Seeing That Frees

1. Emptiness is the Key to Unlocking Profound Freedom

Revered in the tradition as the ‘crown jewels’ of the Dharma, the Buddha’s teachings on emptiness and dependent arising point and pave the way to the most beautiful possibilities for us as human beings.

Radical Revolution. The realization of emptiness, or sunyata, brings about a radical shift in our understanding of existence, opening the door to profound and extraordinary freedom. It's not a sudden event but a gradual journey of understanding that involves all aspects of our being, not just the intellect. This journey requires humility and an open mind, accepting that our understanding will continuously evolve as we practice and inquire.

Beyond Barrenness. Emptiness is not a state of deprivation or meaninglessness, but rather the absence of inherent existence. It's a quality that can be recognized in all things, a way something is. All phenomena lack intrinsic existence, true existence, self-existence, or substantial existence.

Middle Way. Emptiness is the Middle Way between existence and non-existence. It doesn't deny the appearances of things or their functioning according to cause and effect. Instead, it transcends these categories, revealing a reality beyond our usual conceptions.

2. Fabrication by the Mind Creates Illusory Realities

The world is fabricated through conception… completely conceptualized.

Mind-Dependent. All appearances are fabricated by the mind. The thingness of things is dependent on the mind, but the full extent and implications of this dependence may go unrecognized. It is this dependence of all phenomena on the mind that is most significant and that needs to be understood.

Illusory Nature. The world of inner and outer phenomena is fabricated, fashioned, and constructed by the mind, so that it is somehow illusory, not real in the way that we assume, and not independent of the mind that fabricates it. When the Buddha proclaims that things are fabricated, he is declaring much more than the simple fact that they were put together from other building blocks as causes and conditions. He is pointing more radically to their illusory nature.

No Ground. Not only appearances, but the 'whole show' is fabricated, including the mind with its various factors and its consciousness. There is no 'ground' to fabrication. Even this profound realization of the fabricated nature of all phenomena is only a relative truth. Fabrication itself is empty too.

3. Insight is a Liberating Way of Seeing

Insight, then, may loosely be described as any ‘seeing’ that frees.

Dissolving Dukkha. Insight is any realization, understanding, or way of seeing things that brings a dissolution of, or a decrease in, dukkha. It's not a specific experience to attain, but a way of looking that cuts or melts something fundamental on which dukkha relies.

Personal Experience. Insight is based primarily on personal experience of what decreases dukkha, not on faith or blind beliefs. When there is insight, the seeing melts dukkha, and that release of dukkha we can feel and know for ourselves.

Liberating Ways of Looking. Insight is not just 'getting' an insight, but also intentionally sustaining a 'way of looking' at experience that is already informed by a certain insight. This involves actively seeing and experiencing things in a different way than usual, one that is more in line with and emphasizing some insight or other. Sustaining any insightful way of looking will free, to some extent, in that moment.

4. Samādhi Cultivates Well-being and Supports Insight

This kind of pleasure should be pursued, it should be developed, it should be cultivated; it should not be feared.

Unification in Well-being. Samādhi involves more than just holding the attention fixed on an object with a minimum of wavering. What characterizes states of samādhi is some degree of collectedness and unification of mind and body in a sense of well-being.

Resource for the Path. A dedication to samādhi can bring a certain 'juiciness' to practice and to life, and this can provide a vital resource of wholesome and profound nourishment. The well-being that it includes can be crucial.

Qualities of Samādhi. A mind that has cultivated some samādhi has more malleability. It is more able to look at things in different ways, finds it much easier to learn and develop novel approaches and practices, and can move between these with more agility.

5. Mindfulness Reveals the Illusory Nature of Things

… perception is like a mirage.

Staying at Contact. Mindfulness practice involves a degree of putting down, or cutting off, these grosser levels of complication, self-based narratives, and proliferation. It is to hold or return the attention to the ‘initial, basic’ experiences that arise at the contact of the sense doors with the sense objects.

Bare Attention. Mindfulness practice seeks to get ‘underneath’ the veil of abstractions and concepts. It is to sustain a way of looking, over and over, moment to moment, that meets and notices, pays careful and close attention to, the sensations in the chest as they present themselves, as much as possible putting aside, just for now, any story or interpretation that the mind wants to add, even if there is some truth to that story or interpretation.

Simplification of Attention. Mindfulness practice involves a simplification of attention. We are deliberately choosing to pay attention in a simpler way and to a simpler, less conceptual, level of experience.

6. Dependent Origination Exposes the Interconnectedness of All Phenomena

Emptiness is just this dependent arising.

Interconnectedness. The Buddha's teaching on dependent origination (paṭiccasamuppāda) explains how all appearances and perceptions arise dependent on the mind, constructed by the mind. All phenomena are interconnected and arise in dependence on each other.

Chain of Causation. The Buddha outlined a chain of causation, starting with ignorance (avijjā) and leading to suffering (dukkha). Each link in the chain is dependent on the previous one, highlighting the interconnectedness of all phenomena.

Breaking the Chain. The teaching of dependent origination offers multiple possibilities for untangling and lessening dukkha. By understanding the conditions that support suffering, we can intervene and disrupt the chain of causation.

7. The Self is a Constructed Narrative, Not an Inherent Entity

The world has no own-nature.

Social Conventions. Social conventions, such as countries and value systems, are human fabrications. Recognizing their emptiness can free us from unnecessary suffering.

Challenging Assumptions. Emptiness challenges the common-sense assumptions we have of things. We need to keep open the question of what is and what isn’t fabricated, and simply keep deepening our ability to expose the fabricated nature of more and more phenomena as far as possible.

The Mystery of Fabrication. Not only appearances, but the 'whole show' is fabricated, including the mind with its various factors and its consciousness. There is no 'ground' to fabrication.

8. Love and Compassion Arise from the Realization of Emptiness

Without doubt, when practitioners have developed their understanding of emptiness, their minds will be devoted to the welfare of others.

Moral Nihilism. Opening to voidness should definitely not lead to a lack of care, to indifference, cold aloofness, or a closing of the heart. If I find that my practice is somehow making me less compassionate, less generous, less caring about ethics, then something is wrong in my understanding or at the very least out of balance in my approach, and I need to modify how I am practising.

Compassion and Emptiness. As insight into these teachings deepens, we become, as a matter of course, more easily moved to concern for the world, and more sensitive to ethics and the consequences of our actions. Opening to voidness should definitely not lead to a lack of care, to indifference, cold aloofness, or a closing of the heart.

Serving the World. As we travel this meditative journey into emptiness we find that the more we taste the voidness of all things, the more loving-kindness, compassion, generosity, and deep care for the world open naturally as a consequence in the heart. Seeing emptiness opens love.

9. The Nature of Awareness is Beyond Concepts

Consciousness is like a magic show.

Illusory Awareness. Not only appearances, but the ‘whole show’ is fabricated, including the mind with its various factors and its consciousness. There is no ‘ground’ to fabrication.

Challenging Assumptions. Emptiness definitely challenges the common-sense assumptions we have of things. And typically we have all kinds of assumptions we do not even realize we have.

The Mystery of Fabrication. As the Buddha discovered, not only appearances, but the ‘whole show’ is fabricated, including the mind with its various factors and its consciousness. Thus he also declared the illusory nature of any and all awareness, any consciousness of anything.

10. Time is a Fabricated Construct

The world has no own-nature.

Beyond Existing and Not Existing. The Buddha’s assertion that things are beyond existing and not existing is not easy to fully comprehend. One of the keys that can unlock our ability to realize, more than just intellectually, this mystical way things are is tied in with an important way in which our holographic tiger illustration is limited.

Dependent on the Mind. It is this dependence of all phenomena on the mind that is most significant and that needs to be understood. Teachings on voidness are offered in the service of liberation, yet it may be that an explanation of emptiness as meaning ‘dependence on causes and conditions’ is grasped in only a limited way, and so yields only very limited freedom, if any at all, and misses the profundity of what is being communicated.

Fabricated, Therefore Illusory. The world of inner and outer phenomena is, in some very important sense, ‘fabricated’, ‘fashioned’, ‘constructed’ by the mind, so that it is somehow illusory, not real in the way that we assume, and not independent of the mind that fabricates it.

11. The Unfabricated is Beyond Description

The Teacher has proclaimed that all phenomena are primordially peace, free from arising, and that their real nature transcends every pain.

Everything is Empty. Absolutely everything is empty, without exception. The self is empty. So too is the body, and the whole material world, together with its constituent elements, its subatomic particles, fields, and forces.

Beyond Conception. Although, due to fundamental delusion, our habitual, ubiquitous, and almost uninterrupted tendency is to intuitively conceive of things as either existing or not existing, the Buddha’s response to Kaccāyana suggests that something more profound and mysterious than our usual conceptions is being communicated in these teachings.

Reverence and Mystery. As we learn to deepen our understanding through meditation, we discover that not only does seeing into emptiness bring a rare and crucial freedom, sweet relief, joy, and love, there is in the seeing of it more and more a sense of beauty, of mystery. It becomes indeed a mystical understanding.

Last updated: April 3, 2025