..续本文上一页ing on the breath, or whatever your topic of meditation is. You let go of all other concerns. When you do that, you realize how much weight you”ve been carrying around, how many unnecessary burdens you”ve been creating for your self. You come to appreciate how nice it is to have this still space in the mind surrounding everything else. You want it to become more and more pervasive. It”s so easy to lose, though, because you”ve still got all those old habits of running after things you think are important or interesting, things you think have a lot of value, things you”ve got to look into, to look after all the time.

　　So the Buddha gives you tools—the three characteristics—for undoing those habits, to help you realize that those things aren”t really worth all that much worry, worth all that much care. They”re not worth burdening the mind. It”s important to note, though, that he doesn”t have you contemplate things radically in terms of the three characteristics until you”ve got this state of concentration and you appreciate it. Now, sometimes he does have you use the three characteristics in a less radical way to help you get into a state of concentration, to help clear away the entanglements that keep the mind from settling down in the first place. But for the really radical analysis, he has you wait until concentration is solid.

　　Some people start analyzing things radically in terms of their impermanence, or their inherent stress and suffering, or the fact that they”re not really yours, not under your control, before they have sufficient skill in concentration, and it can get pretty depressing, pretty disorienting. But if you contemplate the three characteristics in the context of the concentration, it becomes liberating. You begin to realize that these disturbances in the mind that tend to wipe out the emptiness, create problems in the emptiness, destroy the emptiness, cut it up in little pieces, are not worth all that much care. They”re not worth all that much worry. You don”t have to go flowing out after them. That”s the point in the practice where the Buddha has you think about the three characteristics in a radical way, to see that the things that you really worried about, the things that you really held on to tight, are pretty empty, too. This is where their emptiness becomes a positive thing instead of being depressing or nihilistic. It means you don”t have to burden yourself with them. You can live with them in a way that they don”t put any weight on the mind.

　　When the Buddha talks about emptiness in the Pali Canon, he does so in two contexts. One is this sense of dwelling in emptiness as the mind gets still and the emptiness begins to permeate things, surround things. That”s the side of emptiness that”s obviously positive. Then there are other passages where he talks about emptiness in the sense that things are empty of self or anything pertaining to self. In other words, they”re not you, not yours. They don”t belong to you. Out of context, that sounds kind of negative. The things you used to pin your hopes on: they”re not really you or yours. If you take this teaching out of context, it sounds like you”re depriving yourself of something or that these things are negative.

　　Actually, the things in and of themselves are not the problem. The problem is our attachment to them, the attachment that keeps destroying our concentration, destroying our stillness of mind. When you see things as inconstant, stressful, and empty of self from the perspective of trying to maintain this dwelling in emptiness, then the contemplation of their emptiness serves a positive purpose. It all begins to connect. You can maintain this spacious sense of emptiness and, at the same time, the things that used to bother you, the things that used to weig…

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