacharyans solved the mystery by positing the indivisible union of intelligence and phenomena. Thus there is no individual knower; rather everything is “self-known.” There is only “one mind,” which the Yogacharyans called “self-luminous cognition,” and both thoughts and emotions and people and trees are aspects of it. Thus this school is also referred to in the traditional literature as the citta-matra or “mind-only” school.
The Yogachara school was the first school of Buddhist thought to transcend the division between the knower and the known. Thus its adherents explain confusion and suffering as springing from the mistaken belief in an individual knower. If a person believes that he knows the world, then the one mind appears to be split, though actually its clear surface is only muddied. The confused person feels that he has thoughts about and reactions to external phenomena and so is caught in a constant action and reaction situation. The enlightened person realizes that thoughts and emotions on the one hand, and the so-called external world on the other, are both the “play of the mind.” Thus the enlightened person is not caught in the dualism of subject and object, internal and external, knower and known, I and other. Everything is self-known.