Question: “Hey my friend Quang Trí, I recently read the Heart Sutra and I found it interesting but I feels like I did not, at least intellectually grasp the idea of ‘Emptiness’. Would you mind explaining it to me? Thank you very much. I love your blog!”
I’ll let you in on a little secret: the Heart Sutra is not supposed to help you grasp any “large” idea of emptiness. The title itself, “the Heart Sutra,” is even telling you that. Any sutra with “Heart” in its title means “this is a quick summary of…” So by no means is the heart sutra going to give you a good enough explanation of emptiness. Because it is a summary, that means there’s still a bunch of other things you need to read first. The heart sutra, even though it’s short and sweet, is a fairly advanced sutra. Emptiness in general is a very advanced teaching. If you are within a few years or less of studying Buddhism, I don’t recommend studying emptiness just yet. Emptiness is the final mile of a triathlon, you still have to go through a lot of other challenges and routes before you get to the end.
I’ll give you a very brief and simple explanation of emptiness that I tell to a lot of people. Take your computer or phone for example. Why is it a computer? Why is it called a computer? It’s a computer because we called it that, we put a name to it because it had no name. So really, there is no name. But why is it a computer? Because it turns on, it lights up, we can do things on it, etc. But at what point does it seize to be a computer? When it stops working or when it’s broken into pieces? This is a subjective judgement. Some will argue that when it stops turning on it’s no longer a computer, others argue that when it’s into pieces it’s no longer a computer. The point is the computer is just a designation we give to a phenomena, there is no inherent “computer nature” dwelling in the computer.
Emptiness is when we can see things as they truly are. Everything comes from something else. Point at something that is of its own creation. You can’t, because something or someone had to create it. When we look at a flower, we think it’s just a flower. But it’s not, because it’s also the sun, soil, water, and air – it requires other things to create a flower, so a flower is really all those elements and all those elements are also other things, and it goes on and on. So when we can start seeing things as just a flower, a house, man, woman, tall, short, etc., then we can see things as they truly are, as emptiness.
Smile and be well!