..续本文上一页ve experience that one can utilize to discern onward without clinging to any unwholesome views.

　　Of course, when we say “experience”, we simply and straightly mean human experience, or discerning experience. We are tending to attribute the teaching of emptiness to a skillful means that aims to analyze that all fabricated things (including concepts) have not inherent nature, thus being able to remove attachments that impede a person to become enlightened, to be free from defilements. Or as Thanissaro Bhikkhu points out, emptiness is “a model of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events.”9 If we agreed with Thanissaro Bhikkhu”s arguement, we then may have our attentions to analyze emptiness in a more comprehensible way, to further recognize it as a useful manner that requests proper training “in firm virtue, concentration, and discernment”; without which training, “the mind trends to stay in the mode that keeps creating stories and world views.”10 This sort of insight indeed makes a lot sense. And it raises specific aims to gaze inside to realize that not only all conceptualized things are empty of Self, “but they are also empty of irreducible primary existence.”11

　　So, all dharmas that can be named (or called) are “not-self.” Buddhism from the very beginning claims this to be the truth “discovered by the eye of understanding (prajñā), the eye of the Buddha.”12 The understanding of not-self, accordingly, is a way that leads to cease suffering. The Buddha Sakyamuni himself, as a matter of fact, did not use the notion of not-self merely as a philosophical theory to defeat those Outsiders, but rather he did mean to use it as a practical means to attain real happiness.13 Therefore, to some extent, Nirvana is tranquility because all dharmas have not self; and, what we call a “self”, according to Abhidharmas, is “the combination of the Five of Aggregates, a combination of physical and mental energies.”14 The notion of empty of Self fairly is a fundamental doctrine that goes through the entire Buddha”s teachings, as Buddha sees all doctrines of Self “leading to suffering.”15 Like a doctor cares for his patients” health, giving medicines accordingly, we understand that even in Mahayana Buddhism the teaching of emptiness is actually based on such an assumption—all things have not-selfness, employing it as a healing means to cure those who cling to constituents and the concept of self, who consider all phenomena as real, thus deluded and subject to the series of births and rebirths.

　　The teaching has the function to deconstruct phenomena that one may comprehend via six senses, telling people that things are illusion. They have not real existences. Things seem to exist, as they are entailed by unskillful minds. This can be oftentimes found truthful if we treat emptiness as a manner used to get rid of different sorts of attachments and unwholesome views abided by unskillful minds. Generally speaking, the teaching of emptiness also has a plain aim to entail insight into change, understanding that change is the real fact that all things present themselves in this world, and that things that we can observe have no inherent nature. They are conditioned and co-dependent: “if this exists, then that exists, and if this arises, then that arises.”16 Finally, to some Mahayana fellows, the understanding of the teaching of Shunyata even conveys a significant massage to save all being from suffering!

《SHUNYATA, THE EMPTINESS》全文阅读结束。