A Deep Dive Into The Nature Of Emptiness

Preston Bryant

The Salvation Of Nothingness

Even though the concept of nothingness or "emptiness" (sunyata) has been touched on in many traditions, the value that Keiji Nishitani brought to it should not be undermined, because of his versatile and all-encompassing understanding of the Western philosophical tradition. He had the correct historical sense on both sides, which, as Nietzsche once remarked, "is the congenital defect in all philosophers." (Nietzsche and Handwerk 2013) The subtlety of his precision was just as brilliant as the body of his acquired knowledge. As someone who gravitates toward unorthodox spiritual teachers, such as Alan Watts, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Adyashanti, Jean Klein, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Francis Lucille, and Rupert Spira, I immediately fell in love with Nishitani's contemplative approach, which was complimented by academic rigor and a thorough process of systematic deconstruction. He was equal parts philosophical surgeon and Zen master. Not only was he able to understand the underlying issue of nihilism that pervades the Western philosophical tradition, but he also pointed us toward salvation from such nihilism by reminding us of the more life-affirming view of nothingness that pervades some of the most important traditions, like Zen, which is uniquely oriented to align the practitioner with its ground.

In this essay, I intend to explore Nishitani's view of nothingness and do my best to connect it with liberation from the "skin-encapsulated ego," as Alan Watts once called it (the romantic part of me wishes to use the word "enlightenment" instead of "liberation" but as with the word "mysticism," there are some lofty connotations I would rather avoid). Questions I will try to answer in this paper include the following: (1) What exactly is nothingness? (2) What are its implications for philosophy? And (3) How does it relate to spiritual enlightenment?

Without intending to scare or excite the reader with a dramatic and overly romanticized introduction to the path ahead, I do feel it is worth mentioning that there is a chance we might first be disturbed, in the sense that Jesus meant in the Gospel of Thomas, then astonished, before ruling over all during this exploration together. (Valantasis 2004) We are, after all, undoing and chipping away at the illusions we have of ourselves more than we are adding or becoming more of whom we think we might be. Indeed, it is a dangerous edge to walk upon, but one that might ultimately lead us to unconditional freedom. Saying “yes” to the pathless land might be the greatest path to walk upon, especially if the truth resides there, as Krishnamurti once said, and as St John of The Cross once pointed to when he said these words: “If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.” (St John of The Cross and Hooper 2013) According to such teachers and mystics, the truth is the luminous darkness, a black hole of sorts, the night that Rilke has faith in, an emptiness that is full, a contentless purity capable of redemption and grace, the invisible hand of God, an unobjectifiable and untouchable subtlety, “the breath within the breath,” as Kabir put it (Kabir and Tagore 2021). Of course, these are just words or poetic references that point to an ineffable mystery that cannot be grasped by mere reason. But when it comes to metaphysics, which was, according to Whitehead, a practice of using language in an imaginative and rigorous way to get at the fundamental nature of experience, words are valuable, especially when we are trying to “eff the ineffable.” I would even go so far as to say that poetry is perhaps more useful than rigorous and logical philosophical language here because we are not dabbling in anything that can be explained in a linear or logical fashion, in a style that makes the rational mind feel at home. There is a reason why there exist Koans in the Zen tradition. In much the same way that we cannot “figure out” the sound of one hand clapping, we cannot figure out sunyata by mere armchair thinking. Our analytical and problem-solving skills must be replaced by or infused with a sensitivity to an unfathomable vastness.

On that note, this essay makes a rather devastating claim: if it is the Truth we are seeking, we must be brave enough to let go of the seeker, which includes the entire conceptual structure that keeps it alive in a world of separation and duality. But let us unpack this a bit before moving on because on it rests an extremely important point that Nishitani himself spent a great deal of time unraveling. When I use the word, “seeker” in this context, I mean in it a synonymous way with what is ordinarily called The Cartesian ego, cogito, or what Alan Watts ingeniously called “the skin-encapsulated ego,” the feeling that there is really a self behind our head, a subject that is alive, an individual of sorts that has control and will, the sense of “sombodiness.” If we take the time to unpack this idea just a little bit, we come to realize that its unreality has guided the Western philosophical tradition for quite some time, and in many ways, created the sense of meaninglessness and despair that pervades the modern mind. Descartes creation of the cogito is, as Nishitani said, “a self shut up within itself.” (Nishitani 1983) As long as there seems to be a subject looking out into a world that is separate from it, there is a disconnect, a feeling of isolation, loneliness, and despair. Richard Tarnas drives this point home in his Magnum Opus, Cosmos And Psyche: “What sets the modern mind apart is its fundamental tendency to assert and experience a radical separation between subject and object, a distinct division between the human self and the encompassing world.” (Tarnas 2007) There are many reasons why this came to be, many of which includes the age of scientific enlightenment, but it is not the job of this essay to go into those reasons. My aim is to rather promote Nishitani’s view of nothingness as a suitable solution—dare I say, the only solution—to this exact divide because nothingness is the very ground of reality itself, the only healing balm to the illusory sense of separation.

Not only does Nishitani affirm the unity of the human self and the encompassing world, but he also goes a step further by saying that such unity is legitimate and possible because of the empty ground upon which they are a manifestation. (Nishitani 1983) This empty ground is a life-affirming negation, a nothing that returns all things back to wholeness, an existential cure to the ego’s angst and sloppy daydreaming, a heaven so prophetic it contains all opposites and has the capacity to swallow up hell. In one of my favorite passages of Religion and Nothingness, Nishitani refers to heaven as the abyss for hell—a space so vast that nihilism (the view that life is meaningless) is annihilated within it. So, when I write that we must be brave enough to let go of the seeker, I am calling the entire structure of the ego—with all its hope, hopelessness, expectations, and optimism—into question and inviting us into what Nishitani refers to as The Great Doubt, which is akin to the mystic silence, a contentless presence within ourselves that is incapable of committing hope for the wrong thing and love of the wrong thing because it is utterly devoid of the usual pushing and pulling which ordinarily defines the egoic structure.

In short, letting go of the seeker means letting go of the “permanent center” so that “man is made to lose himself in a “formless nothingness.” But this loss, as Nishitani often reminds us, is a gain. “He who dies and regains life by this word of agape,” writes Nishitani, “can become God-breathed, an expiration of the Holy Spirit (Nishitani 1983). There is a similar ring in the gospel of Matthew: “Whosoever shall save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find it.” (Senior 1997) It is important to remember that these words are utterly meaningless to the ego because the ego is that which is resistant to such liberating processes. In short, the ego is always in the way, even when it is searching for the way. For this reason, it needs to be undercut, questioned, and brought to silence. That is one of Nishitani’s main points.

It is also why sunyata is so important, and why, as philosophers, we would do well to study and take seriously the claims of Keiji Nishitani. For he is not merely trying to make us better at “hunting for entities and their links or causes in the critically polished field of consciousness,” as Raimon Pannikar once wrote in The Rhythm Of Being, he is pointing at a “rebirth of the self,” or to be more precise, “the return of the self to its original mode of being.” (Nishitani 1983) In other words, he is pointing toward something akin to salvation, an orientation that is aligned with the Whole, a new life that is both transcendent and immanent.

But has all this rambling really defined what nothingness is? Perhaps not. So, let us clarify this idea a little more for those who may still be confused and make an important distinction. Some of you may have already picked up on this, but it is worth repeating: Nishitani’s concept of nothingness is not at all a meaningless void, a dreaded nothing as opposed to a positive something. Such an understanding is wrought with the projections of the Western view, which is attached to its own despair, and incapable of understanding that such a view of nothingness makes nothingness out to be a “thing that is wholly other.” In other words, it has objectivized nothingness because its point of view is limited and dualistic. It lives in a world of objects, so it cannot help but imagine that nothingness—however difficult that is to imagine—is also a thing of some sort that is meaningless. This is radically different from Nishitani’s understanding of nothingness, which is absolute in every sense of the term. I will let Nishitani’s poetic and brilliant intellect do its job here: “It is a cosmic sky enveloping earth and man and the countless legions of stars that move and have their being within it. It lies beneath the ground we tread, its bottom reaching beneath the valley’s bottom. If the place where the omnipresent God resides be called heaven, then heaven would have to reach beneath the bottomless pit of hell: heaven would be an abyss for hell.” (Nishitani 1983, 98) To say that Nishitani hit the nail on the head by using those words would be an understatement. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I have not yet come across an explanation of sunyata that is this brilliant; it perfectly depicts its all-encompassing, ineffable, and all-consuming nature. Sunyata is the source of life itself and for this very reason, “the ultimate irrationality,” as Whitehead once described God—something that cannot be reasoned about because it is the very source of reason. (Segall 2019)

But where does the ethical fit into all of this? Does waking up to this reality mean that we transcend the moral and ethical dimensions? If sunyata swallows everything up, including our ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, is there room for The Good? One does not have to look far to find examples of so-called enlightened teachers preaching about emptiness who have sexually abused others, created cults, and used their egos to hijack the egolessness of reality. Ajahn Cha once said that there is no such thing as an enlightened person, only enlightened activity. (Cha and Caplan 2001) This might be true, but so many teachers attempted to possess reality and use it to benefit their unhealthy and unintegrated selves (see Stripping the Gurus by Geoffrey Falk). So, there is a fine and delicate balance that must be struck here. One could make the argument that contacting sunyata through satori (enlightenment) doesn’t necessarily make us good people, because the ethical dimension is not solely tied to sunyata, though it is an expression of it. Another argument that can be made is that waking up to reality wipes the slate clean and does indeed produce agape love, but only when the job is entirely complete. In other words, there are layers of delusion to be aware of during the awakening process that require an incredible amount of integrity and intelligent discrimination. For example, we can imagine that we are done with the spiritual journey when we have only succeeded in producing an awakened mind that hasn’t yet integrated an awakened heart. The modern-day spiritual teacher Adyashanti speaks about this at length in his talks.  But what does Nishitani have to say about all of this? According to him, it is vital to remember that there is a deeper layer to the ethical man than his narrow point of view. In the discussion about ethics, as with most fields of inquiry, he is always calling us back to the source or “near side,” as he calls it. “What I mean to ask here, however, is whether or not this standpoint of the self-sufficient subject that takes hold of its roots within itself does not rest on a still more fundamental ground.” (Nishitani1983, 273) According to Nishitani, this fundamental ground is ethical; Love and compassion are innate qualities of it, but they are far more profound in nature than human love or compassion because they appear when the standpoint of the person has been broken through. Once again, however, it is worth bearing in mind that it is very easy to delude oneself into imagining that one is exuding agape or karuna when it is, in fact, on an ego trip to love others and be good to others because “that is what the Bible has commanded of us.” For this reason, until the ego has been completely undercut by the source of reality, the meaning of love cannot be known. One must realize—as a matter of fact— that there are no others. When that happens, one is none other than the one. (The discussion of premature claims to enlightenment is a complex topic. For those who are curious about it, read Halfway Up The Mountain by Mariana Caplan)

This brings us to the next important section of the paper, which answers the second and third questions I posed at the beginning of the paper. As I said in the above paragraph, Nishitani is always pointing us back to the fundamental ground. In the evolution of consciousness, and consequently, in the evolution of philosophy, this ground has been overlooked or ignored by the limited sense of self. Instead of trying to understand what it is with the structure of the personality, therefore, a completely new orientation needs to be developed. I argue that this orientation redefines philosophy or removes it from the merely academic area of inquiry. Thinking about it is not enough, nor is thinking about it well to change one’s mind. We must align with it and become one with it. To use the words of Raimond Pannikar, “It requires new innocence, a voiding of ourselves and expectations.” (Panikkar 2013) With this new orientation, philosophy is in a sense no different from the religious or spiritual impulse that is devoted to the love of God. For we cannot develop a new innocence unless we are truly in love with the truth. “Without mumuksutva (ardent aspiration for liberating truth),” writes Panikkar, “philosophy is not possible. The culmination of this process is when the atman realizes atman-brahman.” (Panikkar 2013, 27)

Surely, such a culmination cannot be understood by any other words other than “spiritual enlightenment.” But instead of trying to define what that is, I think it is more important to write about the type of attitude we need to develop to live in it since defining the ineffable is a rather silly thing to do (waxing poetic about it, on the other hand, is not). This attitude requires, like I said, a love of the truth, but it also requires a sense of courage, and more importantly, a one-pointedness that is highly devotional in nature. This type of devotion is unlike the academic field of philosophy that emphasizes strong arguments, logical rigor, and a neat order to the structure of things; in other words, it is not merely an intellectual journey, a process of “hunting for entities and their links or causes in the critically polished field of consciousness.” It is an adventure of the heart toward greater purification, a wiping clean of the slate, a polishing of the mirror, and a return back to pure consciousness. To use the exceptional words of Raimond Panikkar yet again, “Philosophy is the opening of our purified conscious being to the self-disclosure of reality—and this finds an obstacle in our ego.” (Panikkar 2013, 26)

And it finds an obstacle in our ego because the ego is, as we said, trapped in its world and attached to its despair without knowing it. For this reason, it cannot perceive the subtler aspects of reality. And there couldn’t possibly be anything subtler than the ground of emptiness or sunyata. After all, it possesses no qualities that can be directly apprehended through the senses—no colors, no shapes, and no objective qualities. The ground of nothingness is a life-affirming negation similar to St. Augustine’s definition of the infinite “whose center is everywhere but circumference is nowhere.” To make matters more confusing for the cogito, it is on the “near side,” as Nishitani writes, so close to us that we are bound to overlook it.

So, where do we go from here? The question implies that there is anywhere else other than here. Perhaps that is the main problem we have created for ourselves. Maybe we should ask these questions instead: what is it like to have nowhere to go and nowhere to turn to? Can we embrace The Great Doubt by stopping and noticing what is as clear as daylight? Can we put ourselves in a position that is capable of being grasped by the Whole? Can we sit quietly and be taken, devote ourselves to a truth that we cannot rationalize, and turn the other way, toward innocence? These questions might not be easily answerable, but perhaps they will stop us and get rid of the craving of the ego to always know. Maybe then the light will dawn on us. Maybe then, we will know what it is like to be known. Maybe then we will know what Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj meant when he said these words: “Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, love is knowing I am everything, and between the two my life moves.” (Maharaj 2012)

Works Cited

Caplan, Mariana. Halfway up the Mountain: The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment. Prescott, AZ: Hohm Press, 2001. 

Hooper, Richard J. The Essential Mystics, Poets, Saints, and Sages: A Wisdom Treasury. Newburyport: Hampton Roads Pub., 2013. 

Kabir, Rabindranath Tagore, and Evelyn Underhill. Songs of Kabir. Esprios.com, 2021. 

Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness. Univ.California P., 1983. 

Panikkar, Raimon. The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013. 

Prabhavananda, and Edith D. Tipple. Realizing God: Lectures on Vedanta. Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 2010. 

Prabhavananda, and Edith D. Tipple. Realizing God: Lectures on Vedanta. Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 2010. 

Senior, Donald. The Gospel of Matthew. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997. 

Tarnas, Richard. Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. New York: Plume, 2007. 

Valantasis, Richard. The Gospel of Thomas. Routledge, 2004. 

Maharaj, Nisargadatta. I Am That: Talks With Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. United States: Acorn Press, 2012.

T. Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead's Adventure in Cosmology. United Kingdom: Lulu.com, 2019.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Human, All Too Human II and Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human II (spring 1878-fall 1879). United States: Stanford University Press, 2013.