When avijja and all the kilesas are extinguished, they are extinguished inside the citta. The extinction of avijja means the destruction of the cycle of repeated birth and death. Both must be extinguished within the citta, for the avijja-citta is the essence of the world of rebirth, the essence of birth, ageing, sickness and death. Sensual craving, with avijja acting as the prime mover, is the root cause of birth, ageing, sickness and death—and it exists only within the citta. When avijja finally disintegrates, being severed from the citta forever, total cessation is achieved. The citta is then free, vast and supremely empty, without limits, without bounds—totally expansive. Nothing encloses or obstructs it. All contradictions have been eliminated. When the citta knows, it knows only the truth; when it sees, it sees only the truth. This is true emptiness.
Degrees of emptiness are experienced at many levels. Samadhi meditation is one level. In deep samadhi, the body and the thinking mind temporarily vanish from awareness. The citta appears empty, but the duration of this emptiness is limited to the time spent practicing samadhi. At the initial level of the practice of wisdom, the citta can permanently separate itself from the physical body, but it cannot yet disengage from the mental components of personality: vedana, sañña, sankhara, and viññana. It is completely empty of physical forms, so images of the body no longer appear within the citta; but it is not empty of mental concepts. When reaching this level, wisdom is able to distinguish oneself from the physical mass that is the body, and so detach itself forever from the belief that the body is oneself. But it is still unable to separate the mental factors of feeling, memory, thought, and consciousness. By investigating further, the citta becomes detached from these mental factors as well. Then nothing remains except an extraordinary radiance that infuses the cosmos, a luminous essence of being that seems boundless, and an amazing and profound mental void. This is the awesome power of genuine avijja. By continuing to employ the full might of mindfulness and wisdom, avijja is finally extinguished within the citta. When everything permeating the citta is removed, one attains genuine emptiness. The emptiness experienced at this level is a total and permanent disengagement that requires no further effort to maintain. This means true and absolute freedom for the citta.
The difference between the emptiness of the avijja-citta and the emptiness of the pure citta, free of avijja, can be illustrated by imagining a person in an empty room. Standing in the middle of the room, admiring its emptiness, that person forgets about himself. Seeing that there is nothing around him in the room, he reflects only on the emptiness he perceives and not on the fact that he is occupying a central position in that space. As long as someone is in the room, it is not truly empty. When he finally realizes that the room can never be truly empty until he departs, that is the moment when avijja disintegrates and the pure citta arises. Once the citta has let go of phenomena of every sort, the citta appears supremely empty; but the one who admires the emptiness, who is awestruck by the emptiness, that one still survives. The self as reference point, which is the essence of avijja, remains integrated into the citta”s knowing nature. This is the genuine avijja. One”s “self” is the real impediment at that moment. As soon as it disintegrates and disappears, no more impediments remain. Everything is empty: the external world is empty, and the interior of the citta is empty. As in the case of a person in an empty room, we can only truly say that the room is empty when the…
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