Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Gestalt Psychology and Mahayana Buddhism 81
concerning the persons, places, and things of conventional reality, that is, an
understanding of the conventional world that is informed by an awareness of its
ultimate emptiness of inherent existence. Mind thus possesses the means, and
nature possesses the order, for authentic insight into the nature of reality.
Especially since Buddhism is so often accused of the very nihilism it explicitly
rejects, it bears repeating that its teaching of emptiness is not a nihilistic denial
of existence or meaning. Let us take a closer look at nihilism and how it errs with
its own implicit absolutism. This is described in recent work out of the West (Varela,
Thompson, & Rosch, 1991): “The philosophical flight into nihilism ... mirrors a
psychological process: the reflex to grasp is so strong and deep seated that we reify
the absence of a solid foundation into a solid absence or abyss” (p. 247). Mind, even
as it rejects absolutism, is not necessarily disabused of the habit of further clinging
to absolutes. Mind may cling to the absence of absolutes as itself an absolute.
Closer consideration of sunyata itself reveals the mistaken absolutism of
nihilism from another angle. Sunyata means that all things – all ideas, concepts,
feelings, percepts, physical objects, and selves – are “empty” of inherent existence.
If all things are empty of inherent existence, then so too is the idea of
emptiness itself. This has been described as sunyatasunyata, or the emptiness of
emptiness (see Ramanan, 1966, p. 173). Emptiness itself is empty of inherent
existence. Thus the idea of emptiness cannot itself serve as a refuge, to be clung
to as though it itself had inherent existence, unless one misunderstands the meaning
of the term. Nihilism represents such a misunderstanding. Nothing, not even
emptiness, can be clung to as a reified absolute. The term serves as an invitation
to let go of all traces of reification – however subtle – as may attend to any percept
or concept, including the concept of emptiness itself.
There is yet another way in which the nihilistic extreme maintains the very
absolutism it claims to reject. For our nihilistic rejection does not cause phenomena
to disappear (see Ramanan, 1966). We continue to live in the world of
demands and constraints, internal and external. Life presents a welter of phenomena
that we must face. If we remain unable to fathom the relationality of
these situations, we will by default remain trapped inside a naive realism that
would conceptualize them as implicitly independent facts, even after we refute
their absolutized existence. Imagine a person railing against God that He doesn't
really exist. The denial not only fails to lay the matter to rest, it sustains it.
Nihilism fails to dispose of the problem of how to respond to the very palpable
events and situations it would explain away. Blind to relationality, mind remains
attached to the very reifications it refutes. It is with respect to this tendency to
persist in reifying that which one denies that the Prajnaparamitra Sutra says:
If he knows the five skandhas as like an illusion,
But makes not illusion one thing, and the skandhas another,
... Then that is his practice of wisdom, the highest perfection.
(as cited in Conze, 1973, p. 10)