Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

82 Edward S. Ragsdale
Skandha is the Sanskrit word for aggregates – in this case the parts that compose
the person. We need not try to “disappear” the skandas as though such banishment
were an appropriate response to the recognition of their illusory aspect.
And if we do, we will have simply entered into another mode of clinging to them –
or having their illusory appearance “adhere” to us – as though they were independently
real. If we try to dispose of phenomena as mere illusion, rejecting not only
their absolute existence but their conventional existence as well, we will maintain a
reified sense of what we are discarding, without any means of relating to it outside
this absolutized, non-relational viewpoint. We will continue to misperceive reality,
committing a version of the very error we wish to refute. Nihilism’s attempt to
explain away the problem leaves us immersed in it.
Perhaps now we can catch a glimpse of what the Heart Sutra means when it
says: “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form;
form is not other than emptiness” (in Lopez, 1988). Rather than preclude existence,
emptiness – as the absence of absolute existence or inherent meaning –
implies an unrestrained potentiality of things to become realized, and to gain
meaning and functionality, on the basis of their infinite capacity to participate in
relationship. Things exist in, and only in, this mutual interdependence.
Buddhism thus offers emptiness as the middle way between the two extremes
of absolutism and nihilism. In it we find – not a nihilistic negation of experience
and world – but a necessary condition for actual existence. For the only authentic
existence of things is as relational events arising in dependence upon other things,
and this is possible only because things are empty of independent existence.
Why is this so? First note that if things did possess independent existence,
they would be independent of all other things, and thus incapable of entering into
relations with other things, including the relations of cause and effect, even the
relations of subject and object that allow us to perceive them. It is only because
they lack independent existence that they can participate in the causal interrelations
that allow them to come into being at all, or to have effects, or to be affected,
or be perceived. Thus it is that the lack of inherent existence, rather than precluding
existence, makes existence and meaning possible.
Consider next the nature of this actual existence. Buddhism teaches that the
mode in which things may be said to exist is as dependent arisings. Things arise
in dependence upon other things. Dependent arising and emptiness are mutually
entailing facts: Because things are empty of inherent or independent existence,
they are free to arise in dependence upon other things. And because they exist as
dependent arisings, we can say that they are empty of independent existence.
Emptiness and dependent imply each other.
Chandrakirti confirms the equivalence of emptiness and actual existence as dependent
arising: Knowledgeable Ones, the meaning of emptiness, that is to say, the
emptiness of inherent existence, is the meaning of dependent arising; it does not