Some recent questions by email from Kalyanamati prompted this attempt to summarise four weeks of a recent course, on the theme of Awareness & Śunyatā. Hopefully it answers his questions too! I also wanted to put in the public domain some original thinking about the relationship between Awareness and Śunyatā, which I think has far-reaching usefulness for practitioners.
Dharmachari Subhuti has come up with the term ‘transcendental object’, to express that which is configured as a worthy focus or goal of Shraddha. This is a very helpful idea, as it crystallises the need our faith has to explore and prefigure what our faith is in. The term ‘transcendental object’ is a thus a kind of shorthand or metaphor for the as yet poorly perceived end of one’s longing. For visualisers who respond to Tibetan iconography, such an object could be a bodhisattva visualised in effective sādhana. For me it is much better represented by the process and nature of music – for example, Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony, or John Sheppard’s ‘In manus tuas’ (all three versions, God bless him!). Almost incidentally, the very need for the term reminds us we have no choice but to express the non-conceptual goal of Buddhist practice metaphorically, that goal which is so deeply longed for but which minds not versed in the formless realms are not yet subtle enough to rest upon.
Taking this further, we might also say that the transcendental object is always śunyatā, or even that śunyatā is the ultimate transcendental object. It is śunyatā which ‘shines through’ a bodhisattva, or an ordinary person or a wall… Śunyatā is however apprehensible more directly if your meditation is deep and stable, whilst still being some kind of subtle object. There is of course a growing stabilisation of such experiences, but this is not the same as the increasingly thoroughgoing appreciation of śunyatā expressed in such progressions as the Four Śunyatās. Śunyatā is the object ‘standing in’ for the Unconditioned, until such time as you are ready for that, though it seems increasingly that it is precisely the real thing.
The corollary of all this talk of objects, however subtle, is of course some kind of subject. Mahayana philosophising tends toward rejoicing in śunyatā as object (as the wish-fulfilling jewel, and so forth), without being quite so enthusiastic about Awareness, its subject-corollary. As apprehension of śunyatā grows, the subject as Awareness also becomes clearer, more integrated, less dependent on gross conditionality. One swims in the formless realms as one’s natural home. The True Nature teachings, while being understood in specific ways in different recensions, all point to this transcendental subject, which provides what seems to be a continuity of Awareness which holds the space of phenomena. Awareness and Śunyatā are two sides of the same coin, no longer poles apart, but now close.
In order to be free, we must first become what we really are. We must increasingly reside in and trust our True Nature, which is open, blissful and radiant. This is not some form of ‘identifying with’ – that language belongs to the tortured conceptual self. We actually become whole, arrive at something we could not have imagined being so blessed and so available. We fully allow the ground of our being, and it is completely satisfying. I mean the word ‘completely’ quite literally. How can we become enlightened if we are initially divided from ourselves? Ordinary dividedness leads to the suffering of a stream of self-referential emotions. Making the transition to our True Nature gives rise to radiant energies, a subset of which are the brahmaviharas (I won’t sully them with the name ‘emotions’; they are much more wholesome than those things). We feel fully ourselves, and that we have realised what previously was the far object of our Faith. Śunyatā becomes a constant subtle presence; from the first stirrings before we wake, to our last attentions before we drift off at night. All our activity flows steadily and joyfully out of it.
Because of the relative stability and peacefulness of this state, and its relative freedom from conditions, one can feel that one has ‘arrived’. One certainly would be happy to be like this indefinitely. One may even believe one’s-self to be enlightened. Indeed, there is confusion in contemporary Buddhist texts about this phase, in which it is sometimes taken to be thus. It is clear that one is a conduit for tremendous energy, which ‘feels like’ it comes from the Unconditioned. It is an energy of liberation, perhaps so strong from having been so pent up by the horrid contortions of delusion previously. Insofar as there is liberation, there is also assimilation, and a new configuration of being. Once the energy is fully freed, and the re-configuring is mostly complete, energies quieten and give way to Equanimity, and a new phase beckons. This new phase centres around the growing appreciation of nirōdha and karmic inactivity, leading to nibbāna, and how to live from there – all of this far more tricksy than the śunyatā phase.
I cannot imagine how one would consider moving on from one’s True Nature – it is effectively incomprehensible that one might choose to. Chuck away the wish-fulfilling jewel, now you have found it? Are you nuts? Progression is something that happens to you, once you are sufficiently re-configured. It might be said to follow on from the ripening into the non-difference of Samsāra and Nibbāna… This means in practice that everything is here, fully present, and you no longer wish any sort of escape from any detail of this place. This cannot be made to happen, though no doubt one’s points of resistance are being probed and met, probably meditatively. One does even this trusting that all will be well, that the outcome will be just more presence, and so it is… However, the illusion of the continuity of Awareness, the longing to be, is deeply bound up with the roots of suffering – while you attend to the latter, you are quite unwittingly also undermining the former. In all this loveliness, we foreshadow the acceptance of our own death.