Embracing emptiness, the body’s true nature

Two weekends last month saw me sweltering under the heat dome while volunteering at two street fairs – Juneteenth and then the half-million-people Pride Fest. Quite apart from the joy of meeting passers by whose curiosity is piqued by our signage, manning a booth also provides an unprecedented occasion for people-watching. Which is to say, and for the most part, body-watching.

There are so many human bodies in Denver alone, let alone the rest of the world! And such a huge variety too – during Pride Fest, in particular, all kitted out (or not) in outfits you wouldn’t normally leave the house in, some of which could possibly get you arrested on any other day of the year. I admired the joy and confidence with which everyone was celebrating their bodies, celebrating being alive, celebrating seeing and being seen.

However, I was also reminded that none of us is our body – that there is infinitely more to us than this meat suit. And that none of these bodies, however dramatic and hard-won, actually exists from its own side. Our body exists as mere name or imputation not other than its emptiness. So what are we really seeing? There is nothing there when we look, nothing behind any of these vivid appearances; they’re just emptiness appearing. As Venerable Geshe Kelsang says in Tantric Grounds and Paths, forms are just emptiness in disguise.

Rainbow bodies

Once we fully realize this, our mind will transform into wisdom and our body into wisdom light. These Pride rainbows are well and good, but imagine that day when actual rainbows are emanating from our pure Deity bodies in the Pure Land. Now that will truly be a cause for celebration.

It is often painful to identify with our appearance or packaging, unless we are that rare person who always thinks they’re gorgeous, whether they are or not. And there is no future in our body – age steals away our youth and our vitality, and eventually this thing collapses altogether.

Today I saw a video of my face looking more haggard than I had realized it had become – my version of my face is still about 5 years younger than the version others are seeing, apparently 😂 Perhaps ‘cos when I look in the mirror I position my head in a certain way to avoid seeing the wrinkles and jowls, and go for soft lighting. So I will now endeavor to adapt to this new reality! Yet I find I’m already feeling okayish about it because it is added incentive to stop identifying with this deceptive conventional truth and identify with my pure blissful nature instead.

Have you ever seen one of those stickers on an old banger saying, “My other car is a Lambhorgini”?! I am reminded today of my old friend Eileen, aged 90+, wearing a nightie with the words, “My other body is a rainbow body.”

“Time is running,” as Geshe-la would say; and I can tell this is so from that video.  And from yet another birthday this week – one mainly orchestrated by Facebook, from what I can tell. Talking of stickers, and maybe it is just me, and no offence intended at all, and not meaning to be ungrateful, but I think I will actually run for the hills and/or cancel all future birthdays if I ever have to see another one of these:

Where in our body is our body?

With all this in mind, I wanted to share some comments on the emptiness of the body meditation. As Shantideva says:

Therefore, there is no body.
But, because of ignorance we see a body within the hands and so forth,
Just like a mind mistakenly apprehending a person
When observing the shape of a pile of stones at dusk.

None of the stones is a body, but in the dusk of our confusion we hallucinate a body within the pile of stones. When we take a closer look, we realize there is no body there.

Self-grasping is hallucinating a body within its parts. How can we know this? By looking for it.

We have to know precisely what we’re looking for in order to know we haven’t found it. The first step is therefore identifying the negated object, getting a clear image of the body we normally see, the one we believe to be true, the one we are grasping at and cherishing above all. We can bring a vivid version of it to mind, perhaps the body that appears in our mirror – “This mirror is privileged to reflect me!” or “How did I get this flabby?” This body seems to exist within the pile of stones, as it were, but also strangely independent of them.

I explained this meditation, which is called the four essential points, in some detail here: meditation on the emptiness of our body. And what I really recommend is for you to seek out this meditation in Venerable Geshe-la’s books, for example in How to Transform Your Life. (Also, see below, this year’s Summer Festival will include his teachings on this.) We have to do this meditation a lot until we get those light bulb moments and samsara begins to shake.

To add to those articles, here are a couple of short considerations:

Looking for the body inside its parts

If our body is its individual parts, we have many bodies (we don’t) OR there is only one body part because there is only one body. If our body is its parts collected, why do we need a whole different name and object, “body”? Why can’t we just get by with saying “collection of body parts”? It’s because we’re actually projecting and apprehending an inherently existent body that exists over and above the collection, something that exists from its own side independent of the collection.

When we look for our body within its individual and collective parts, we cannot find it. We are now beholding an absence, not a presence like we normally do. We get to the point where when we look at our hands and so on, we see an absence, not a presence, of our body. Meditation on emptiness is us learning to dispel the presence of the body by realizing that it’s not present. Imagine what it would be like to have just the parts with no body inside them? What would it be like not to have a body even if we have all the parts?! Thinking about this shakes our mind up, in a good way. We are looking at the parts and seeing an absence.

What is the meaning of a part? A body part is something upon which we impute body. However, for the average person, us, someone who hasn’t quite realized emptiness yet, a part is something in which the body seems to inhere, especially if enough parts are put together. There is some body-ness in each part. A person who has had plastic surgery for new breasts, for example, regards these as part of their body because they are now using them as a basis for saying “my body”.

Take a bicycle – there is an absence of bicycle in this wheel, that mirror, this seat, etc. Then we start to assemble it in a certain order, and at what point does a collection of things that are not a bicycle magically transform into a bicycle? A bike wasn’t there and now there it is, or seems to be – at what point did that happen exactly? The answer is that there was no point! There is still an absence of bike. There is a basis for calling it a bike because the parts are the basis of imputation for a bike, not because there is a bit of bike inhering in each part.

Check out this forest example in here for a bit more on this: Mere karmic appearance of mind.

Looking for the body outside its parts

If our body is separate from its parts, then where is it? When we point to our body, we are only ever pointing to a part or parts of it. We don’t point anywhere else, that would be dumb.

Gen Samten explained a “classic fun meditation” as he called it when he gave a talk on this subject recently. We imagine the parts of our body all floating off, as graphically as we can – my leg goes over here, my belly over there, my eyebrows over here, etc. Then we look in that space – is there a body here? No, only an absence. We should meditate on that absence for as long as we can.

Then float all its bits back and reassemble them – is the body there? Self-grasping says “yes” … but there isn’t. Eventually we will reassemble and that sense of absence remains. The parts are assembled but there is an understanding and feeling of absence. This experience is a priceless jewel.

Basically, with this meditation we see that our body is not there when we look for it. This is a great relief. We should spend as long as we can meditating on this absence. This wisdom realizing emptiness is the direct antidote to self-grasping at the presence of a body, and it will set us free from all problems associated with our body. But as Venerable Geshe-la told us in Portugal in 2013, we also need to remember this during the meditation break. Otherwise things will simply go back to normal, ordinary, boringness again, and we will not be able to solve our physical problems any more than anyone else who hasn’t meditated on emptiness.

The mind is more important

 Let me share with you this quote and short commentary from a Kadampa friend and yogi who sent it to me recently:

Purity and impurity, beauty and ugliness, good and bad all depend upon mind. For this reason, mind is more important than external things. Geshe-la, Ocean of Nectar

If purity & impurity depend upon the world, then the world would be more important.
If beauty & ugliness depend upon the body, then the body would be more important.
If good & bad depend upon our reputation, then our reputation would be more important.
But since all these things depend upon the mind, the mind is more important.

We each have a body, so what’s the big fuss about our own?! It’s not remotely unique. We really need to let go of attachment to our body. We don’t like getting ill, getting old, or even putting on 2lbs. But where is that ill, ageing, or overweight body?

It is a useful guesthouse for our mind, which came from bits of other people’s bodies, but I may die today, whereupon this body and its world will vanish as mistaken appearances dissolving into the clear light of death, never to reappear. I can look after it like any other useful possession—clean it, give it the right fuel for its microbiome, etc; but there’s not much point in giving it attention beyond that, is there? Instead, why not just use it for helpful activities?

When it experiences pleasure, great, but it’s good to remember that the bliss is actually coming from the mind. As is any pain, so there’s no need to get angry with it either. As Shantideva points out, what exactly are we attached to or angry with anyway? Both the pleasing body and the unpleasing body are just imputations not other than their emptiness. And the emptiness of both is the same nature, like the space inside two bottles, so we don’t need to discriminate between them so uptightedly. As Venerable Geshe-la says in The New Eight Steps to Happiness:

In this experience everything becomes very peaceful and comfortable, balanced and harmonious, joyful and wonderful.

Sounds good to me.

More to people than their packaging

Another conclusion from all of this, starting with the Street Festivals … bodies are the most visible of our aggregates so we are habitually inclined to impute people on their bodies, their fleeting packaging. It requires more mindfulness to remember, “This is my kind mother”, for example, or that “This person wants to be happy and free from suffering,” because these are more invisible qualities of the mind. Our body’s actual nature is emptiness, lack of inherent existence, the mere absence of the body we normally see. If we train in seeing bodies as more see-through, as it were, only pretending to be there, just emptiness in disguise, we get less caught up in superficial judgments and it’s much easier to relate to people in more helpful ways. More about that here: Body image: a Buddhist perspective. 

Summer Festival 2024 includes this! 

If you liked reading about the emptiness of the body, I hope you may be able to get the teachings on The Heart Sutra next week at the International Kadampa Summer Festival. These will include Venerable Geshe-la’s teachings on the subject in Portugal 2013. There are lots of blessings to be had, even online, that will help this profound subject come to life for us.

Over to you, your comments are most welcome!

(Image is of Great Mother Prajnaparamita, the embodiment of the perfection of wisdom of all enlightened beings. This Tharpa statue is available at the Summer Festival.)