Attachment To Emptiness in Culture Today
ETHICS A radical New Age teacher says Ukraine is now facing the results of its karma from the past and there is no absolute right or wrong in the military actions of Russia. But there is hope - in reality there is no self which suffers and no self inflicting pain. In pure witnessing mind there are no drones, no missiles, no rapes, no wounds and no politics.
Your Sangha friend supports these views. He claims they are similar to when American zen poet, Paul Reps wrote: “Drinking a cup of tea, I stop the war”? Do you agree?
One aspect of Buddhism’s visionary genius, echoed in Zen Master Seung Sahn’s teachings, lies in its ability to predict very complex modern social and scientific concepts. The theory of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), found in the Pali Canon and later developed by Nāgārjuna in the Madhyamaka school and in the vision of the interconnected net of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, foreshadowed ideas that in the West appeared only in the Twentieth Century - such as systems theory, non-linear causality and cybernetics. Likewise, Yogācāra’s insight that “Everything is made by mind alone” appeared over a thousand years before Kant and long before postmodern views that define truth as shaped by beliefs. Similarly, Zen Master Seung Sahn’s teachings on attachment to emptiness, with the medieval Chinese idea of zen sickness, anticipate what psychology now calls spiritual bypassing. All of these point to how people try to simplify the complexities of life, relationships and emotions by retreating into stillness.
Dharma-like Postmodern Views Without Buddhist Ethics
We are now able to use the contemporary language of neuroscience and cultural anthropology to analyze these old Buddhist intuitions using evidence-based data - from social observation to brain-imaging techniques. Postmodern morality recognizes no absolute values and no objective truth, in the same way the “right and wrong are just empty names,” since “all conditioned forms are emptiness.” But this is only one part of the Buddhist view. Without the second part we fall into attachment to emptiness or freedom. On one extreme, this means clinging to nihilism, suppression of needs, emotional distance, depersonalization, and rigid control. On the other, it leads to hedonism, hyperarousal, egotism, and even sociopathy.
MIND CONTROL Ryan Holiday, a modern neo-Stoic philosopher, the author of Ego Is Your Enemy and the “Daily Stoic” podcast, motivates his followers towards autonomy, resilience, minimalism, independence from any outside forces and self-mastery. As Marcus Aurelius wrote during one of the Roman military campaigns: “You have power over your mind - not outside events.” Mindset vlogs and fanpages from this trend offer rational self-help for strong, iron-willed individuals, who value cold discipline, relentless meditation and logical introspection, critical approach to emotional turmoil, and reducing unnecessary needs.
Your Sangha friend supports these views. He claims they are similar to when Zen Master Seung Sahn writes “Keep a not-moving mind, from moment to moment, regardless of the outside conditions” and “Hard training necessary.” Do you agree knowing that DSSN adds that “Placing too much emphasis on making a strong center leads to wrong ideas about the point and function of zen meditation. So if you only emphasize Great Courage… - you are not having a clear direction. That is why you need Great Faith, because it provides our direction [to help others] and our try-mind.”
The second part of Heart Sutra goes “emptiness is expressed as form.” Therefore, as our teacher says, “Everything is truth.” So “keep your correct function and relationship in this world.” And this constitutes a whole new dimension of Buddhist ethics, based on empathy, caring and mutual responsibility of beings able to perceive how interconnected we all really are. This is what saved Buddhism from the problems of relativity, subjectivity and extreme individualism we now struggle with in the neoliberal West.
The belief - because mostly it’s intellectual belief more than experiential insight - only that “form is emptiness” pervades many fields. Let’s look at some examples of how postmodern attitudes, sharing Buddhist views but not the ethics, can show up in spiritual circles and philosophy departments, in social media trends, politics, art, medicine and business coaching.
In Buddhism
Zen Master Seung Sahn in Dropping Ashes on Buddha writes, “Form is emptiness, so my life is empty, nothing. If you only understand this, we say you are attached to emptiness, and you cannot function moment to moment for others. It is a kind of alienation, and in its extreme form, nihilism. This happens to many people. But if you attain nothing, then everything is no problem. Then your house is correct, your mind is correct, your action is correct, your nature is correct… Everything is just-like-this.”
The early appearances of the teaching on attachment to emptiness is explicitly emphasized in the Mahayana ideal of bodhisattva, who doesn’t withdraw into nirvana but engages to help others. As Buddhism spread through urban centers, trade routes, and lay communities, a new emphasis appeared. The bodhisattva path promoted the values of compassion, altruism, and lay devotion alongside renunciation. Inscriptions and archaeology suggest Buddhist monastic communities were becoming more institutionalized and, to survive, they had to connect to and include new practices for donors and patrons. As a result, Common Era texts like the Lotus and Vimalakīrti Sutra sometimes even portrayed lay bodhisattvas as more advanced than monks.
SEX: From Case 10 in The Whole World Is A Single Flower: An old woman supported a monk for ten years. To test him, she sent her daughter, who sat on his lap and whispered: “What do you feel now?” He replied: “Rotten log on cold rocks. No warmth in winter.” Hearing this, the woman beat him and burned his hermitage: “I’ve spent ten years helping a demon!”
Your Sangha friend supports the monk’s attitude. She also supports it when conservative right wing establishments advocate renouncing sexuality - especially nonheteronormative - and premarital purity. Pleasure promotes promiscuity and sexualization of the youth, therefore some church traditions urge that “true love waits” and “your body is your temple.” This leads to perceiving the traditional gender roles through the lens of “natural law,” which is fully expressed in traditional family values or purity - the only cures against nihilism, relativism and wokeism. Do you agree?
In the vision of the fourfold Sangha assemblies, the clean and pure role model of a monk and nun embodying moral perfection and self-abandonment is complemented by an ideal of a fully-human male and female householder, engaged in socially-valuable work, with purity of family, body and heart. While the attribute of the first two groups has been voiced as prajna-wisdom, the path of the second becomes great love, great compassion.
In Mahayana, the realities of form and emptiness, relative and absolute truths, samsara and nirvana begin to intertwine. Eventually, also on a philosophical level, emptiness is more and more explained in the terms of interconnectedness and dependent origination. It turns out the sacred and the profane rely on each other in the interconnected system of non-linear causes. Are the monks helping the laypeople or the other way around? Do we practice liberation from the world - or within the world?
On the level of meditation practice, Chinese chan teachers began pointing out the hindrances which wrong views posed for correct concentration and insight. The third patriarch Sengcan wrote the famous line, “When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity (and stillness), the very effort fills you with activity.” Similarly, Song dynasty Zen Master Dahui, creator of the “great question, great determination, great faith” teaching, criticized “keeping the mind still” and “sitting long in mystic darkness.” He warned against “false emptiness, sunk in dark ignorance, as in a cave of a black demon.” Understandably, his teaching was especially attractive to Buddhist intellectual elites and busy clerks.
Until today we still work with kong-ans directed at the problem of trying to find freedom in negating what’s human: “The old woman burns down the hermitage,” “Pai chang’s fox,” “The shout of Amdu” and many others. They all lead to seeing directly how pushing away life situations, relationships, emotions and karma only produce more pulling, attachment and karma.
In Neuroscience
BODY David Aspray is dreaming a cyberpunk dream about androids. He is a futurist entrepreneur and The Human Upgrade project speaker, who coined the now-popular term “biohacking” in the context of philosophy of transhumanism. He promotes self-optimization, biological immortality, supplements, cryotherapy and genetic modifications in order to conquer death and impermanence through “bulletproof lifestyle.” His book “Super Human” claims that aging is a bug in the somatic system, fixable by biotech. The mind can reach beyond the body, sickness and death.
Your Sangha friend supports these views. He claims they are similar to when Shantideva praises the body as a vehicle for liberation and the precious human rebirth. Or to the Heart Sutra saying “no body, no mind, no old age and death.” Do you agree?
Put simply, the human nervous system has two problematic gears when it comes to spiritual practice:
Hyperarousal, which means too much: craving, compulsive action, hedonism or egotism - overengagement of the sympathetic nervous system may strengthen attachment to freedom or form.
Hypoarousal, which means too little: distance, numbness, emotional shutdown, passivity, control or depersonalisation – overengagement of the parasympathetic nervous system may strengthen attachment to emptiness.
About 1,500 years ago Tiantai Master Zhyiy, and after him Dahui, relying only on ancient Chinese medicine and qi energy cultivation, called them: floating mind and sinking mind. Psychologically these correspond to the classical Buddhist pair of tendencies - wanting mind of desire (chanda, grasping, wandering) and aversive mind of anger (dosa, rejection, sloth and torpor). DSSN would say "our likes and dislikes”. In modern clinical language these stem from the tendencies to fight or flight (energy up and sensitization) and from tendencies to freeze or fawn (energy down and avoidance/ dissociation). Both gears can be given philosophical colorings: one dressed up as heroic liberation or crazy wisdom, the other as noble non-attachment and keeping distance, staying before thinking. Both, if unexamined, produce harm.
Philosophical And Physiological Bypassing
As we saw, on a social and personal level, we employ postmodern or spiritual cognitive strategies of avoidance to support our attachments. But there are also somatic meditative methods to install these attachments deeper into our brains and bodies in order to suppress emotions and to avoid conflicts:
Philosophical bypassing → relying on abstract doctrines or worldviews (e.g. emptiness, freedom, postmodern relativism)
Physiological bypassing → relying on body-based techniques (e.g. dissociation, meditation overuse, extreme biohacking)
When we practice one-pointed concentrative meditation, on the neural level, attachment to stillness is reinforced by prefrontal mind control over the emotional amygdala system. It allows for so-called cognitive decentering, which supports distancing from experience. Observing the breath or repeating the mantra trains focus and detection of the mind wandering, and inhibits the impulses. This strengthens top-down regulation of anger, fear, depression, and reactivity. For impulsive, anxious or ruminating people this can be therapeutic, but over-control can also flatten emotions and lead to parasympathetic over-activation — silencing not only negative but also positive feelings.
ART In 2021 Salvatore Garau auctioned his first “invisible sculpture” for 15,000 euros. His second immaterial piece, Buddha in contemplation, was placed in Piazza della Scala in Milan. The only proof of its existence is a movie on Instagram. Radical minimal art of space and pure geometry suits homes of people practicing extreme decluttering and discarding all needless belongings. Such art works are also dramatic gestures made to reduce overstimulation and agitation.
Your Sangha friend supports these views. He claims they are similar to elegant and raw Japanese aesthetic phenomena like sumi-e and wabi-sabi. Sumi-e ink painting works with the fewest strokes possible, yet each line carries energy and presence. Wabi-sabi means a mood that values imperfection, weathered surfaces, and the modest beauty of impermanence - a cracked bowl, an asymmetrical garden stone, a fleeting season. Do you agree?
Feel-Good Meditation
Physiological changes naturally occur as a result of meditation. Difficulties and problems occur, when these techniques arise from at attachment to emptiness and are guided by pressure of our cultural biases and societally-destructive trends. Two kinds of unfortunate complications may ensue. First, efforts at psychological self-healing can go off track without professional guidance for clinical concerns and spiritual guidance for clarity of approach. Neurotically we hope to erase the unavoidable discomforts or life through a misguided effort to heal and eradicate what is natural for human beings: values, emotions, thinking, relationships, anger, sex, aging. Sometimes even the whole “self” - instead of harmonizing our energies and learning “how to see, hear, feel and think clearly.”
Our teacher calls this “the outer path” or “feel-good meditation of common people” - a practice wrongly aimed at therapy, solving emotional problems, or managing stress. This only reinforces the sense of “I, my, me” - even when we simply hate this “I.” It never touches the deeper question of what this “I” actually is and never allows for “don’t know.” The culture’s superego and aforementioned postmodern norms, when they become unhealthy, always claim to know what’s wrong with us and what we should act like. Actually, they propose thousands of options.
Buddha called the nihilistic view that self doesn’t exist “the thicket and fetters of views,” which also includes the view of eternally existing self and of the self being either pure consciousness or simply material body. Instead, he was ethically concerned only with how to stop suffering. His teaching on this is fundamentally clear and apparent. However, in the suttas he was misrepresented like this by Brahmins. Even up until today, people are bombarded with teaching-bullets of “ego death” and “no self” by the New Age movement. Why? Maybe because if there was only No Self and No Mind, we wouldn’t have to work to achieve Big Self and Clear Mind.
MEDITATION I was ordained as a nun in Korea at thirty and disappeared into the training, seeking to “go beyond body and mind.” At 2:30 AM we would sweep the shimmering snow from the mountain path to make it ready for morning chanting. At 10:00 PM I would do my 500 prostrations, proud that no one knew about this extra practice. My mind was radiant with spacious meditative bliss, gently shielding me from fatigue and body pain. After four years, I got sick and had to return to the West for medical treatment.
Is it similar to when Hakuin Ekaku, the Ninetheenth CenturyJapanese reviver of Rinzai zen, “devoted himself to practice, completly renouncing food and sleep.” He urged that “the effort must become unified and solid… until the mountain crumbles.” However, through such self-control, “the fire from the heart hit his heart, scorching the lungs, but leaving feet cold as ice.” He wrote later in Yasenkanna: “In my ears I heard a noise as if of a mountain creek. I became very weak and full of anxiety, I feared everything I was doing.” These were the symptoms of so-called zen sickness, later diagnosed by Taoist healer Hakuji as the “result of excessive effort… against the art of sustaining vitality.”
Typical neurotic patterns of putting down “I, my, me” include various types, whom we meet in Zen centers, when they are dropping ashes on Buddha, because “Buddha is everywhere”. They bring into the Sangha characteristic cultural patterns plaguing Western societies. Their attachment to emptiness manifests in various ways clothed in spiritual language, taken out of the full context:
Suppressors - intellectualizing, rationalizing, distant, ironic, because “it’s all made by your mind”
Hyperfocused types - able to use high concentration to keep their minds “still from moment to moment”
Masochistic/macho types - heroes enduring, denying needs, glorifying toughness or sacrifice, “not for me”
Alexithymic types - confusing emotions with somatic symptoms, fatigue instead of fear, “not checking emotions”
Passive-avoidant types – confusing acceptance with resignation and giving up responsibility, “not making anything.”
Each one of us has probably leaned toward one of these strategies sometime in practice, and probably we still do. The only way to work with them is practicing the whole Eightfold Path, not just a piece of it. That means not only right view and prajna (postmodernism may have it), not only right meditation and samadhi (New Age may have it), but also sila, ethics and compassion. Not only primary point and insight into empty substance, but also correct relationships and functioning in the world for others.