What keeps us from tasting our inherent wisdom? Concept. We are generally chasing one conceptual creation after another. This matrix of concept appears in many variations, but its weak point is always the same: it is fabricated. Without really looking at the nature of appearances, we project a meaning-generality onto the world, shaping it with our assumption of independent existence.
The Buddha taught that we can’t realize enlightenment until we experience a very basic truth: everything in the world is interdependent. That is the notion of emptiness. We say something is empty because there is no single entity that is sustained in space independently. If the tree were really there, it would not take seeds, sun, water, leaves, and bark to make a tree.
People sometimes confuse emptiness with “blankness” or “voidness,” as if Buddhists are into nihilism. But we’re not into nihilism any more than we are into permanence. Enlightenment is a level of wisdom that transcends both those concepts.
Concept is what we add to the interdependent nature of things. Moment by moment we look at ourselves and the world and draw an erroneous conclusion. The point of contemplative meditation is to slowly unravel this creative process. Along the path, we discover that we have made many assumptions. The biggest assumption is that the self exists in the way we think. When we die, this concept of self—which we had assumed to be this body with this family and these friends—dissolves and only consciousness remains. That is very destabilizing.
We experience such dissolution in a small way when our marriage breaks up or we crash our car. Suddenly we feel like we’re falling apart, as if our identity is lost—but it was never there. Like everything, it was dependent upon something else. That’s interdependence.
It is our habit to color interdependence with a conceptual overlay. This overlay is hard to crack because it’s been going on for a long time—in fact, endlessly. We might think it won’t be quite as strong tomorrow, but unless we meditate to get a little distance, we’re likely to buy into the conceptual framework by reacting to the world in our usual habitual way as soon as we wake up in the morning.
This is called karma, which means “action.” We are conditioned by lifetimes of karma—habitual action that keeps us in samsara, the cycle of suffering. How do we reverse this process?
In contemplative meditation we can begin to see the interdependence of a tree or the season, and if we go deeper, we can see the interdependence of ourselves. In one traditional contemplation we break the body into parts, all the while looking for the independent entity known as “me.” Am I my hand? Am I my head? Am I my breath? Am I my blood? With this contemplation, we discover that there is no body called “me.” Rather, the body is a form made up of elements.
Form is the first of the five skandhas, a Sanskrit word that means “heap.” When we look closely at the shape made by a heap of rice, we see that it is really only a conglomeration of grains. In the same way, in contemplation we look at how ignorance gathers the skandhas—form, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness—to fabricate the imaginary, independent entity known as “me.”
The second skandha is the feeling—good, bad, or neutral—that we attach to everything we experience. We texturize feeling with the third skandha, discrimination or perception. When we say, “I felt good yesterday when I went up into the mountains and let the sun shine on me,” we are discriminating how we felt, where we were, and how the feeling happened.
Based on form, feeling, and perception, a fully formulated thought or concept now arises. This is the fourth skandha, karmic formation. Traditional teachings identify fifty-one such formations: different aspects of the mind ranging from root afflictions—anger, ignorance, pride, jealousy, doubt, view—to virtuous activity—compassion, mindfulness, and awareness. As soon as we have formation, what follows is action. For example, if an experience felt good, then I’m going to do whatever I can to protect it; that’s called aggression. Where does that action take place? It takes place in the fifth skandha, which is consciousness.
Consciousness the field of self-awareness where the first four skandhas happen. It is divided into eight categories. The first five consciousnesses register the mental sensation associated with objects of each sense organ: eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body. The sixth consciousness registers the sensations associated with objects of the mind organ. This is the consciousness we use in peacefully abiding meditation. Resting in that sixth consciousness, we can hear things, smell things, and touch things, but we are no longer so distracted by them.
On the other hand, if we’re always at the gate of the sense consciousnesses, we’re quick to react through karma. In that case, our meditation will routinely be to hear sound, have thought, and act. That kind of meditation is not particularly peaceful because it puts us at the mercy of every event that arises. When we meditate, the sixth consciousness has the feeling of being somewhat withdrawn, but for a purpose. We are trying to observe the mind and work stage by stage in order to slowly unravel the conceptual process.
The seventh consciousness is known as the afflicted consciousness: its affliction is pride. The Tibetan word for pride means, “I am glorious.” This consciousness sits there all day long saying, “This is ‘me’ and I am real,” imposing that concept on everything that happens.
The eighth consciousness is called kunchi, “the ground basis of all.” As we experience physical forms, feelings, and perceptions, as we formulate opinions and act on them, we tend to think that our words and actions simply vanish into space. However, all that karma is actually being stored in the eighth consciousness, where it is planted as latent seeds that will ripen moment by moment as causes and conditions allow. If you say something negative about somebody, it doesn’t just vanish into thin air. It is planted in the storehouse of the eight consciousness.
Contemplating the skandhas one by one deepens our understanding of how we fabricate a conceptual projection that keeps us trapped in samsara. Through dissecting our habitual assumptions we discover that whatever we see is conditioned by interdependence. We think that “me” is made of a body and a mind, but when we look at ourselves more closely, things aren’t exactly what we thought. That moment is the discovery of emptiness. What is emptiness empty of? It is empty of our concept. That discovery is the beginning of wisdom and joy because it leads to nonattachment.
Contemplation is accurate thinking—thinking that takes us to the right result. When we hear the truth and contemplate what we’ve heard, at some point its meaning will penetrate us. In this way, each truth becomes experiential and we can deepen our practice stage by stage. Bringing the truth into our experience takes time because it’s not just information, like what we read in the paper. Dharma penetrates slowly, but if we are willing to stay with it, it will change us from the inside out.
