B SUNYATA

There’s no beginning to our experience of samsaric suffering and so far it has not ended. Why do we still suffer? Because we have not yet realized emptiness, the ultimate nature of phenomena—that things are empty, that things exist merely in name. We have not discovered reality; we have not discovered the wisdom that cuts the root of all delusion and karma, the true cause of suffering, the cause of samsara. We have not eradicated ignorance, the unknowing mind. We have continually been creating ignorance, the root of samsara. Instead of meditating on emptiness, practicing mindfulness, we have been making our mind more and more ignorant. That’s why we continue to suffer.


nstead, we cloak these merely labeled sense objects in the hallucination of existence from their own side and hang on to that as true, allow our mind to believe in our own hallucination that there


 really is something there. Because we do not practice mindfulness meditation on emptiness, or dependent arising—mindfulness on the hallucination that it is a hallucination—we constantly make our mind more and more ignorant.


In the same way, then, what’s called mind is also a name. We think there’s a real mind—a real mind existing from there. That’s how it appears to us and, without a shadow of doubt, we believe one hundred percent in this appearance. But if we analyze this phenomenon called mind, it’s no different from the name given to you by your parents, which was created by their mind. What you call mind has been merely labeled by your thought in relation to its base, that formless phenomenon that has neither shape nor color, whose nature is clear and that has the ability to perceive objects. That is the base, and “mind” is the label. They’re two distinct phenomena, not one. They’re not separate, but they’re different. That’s what we have to realize—that these two phenomena are different. This is what we have to discover through meditation. By doing this we can begin to free ourselves from the hallucination that is the root of all suffering. This is how we start to liberate ourselves from samsara.


The way to practice more meaningful mindfulness is this. For example, when you’re sitting or when you’re walking, ask yourself the question, “What am I doing?” Then your mind will answer, “I’m sitting,” “I’m walking,” “I’m eating,” depending on what it is that you’re doing. “I’m cooking,” “I’m talking.” Whatever you are doing, you can meditate on emptiness.



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The second technique for meditating on emptiness is one that takes you back to your childhood, to the time before you had learned the alphabet. Imagine yourself before you knew your ABCs. You’re sitting in the classroom and your teacher draws a letter on the blackboard for the first time. You, the child, have no idea what it is, what those lines represent. Although the teacher draws an A, you have no appearance of A. Even though you see the lines on the blackboard, A does not appear to you. You see the lines but you don’t see them as A. That’s because your mind hasn’t labeled those lines as A and believed in that. Remember, labeling is not enough—in order for there to be appearance, you have to believe in it as well. At this point in your life, your mind has not yet labeled that configuration and believed, “This is an A.”

Then your teacher tells you, “This is an A,” and your mind—believing what your teacher has said, in relation to that base, those lines on the blackboard—creates the label A, merely imputes it on the base, and believes in it. Only then do you have the appearance of the letter A. After that, then you see that this is an A.

The point to understand here is that first there’s that arrangement of lines, which is the base. What is it that makes your mind decide upon the particular label A? You don’t label any old configuration A—it has to be this particular pattern. That’s why your mind chooses to label it A—it sees the appropriate pattern. That is the base; the base to be labeled A.

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Similarly, when you look out your window and see a car go by, analyze what happens. First of all, before anything appears, you don’t label “car” because you haven’t seen anything. There’s no reason for you to label, “There goes a car.” When a car does go by, you don’t label it “car” the very moment you see it because for your mind to choose that particular label, “car,” you have to see something first, as we’ve been saying. What causes your mind to create the label? There has to be a prior reason. You have to see something before you create the label. What you see is the base—the phenomenon that has the appropriate shape and performs the function of going here and there, transporting people and so forth—you have to see that first. The label “car” comes after that. First you see the base; then you see the car. You see the car after you have applied the label. Therefore, it is a hallucination. Whatever you see go by—a person, a cat, a dog, a motorcycle—it works the same way.

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