EMPTY COFFEE by Mike Wright

Hi Mac,

I see that you and your fellow coffee drinkers seem to enjoy a bit of philosophical discussion. I'm afraid that Buddhism has flat-out ruined philosophy for me. However, that has not stopped me from being as verbose as any real philosopher. It's actually easier to write this kind of thing than to write about real coffee.

I no longer claim to be a Buddhist, as many of my ideas would seem strange to the average Buddhist. (I know this, because back when I had a Web page where I expounded on some of these ideas, I frequently received email from more-traditional Buddhists who found my thoroughly materialistic approach upsetting.) Nevertheless, some of the core ideas that I have about the world and the way it works came from my exposure to Soto (Sootoo) Zen. (Since one of the great failings of the Macintosh is that the standard character set lacks the macron that is used to show long vowels in many romanizations, I'll be using double vowel letters to show long vowels in Sanskrit and Japanese.)

One of these foundational ideas is that of "no self" (Sanskrit "anaatman" [often romanized as "anatman"], Mandarin "wu2wo3", Sino-Japanese "muga"). I'll stick to just this one idea for now. Soothill's "A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms" has the following entry for wu2wo3:

"Anaatman; nairaatmya; no ego, no soul (of an independent and self-contained charactert), impersonal, no individual independent existence (of conscious or unconscious beings, anatmaka). The empirical ego is merely an aggregation of various elements, and with their disintegration it ceases to exist; therefore it has no ultimate reality of its own..."

"Anaatman" is closely related to "suunyataa" (emptiness--often romanized as "sunyata"), so maybe I'll have to write about both. I'll start with a litlle personal background, as I love to talk about myself (but not my self).

I began reading about Zen Buddhism in college. This was due in part to a book on Taoism that I read as a high school senior, and in part to having read Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums" and other novels during the summer after high school. I'd sit in the music room of the Southwestern University Student Union Building, listening to folk music or jazz on the phonograph and reading whatever I could find by Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki. It was intriguing stuff, but it seemed strange, hard to pin down, and beyond the possibility of intellectual understanding. I was then, as now, exceedingly cerebral and very literal-minded, and none of it made any sense. Still, there was something about it all that appealed to me, so I kept at it over the years as I flunked out of SU not once, but twice, hitchhiked out to California--too late to be a Beatnik and too early to be a Hippie--and back to Houston, joined the Army, learned Mandarin Chinese, spent almost two years in Taiwan, got married, learned Japanese, then spent five years in Japan (and another two and a half years later on).

While in Basic Training at Fort Lost in the Woods, Misery (Ft. Leonard Wood, MO, for the non-Army folks), I was told that I would be going to the Defense Language Institute to learn a foreign language. Those of us headed for DLI were each given a list of 40 languages and told to number them in order of preference. I had great hopes that understanding Japanese would help me understand all that odd stuff about Zen, so I put Japanese down as my first choice. Mandarin was my second choice and, of course, that's what I got. At the end of the 47-week course (six hours a day, five days a week, not much else but classroom and homework), I could speak pretty decent Mandarin. I had a useful vocabulary and a surprisingly thorough grasp of the essentials of the syntax of the spoken language. I "knew" about 2000 characters, but had no exposure to Classical Chinese, and very little even to the kind of Chinese that appeared in newspapers and most books in Taiwan.

After I got to Taiwan, I tried to find information on Buddhism. As it turned out, the average Taiwanese Buddhist" didn't seem to know much about Buddhism--probably even less than the average "Christian" in the US knows about Christianity. Looking back over the wee bits of Chinese in Watts' books, I found that it didn't add up to much. either. So, a few years later, when I got a chance to apply for another language course at DLI, I put Japanese as my second choice--after Cantonese--and, naturally, that's what I got. The results this time were even more disappointing from the perspective of a student of Buddhism. Most Japanese that I met didn't even claim to be Buddhists, much less to know anything about it. On top of that, all the written materials I could find were actually in Classical Chinese. Still, I kept digging into it. I took up martial arts, Chinese ink and watercolor painting, and Japanese calligraphy, all supposedly influenced by Zen. But I never met anyone who knew the slightest thing about the subject.

A typical bit of Buddhist writing that exemplifies the apparent strangeness of it is the "Prajnaparamita Hrdaya Sutra", AKA "The Heart Sutra". It contains the following lines:

"Form is not different from emptiness;
Emptiness is not different from form.
Form is just emptiness;
Emptiness is just form."

I memorized the whole thing in Mandarin (it takes up only a small page in Chinese), and wrote it out over and over, and spoke it to myself whenever I had nothing more pressing to do. I did find that it doesn't make any more sense in Chinese than it does in English. I have no idea how it works out in the original Sanskrit, but I'm willing to bet that it's no better.

I don't know exactly when it clicked. There was no sudden burst of understanding. There was no light from Heaven and no singing of birds. But at some point, I discovered that it all made perfect sense--and this wasn't some kind of mystical, spiritual sense. It was perfectly logical sense that fits quite well with physics, neuroscience, and natural selection. So much had been made of its difficulty that I was surprised to find how simple it actually was. I think that I was at least partly prepared by repeated exposure to the oddities of relativity and quantum electrodynamics. Einstein and Feynman were already preparing me to abandon intuition as a foundation for understanding my world. Chaos theory and symmetry theory also helped me dispense with the idea of perfectly definable entities.

Little things from my youth sometimes come back to me in connection with whatever I'm learning about at the moment. One that seems to relate to my understanding of anaatman is an incident that occurred when I was about 10 years old. I was visiting my paternal grandparents, Mamie and Ikey, in Rosenberg, TX, and my Great Aunt Jessie, who lived with them and worked as a reporter for Ikey's weekly newspaper, "The Fort Bend Reporter", was dragging me along with her on her rounds. At one point, she pulled up near one of the many bridges across the Brazos River--somewhere out in the country, away from town--and we walked over to the bridge and looked at the red, muddy water, far below. She told me that someone had just drowned in it at that very spot. She pointed out several little whirlpools at various places along each bank. The whirlpools, she said, were what sucked people down and drowned them. Poor folks, including Mexican farm workers, used the river as a combination laundry, bathtub, and swimming pool, and quite a few died there each summer. As we watched, the little whirlpools moved along, changed shape, and disappeared. Then new ones arose at other points and went through a similar process. That image of whirlpools, appearing and disappearing, is still with me 50 years later--and it's one of the images that became a symbol of anaatman to me.

A whirlpool exists for a time. It's real enough to drown a child. But it arises where there was no whirlpool before and it often diasappears leaving no detectable trace of its existence. Neither its shape nor its location remain unchanged for even the shortest period of time. Even its content in terms of a specific set of molecules shifts constantly. When we see a whirlpool moving down a river, we are not seeing a "thing", we are seeing a process.

When we look at the "things" that temporarily take part in the whirlpool process--water, clay, iron oxide, organic compounds, etc., we find that they, too, are subject to constant change. They, too, are processes. The most obvious thing is that they constantly change position. Furthermore, they are all made up of smaller components that constantly change position. Ions gain and lose electrons. Photons are absorbed and emitted. We have not yet found a place where we can stop and confidently say, "This is an ultimate constituent of matter. It cannot be broken down any further." And, even if we could, these constituents will be moving relative to one another, and may also undergo other changes. All edges are fuzzy if we look at them under sufficient magnification.

So, now I see the universe as this vast collection of "things", each composed of other "things". At any moment in time, if we imagine that we could take a series of snapshots of it, one nanosecond apart, we would see that each snapshot was, at the highest magnification, not precisely the same as the previous one, and if we looked at a few trillion of them in order, we would be able to detect some vectors of change. If we zeroed in on a small segment of the Rio de los Brazos de Dios where it runs through Ft. Bend County, we might see a whirlpool forming, changing, and disappearing, and we might think that we see certain vectors of change that can be expressed in mathematical terms. But none of those photos would contain the eternal essence of an individual whirlpool.

There is a practical utility in saying that whirlpools exist, but when we try to pin one down, there is nothing there but a series of mental snapshots. Whenever we look deeply at anything, it turns out to be no more stable than a whirlpool. No thing is unchanging. No thing is eternal. No thing has an essence that can be grasped. That's what "no self" means. That's what "emptiness" means.

I am just another whirlpool. I have no eternal, independent self. I am empty--just a part of the flux. It's good that I have almost infinitely high self-esteem, otherwise that fact might bother me.

http://www.io.com/~snewton/zen/heartsut.html and
http://www.io.com/~snewton/zen/sanskrit.html provise a nice combination of texts on the Heart Sutra.

'Nough for now,
Mike
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