If you spend any amount of time reading books on Buddhism, or hanging out with Buddhists, you’re likely to encounter the mysterious idea known as the “doctrine of emptiness”. I’ve never understood it, yet always liked it, probably because I’m perversely drawn to how bleakly depressing it sounds. (Buddhism is full of this downbeat stuff: for example, did you know that reincarnation, traditionally, was seen a bad thing? The goal of meditation was to stop yourself being reborn next time. It’s less a religion of smiles and flowers, more a death cult.) According to the doctrine of emptiness, all existence is, in some sense, empty. I still don’t totally understand what that means. But I’m a lot closer thanks to Robert Wright’s superb, level-headed new book Why Buddhism Is True. And the answer, it turns out, isn’t even very depressing: it could be a much-needed antidote to our increasingly angry times.
The basic premise is that we typically view the world through a screen of assumptions, some so basic they’re invisible. Most basic of all is the way we project an “inner essence” on to every object and person, a shadowy something we never quite experience. “People have a default assumption,” writes the psychologist Paul Bloom, “that things, people and events have invisible essences that make them what they are.” If I stole your wedding ring, replacing it with an identical one, you’d be dismayed if you found out, because it wouldn’t be your ring. That’s essence. In an angry confrontation with a driver who is being a jerk, it’s virtually impossible not to relate to him as essentially a jerk. People who attend white supremacist rallies are bad people.
This essentialism has the effect of stoking animosity, feeding the sense of life as a constant battle, in which the only viable solution is to destroy the possessors of bad essences. Yet these essences never seem to show themselves. In the confrontation with the driver, were you to look solely to your experience, you’d find only patterns of phenomena: the perceptions making up your experience of the driver; your emotional reactions, and so on. The white supremacist, likewise, emerges as a collection of brain activity, thoughts and actions – each caused by some other phenomenon, caused by another, and another, all the way back to the Big Bang. This isn’t to excuse immoral actions, but to see clearly what’s actually there. “There’s an important, if subtle, sense in which we attribute too much form and content to reality,” Wright notes. We could stop going through life trying to protect certain essences while avoiding or eradicating others, and focus on simply reducing suffering.
In a famous Buddhist tale, told in many versions, a man piloting his boat over a foggy lake is furious when another boat bumps into his. It keeps happening; his rage at the other navigator grows. Then the fog clears: the boat was empty. His anger evaporates. Well, according to the doctrine of emptiness, the boat is always empty – even if there’s someone in it. After all, boatmen are just collections of phenomena, too.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
