Emptiness and Kinship

The bird and bird bath, the plant life, the sun, the wind and the rain, and myself: ‘interbeing’. These concepts do not have a separate independent existence. For me this sort of thinking is similar to the widespread Native American notion of ‘kinship.’ Photo by DWC.

My brushes with Buddhism have been few and far between and yet profoundly important for me. I associate these encounters with three specific words that represent very particular concepts.

The words are these: compassion (which, though not without its intricacies, is perhaps the most readily understandable of the three), mindfulness (which is surely the most popular Buddhist notion in vogue these days), and emptiness (which without doubt has been the most difficult of the three for me to comprehend). In this sketch I want to discuss only this third concept.

I first delved into Buddhism, because of the emptiness I felt after a day at high school, or a day at work, or indeed a day at church. At the time I was working as an usher at the Chief Movie Theater in Enid, Oklahoma, and so, I happened to share these concerns with a young man who worked behind the candy counter. Like me, this guy was never without a book somewhere near at hand. I told him I was reading the Heart Sutra to understand my condition of emptiness.

“No, no”, he said, “you’ve got the wrong end of the Buddhist stick, you must always pick up a snake by the tail if you don’t want to be bitten. Emptiness is nothing but form, and form is emptiness.” I stared at him blankly, but, that night, I wrote his words down in my journal.

From this unpromising start, he went on to point to the paper cup in my hand, saying “Your cup is empty, and its value as a thing lies in its emptiness; because it is empty, you can always fill it up with coffee.” This little exchange cured me of my interest in Buddhism for several years, though now I realize there may have been more than a crumb of truth in his comments.

Indeed, every time I fill the bird bath in the photo at the top of the page, I think of my candy and popcorn man’s idea of emptiness. The bird bath’s form is emptiness which allows it to hold water, which brings the delightful birds. “Emptiness is the true nature of things and events,” said the Dalai Lama. “Emptiness, or selflessness, can only be understood if we first identify that of which phenomena are empty . . . You might think that emptiness means nothingness, but it does not. . . .

“Buddha said many times that because all phenomena are dependently arisen, they are relative — their existence depends on other causes and conditions and depends on their own parts. A wooden table, for instance, does not exist independently; rather, it depends on a great many causes such as a tree, the carpenter who makes it . . .” (Emptiness and Existence)

In 1968, as a member of academic staff at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, I acted as host to Alan Watts, an important Western interpreter of Buddhism, scheduled to give a lecture on Emptiness. “First of all”, he said, “emptiness means transience. Nothing to grasp, nothing permanent, nothing to hold on to. But it means this with reference to ideas of truth, ideas of god, ideas of the self or concepts of things and of events. What it means is that reality goes beyond all concepts. Always your concepts will prove to be attempts to catch water in a sieve or to wrap it up in a package or to express it in mere words, or to take its picture with a camera.”

These concepts do not have a separate independent existence. Nothing we see. or hear. or think, or say, or are, can stand alone. Every concept, every thing, every event is a transient expression of a single yet multivariate, seamless and interconnected reality: a landscape through which streams flow, winds blow, trees grow. So although no individual person or thing has any permanent, fixed identity, everything taken together is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “inter-being.” This term is, perhaps, a more positive expression of emptiness.

Is this callistemon flower a thing unto itself that exists without the honey bee, the sun, the soil, its roots or the hand that planted it in the garden? Photo by DWC.

Thich Nhat Hanh also explains emptiness through a piece of paper. Where is the paper if we take away the rain, the earth, the sun, the logger who cut down the tree? Without these and many, many other conditions, the paper would not exist. It is empty of a separate self but full of all the other things that make it up. New Translation of the Heart Sutra

It seems to me that this deep understanding of the condition of “being” in our world, is found in many religions, especially in those practiced by indigenous Americans. Although there exist major variations in ritual and belief, Native American spiritualities share certain common characteristics, most particularly the idea of the kinship of all living things. a perspective that has been described as “animistic.”

Animism incorporates the belief that there are close bonds between people, animals, and the natural environment: kinship ties signified in expressions like ‘Mother Earth’ and ‘Brother Deer’ and ‘Grandfather Stone’. However, such articulations surely signify more than just the metaphor of family relations. Rather, it is the attribution of a real and closely connected participation in the business of being by all animals, plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.

If you have another five minutes to think about the idea of inter-being and kinship, you can do much worse than attend this teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh.

Some religions, for instance, Hindu, see some eternal essence, called atman or soul, that exists at the core of all human beings and living creatures. I leave it to theologians and other scholars to sort out the comparative beliefs of different religions, but for me the simplest and in some ways most profound outlook is that of Native Americans who in their stories and songs acknowledge and forefront the deeply held belief that in this life we do not partake of separate selves, but rather that “we are all related,” that we all, we all, participate in inter-being, to use the phrase of Thich Nhat Hanh. One native experience of this insight describes looking for a tunka stone

“In the old Lakota language, implying special regard for the ancestral earth. I recalled that a common root bound the words Tatanka, “buffalo,” Wakan Tanka, “Great Spirit,” Tunka, “stone,” and Tunkáshila, “grandfather” or “healing stone.” The Omaha once sang a song like this:

unmoved
from time without end
you rest
covered with the droppings of birds
grass growing from your feet
your head decked with the down of birds
you rest
in the midst of the winds
you wait
Aged one”

- from The Good Red Road, by Kenneth Lincoln and Al Logan Slagle,

In the modern world, non-natives often seem to consider the hundreds of such animistic and kinship stories as suitable mainly for children. Indeed, these accounts have been widely and correctly lauded as a valuable contribution to children’s literature. But far more than that, stories, songs, poetry, dance and other art forms constitute important tools for the transmission of knowledge and culture for all ages.

By labeling these stories as ‘myth’ and ‘legend’, the feeling is often promoted that they should be regarded as superstition, as false belief, as fictitious or imaginary. In truth, as we have seen, the stories are often grappling with complex issues of theology and philosophy, dimensions of both nature and culture. Through storytelling, Native American tribes shared, preserved, and paid tribute to this rich legacy of belief and understanding. There is nothing false or simplistic about the idea that “we are all related’.

If you enjoy eccentric, slightly off-the-wall, takes on life, then you may want to check out my Archive of Writings.

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David Wade Chambers

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