A very well written essay about the essentially empty nature of phenomena. It takes a bit of time, but well worth the effort! Particularly well written for the western mind, which by nature arrives at understanding through a more anylaitic process.An excerpt:
For people who grow up in a country where the Buddha’s teachings have flourished, Buddhist ideas have become second nature. For instance, these people just trust that there are consequences to one’s actions, and that they’ll form a part of their future lives; they don’t doubt that at all. For Westerners, on the other hand, this is unfamiliar ground, and they wonder, “Are there really repercussions to what I do? Does it really matter?” and also, “Have there been lives before this one, will there be more after?” Westerners are skeptical about these things. Because of their level of education in general, and because of their scientific methodology in particular, they like to intelligently scrutinize. Often, when they’re presented with the main view of the Buddha, which is shunyata—emptiness, or the essentially empty nature of phenomena—and dependent origination, which describes all phenomena in terms of conditioned causal relationships, they feel that they’re capable of understanding and accepting it precisely because it is consistent with their reasoning. The profound view of reality makes perfect sense to them. Then, implicitly, they begin to trust what the Buddha has said about other things. And, later, an understanding of what we call the Three Jewels—Buddha, Dharma, Sangha—comes slowly and as a side effect of that.
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