Buddhist Teachings on "Emptiness" are not Nihilistic

And why traditions that aim to existentially transform rather than conceptually explain are often misunderstood

There have been a plethora of responses to the Buddha’s teachings in today’s world. Some see the Buddha as a great psychologist who can help alleviate stress. Others see him as a scientist who advocates for experience-based inquiry into the nature of reality. Some find his meditative teachings useful, but his teachings on rebirth and karma to be incompatible with their materialist worldview. Others find that the metaphysical paradigm of karma and rebirth intuitively resonates with their experience. The list could go on. Here, I want to deal with one particular way the Buddhist teachings have been received. One trend of interpretation has been to argue that, as helpful as Buddhism may be in practice, the philosophical underpinnings of Buddhism are at worst, nihilistic, and at best, pale in comparison to the complexity and sophistication of Western philosophy and theology. For example, thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jordan Peterson claim that Buddhism is “life-denying” (Nietzsche) and “almost nihilistic” (Peterson). Similarly, the famous German philosopher Hegel suggests that Indian systems of thought, which encourage us to attend to impermanence, are overly simplistic as they fail to account for the internal complexity and self-sustaining nature of phenomena like the self or a community. In the realm of pop philosophy and theology, I have seen philosophy blogs and Christian YouTubers alike acknowledge the practical benefits of Buddhist practice but critique Buddhist theory as rife with “half-truths” due to its claims concerning the “emptiness” of substantial entities.

  The vast majority of these critiques take aim at Buddhist teachings and practices that encourage the mediator to notice the insubstantiality or “emptiness” of seemingly independent phenomena. For example, let’s say a meditator is applying their practice to the experience of anger. They may be instructed to attend to the thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations that fuel the fire of anger. One might attend to the arising and passing of each particular thought and sensation that makes up the anger. Just like looking closely at the pixels of a computer image causes the cohesiveness of the image to disintegrate into disconnected pieces, this attention to the parts that make up the anger can cause the entire feedback loop to collapse, leaving only harmless individual thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

  Many critics acknowledge this form of meditation’s effectiveness at diffusing unskillful mental and emotional states. However, the Buddha does not limit this deconstructive teaching only to negative emotions. This process of “insight” can be applied to any seemingly independent entity, including the self, physical objects, and the world itself. According to the Buddha, one only perceives bounded, separate, and isolated subjects or objects because they are unaware of the process of co-dependent origination: how all phenomena momentarily arise only when the causes for those phenomena are present. Just like the experience of anger arises when there is a contraction around a particular set of “angry” thoughts and feelings, the sense of a solid self and world arises when one contracts around or clings to a particular conceptual interpretation of a particular set of sensory phenomena, and then establishes the illusion of solidity by conditioning that interpretation so strongly that it is subconsciously made each moment.

  For example, the Buddha would claim that the perception of a “self” arises due to a conditioned habit which consists in mentally and physically contracting around a cluster of thoughts or sensations and labeling them with the conceptual designation “me.” (This all happens so quickly, however, we do not notice it; which is why we are encouraged to carefully observe ourselves in the silence of meditation.) Although this experience of there being a “me” arises only when these causes are present, we have become so habitually conditioned to make this contraction and conceptual judgment, it seems as if there is truly a substantial self. According to the Buddha, all seemingly independent phenomena are, in fact, momentary and insubstantial happenings that arise due to causes and conditions. If we take these particular teachings of the Buddha to their conclusion, we seem to be left with nothing substantial with which to work—philosophically, theologically, or ethically. As the Heart Sutra says of this teaching of the “emptiness” of all phenomena: “so in emptiness, no feeling, no form, no thought, no choice, nor is there consciousness, no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; no color, sound, taste, smell, touch, or what the mind takes hold of, no even act of sensing.” Many critics ask how we can make ethical judgments, discuss beauty, debate politics, or discuss the purpose of human life if we have no objects or subjects left to act as the basis of our discussion.

These types of critiques seem to be unaware that even Buddhist teachers warn students against taking emptiness as a conceptual explanation before they have tasted it in their own experience. Instead, critics will often point out how these teachings fail as attempts to systematically describe the complexity of reality, arguing that, as a conceptual description, they negate and oversimplify aspects of experience that are essential to living a rich, virtuous life. However, teachings on emptiness are not intended as a systematic description of the complexity of all of reality. For many Western thinkers, this is what philosophy, theology, and science are all about: explaining reality as comprehensively as possible in an intellectual statement or system, what French philosopher Jacques Derrida refers to as “Logocentrism.” If this line of the Heart Sutra was aspiring to this Logocentric project, their critique would be fair. However, this is simply not what the Buddhist teachings aim to do.

  Ajahn Chah, a Buddhist monastic and teacher from Thailand, was once asked why his teachings often contradict each other. He answered with a metaphor. He explained that the student of Buddhism is walking on a path with deep chasms on either side. If a student strays to the left, he gives them a particular teaching that will help nudge them to the right. If the student strays to the right, he gives them a teaching that will help nudge them to the left. And what is the middle? The middle is non-clinging: freedom from the confusion and suffering (or dukkha in the original Pali) that arise when our thoughts and actions are governed by unconscious, conditioned contraction around sensory phenomena and unconscious, conditioned conceptual interpretation of those stimuli.

  We must be careful not to misunderstand. Insight into emptiness does not aim to free us from the use of any conceptual designation whatsoever. Rather, we are freed from clinging to sensory experience and our conceptual interpretations of those experiences. In this sense, the fruit of the Buddhist path of insight is itself a refutation and rejection of Logocentrism. Once we realize that concepts do not refer to substantially existing objects “out there” or substantially existing subjects “in here,” but instead can act as causes that contribute to the momentary perception of substantially existing entities, our relationship to concepts undergoes a paradigm shift.

The dream of Logocentrism is shattered as concepts are seen to be creative and pragmatic rather than referential. Concepts, and the objects and subjects they denote, are now freed from the dead weight of fixed, unchanging meanings and can be invoked and applied in a way that is proper to the particular context and our particular purpose. For the Buddhist tradition, the purpose is always the eradication of suffering and delusion. In a certain context, this might mean using concepts to provide a practitioner with “insight”-based teachings to help them eradicate the mental, physical, and existential dis-ease that arises with the perception of oneself as a substantial entity fundamentally separate from the outside world. However, in other contexts, Buddhist teachers give different teachings that rely on different metaphysical assumptions. For example, the Buddha’s teachings on virtue, or sila, implore followers to live with wise restraint and treat others with compassion. These teachings do not recommend a deconstruction of the sense of a substantial person out there, but, on the contrary, encourage the practitioner to take the people they interact with as real and treat them with compassion and respect.

  Unlike Western philosophy, theology, and science, the fundamental aim of Buddhist teachings is not to provide a comprehensive conceptual model of reality. The fundamental teachings on emptiness suggest that the dream of a comprehensive and context-independent conceptual model is rooted in a misunderstanding about the nature of concepts and language. If we want to understand Buddhist teachings on their own terms, we must not ask if a particular teaching adequately describes the entire complexity of reality, but if that teaching would be effective at attenuating a particular form of suffering or clinging that a practitioner might be experiencing.

  Sadly, the inability to understand traditions that take concepts and language to be fundamentally practical and context-dependent is not limited only to Buddhism. Critiques of other traditions on the same grounds, especially by Enlightenment philosophers such as Hegel, have caused Western anthropologists, philosophers, and colonizers to demote, disparage, exploit, and even enslave peoples who are more interested in existential transformation and pragmatic action than systematic intellectual explanation. As Sioux elder and scholar Vine Deloria says of the ceremonial practices of his tribe, “These ceremonies come out of their experience, not out of a philosophical search to explain things. If you talk to a good medicine man, they’ll say, well, I have different spirits that help me do this and that, but at the bottom of it, I don’t understand the whole thing, I just know it works.” If we allow ourselves to receive these other traditions on their terms, they can encourage us to ask the difficult questions about our conceptual models that a true dialogue with these traditions might encourage: What do my conceptual models of nature, the self, or what matters in life amount to pragmatically? Do they work? Do they help me live in harmony with those around me? Do they ease my suffering and give my life meaning?

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