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 that 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 the 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 complex modern social and scientific concepts. The theory of dependent origination, found in the Pali Canon and later developed by Nagarjuna in the Madhyamaka school and in the vision of the interconnected net of the Avatamsaka Sutra, foreshadowed ideas that in the West appeared only in the twentieth century—ideas such as systems theory, nonlinear causality and cybernetics. Likewise, the Yogacara school’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, ranging from social observation to brain-imaging techniques. Postmodern morality recognizes no absolute values and no objective truth, in the same way that “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. At one extreme, attachment to emptiness leads to clinging to nihilism, suppression of one’s needs, emotional distance, depersonalization, and rigid control. At the other extreme, 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 toward 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, logical introspection, a 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? Keep in mind that Seung Sahn adds, “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 verse of the Heart Sutra has the phrase “emptiness does not differ from form.” Therefore, as our teacher says, “Everything is truth.” So “keep your correct function and relationship in this world.” This approach to emptiness 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 downfalls of relativity, subjectivity, and 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” without considering the converse idea that emptiness is also form 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 the 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 are explicitly emphasized in the Mahayana ideal of the 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 adapt by including new practices for donors and patrons. As a result, Common Era texts like the Lotus Sutra and the Vimalakirti Sutra sometimes 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 conservative right wing establishments that advocate premarital purity and renouncing sexuality—especially nonheteronormative sexuality. According to this viewpoint, pleasure promotes promiscuity and sexualization of the youth, so therefore some church traditions urge that “true love waits” and “your body is your temple.” These ideas lead to perceiving traditional gender roles through the lens of “natural law,” which is fully expressed in traditional “family values” or “purity”—understood to be 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. One can think of the monastic life as embodying prajna (wisdom), while the domestic life embodies 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 (Zen) teachers pointed out the hindrances that wrong views posed for correct concentration and insight. The third patriarch, Sengcan, wrote, “When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity (and stillness), the very effort fills you with activity.” Similarly, the 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.
Nowadays 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 the philosophy of transhumanism. He promotes self-optimization, biological immortality, supplements, cryotherapy, and genetic modifications in order to conquer death and impermanence through a “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, egotism, and overengagement of the sympathetic nervous system may strengthen attachment to freedom or form.
· Hypoarousal, which means too little: Distance, numbness, emotional shutdown, passivity, control, depersonalization, and overengagement of the parasympathetic nervous system may strengthen attachment to emptiness.
About 1,500 years ago the Tiantai master Zhyiy, and after him Dahui, relying only on ancient Chinese medicine and qi energy cultivation, referred to these extremes as “floating mind” and “sinking mind.” Psychologically these correspond to what Buddhism refers to as desire and aversion. Or likes and dislikes, as Zen Master Seung Sahn would call them. In modern clinical language these extremes are called either the “fight or flight” response (energy up) or the lesser-known “freeze or fawn” response, which is to become either numbly immobile or overly people-pleasing and appeasing (energy down).
Both extremes, if unexamined, produce harm.
Philosophical and Physiological Bypassing
In addition to the cognitive strategies described above that we use to cling to our attachments, 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—for example, emptiness, freedom, postmodern relativism
· Physiological bypassing: relying on body-based techniques—for example, dissociation, attachment to meditation, 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. Such radically minimal art of space and pure geometry resonates with those who practice extreme decluttering, discarding all needless belongings. Such artworks are also dramatic gestures made to reduce overstimulation and agitation.
Your sangha friend supports these views. He claims they are similar to the elegant and raw Japanese aesthetic of sumi-e and wabi-sabi. Sumi-e ink painting works with the fewest strokes possible, yet each line carries energy and presence. Wabi-sabi 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 an 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. 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, sex, aging.
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 kind of meditation 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 an 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, it’s easy to focus only on buzzwords from Buddha’s teachings such as “ego death” and “no self”—while forgetting the importance of big self and clear mind.
MEDITATION
I was ordained as a nun in Korea at the age of thirty and disappeared into the training, seeking to “go beyond body and mind.” At 2:30 a.m. we would sweep the shimmering snow from the mountain path to make it ready for morning chanting. At 10:00 p.m. I would do 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 nineteenth-century Japanese 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 of people that we meet in Zen centers—for example, those who drop ashes on Buddha because “Buddha is everywhere.” They bring into the sangha characteristic cultural patterns that plague Western societies. Their attachment to emptiness manifests in various ways, clothed in spiritual language but taken out of context:
· Suppressors: intellectualizing, rationalizing, distant, ironic, because “it’s all made by your mind”
· Hyperfocused people: able to use high concentration to keep their minds “still from moment to moment”
· Masochistic or macho people: heroes enduring, denying needs, glorifying toughness or sacrifice, with a “not for me” attitude
· Alexithymic people: 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 we must not only practice right view and wisdom, which the postmodernists cling to; not only right meditation and samadhi, which the New Age types favor; but we should also manifest discipline, ethics, and compassion. Not only should we attain primary point and insight into emptiness, but also correct relationships and functioning in the world for others.