Compassion and Emptiness

The Buddha taught the divine abodes – unconditional love, compassion, joy and equanimity – not just as states of calm, but as ways to liberate the mind.

The Brahmavihara practices enable us to cultivate these qualities and to engage with our afflictive emotions – craving, hatred and ‘ignoring’ – in relation to them. In doing so, we’re already engaging with insightful perspectives. Sooner or later, we’re likely to start glimpsing the uncultivated, unlimited, unconditional nature of these qualities, free from afflictions. We’ll explore these possibilities in the first part of the retreat from a perspective of deep, embodied awareness and in a spirit of openness and curiosity.

This will provide us with an excellent basis for our contemplations of emptiness.

Based on the ‘Shorter Discourse on Emptiness’, an early Buddhist text, this approach to emptiness is less analytical and more experiential than many of those developed in later Mahayana schools. Starting with our everyday experience, it enables us to realise emptiness progressively in relation to the four ‘formless attainments’ (also known as the arupa dhyanas).

We’ll see that experience is empty of whatever isn’t right here in experience now.
This may seem obvious, but we constantly delude ourselves into believing that although something isn’t ‘here’, it’s still really ‘out there’, even when we don’t experience it. It’s easy to miss the main point – what we think we’re experiencing is just a mental fabrication. What we’re actually experiencing is empty of those fabrications.

It doesn’t matter how far through this progression we manage to get – emptiness is emptiness and discovering it in relation to our ordinary experience now can be quite profound enough!