Form Is Emptiness, Emptiness Is Form

Now, we are up to Avalokiteshvara’s explanation. He starts his explanation like this. 

He or she needs to keep in view, fully and in detail, the five aggregate factors of his or her experience and those as devoid of self-establishing nature.

In order to understand this and the lines that follow, we need to understand the five aggregate factors. In fact, the sutra is going to refer to many groups of factors. There are the five aggregate factors, the twelve cognitive stimulators, the eighteen cognitive sources, the twelve links of dependent arising; all these things are mentioned here. We have to remember that this is a condensed sutra: the heart, the essence of the Prajnaparamita teachings; in the longer versions, which are as long as a 100,000-verse version, we will have all the detail. When we are faced with an expanded version and the abbreviated condensed version of something (as here with the Prajnaparamita literature and also with tantric sadhanas), we need to remember that the condensed abbreviated form is really for advanced practitioners; for beginners, we have the expanded form. We like to think of it the other way around! It’s only when we understand the full teaching, the full practice, that then, when we read a condensed version of it, we can fill in with our understanding what’s being condensed; otherwise, it’s very difficult to understand what it’s talking about in these condensed versions. 

We only have a short amount of time together, so there is no time to explain all of these lists in detail, but I’ll try to give in brief an explanation of them so that at least this material in the Heart Sutra is understandable.

The five aggregates – I call them the “five aggregate factors of experience.” Yesterday, we discussed what “experience” is referring to. Experiencing things means not just to take in information, but also to feel some level of happiness or unhappiness in conjunction with that. So, we’re going through life, and what actually is happening from moment to moment? This is the question. We really can only deal with what is happening from moment to moment in terms of our subjective experience of it, and that’s individual. What I am experiencing sitting in this room and what each of you is experiencing sitting in the room are very different, even just on the level of the visual appearance that you are perceiving; everybody is looking from a different perspective. 

If we want to analyze what is making up this moment of experience – after all, it’s changing from moment to moment – we would want to have some classification scheme. Why? Well, we’re talking about Buddhism here, aren’t we? It’s not just a scientific classification scheme. We want to understand what we are experiencing because there is suffering as part of it, and we want to figure out what part of what’s going on in our subjective experience is the troublemaker, the cause of the suffering, and what we need to change that in order to eliminate that suffering. That’s the whole purpose. It’s not just some intellectual game.

We can classify or divide what we are experiencing in terms of five large categories. It doesn’t mean that these categories are boxes sitting somewhere up in the sky or by themselves; it’s just a way of understanding things. We have forms and physical phenomena. There are sights, sounds, smells, tastes and physical sensations, and there are the physical sensors, or the cells of the eyes, the ears, and so on, that are involved in the perception of any form of physical phenomena. We also have more subtle ones like, for instance, what would appear in dreams: seemingly sensory objects that appear in dreams, or when we imagine something, like when we think of a dog. We have some sort of visual image that is purely mental. In every moment there is going to be some sort of form of physical phenomenon, even if it’s just darkness while we’re asleep.

Then, there will be some type of what’s called “primary consciousness.” Primary consciousness is a way of being aware of something; it is aware of what’s called the “essential nature” (ngo-bo) of its object. What does this term “essential nature” mean? We know there are so many different terms that are loosely translated all together as “nature,” but actually there are many different types of nature, and specific words have specific meanings. We can’t just say “aware of the nature of phenomena.” It’s an essential nature, so that means in essence what type of phenomenon it is; it is aware in terms of something being a sight, or a sound, an odor, a taste, a physical sensation or a mental object. That is an essential nature – what general type of thing something is. In modern science, we don’t make that differentiation into different types of consciousness, we just speak in terms of consciousness. Here in Buddhism, we differentiate the type of primary consciousness that we have according to the type of information it cognizes.

If we think in terms of the brain, in a Western analysis, we have from each of the senses some type of electrical impulse and chemical message that is being sent through the neurons to the brain. It’s like what we have on a television; the television is receiving some sort of waves or something like that. Actually, I don’t know how a television works, but I assume that it’s receiving some sort of electrical information. The primary consciousness is like the decoder, and it’s going to decode that information into either visual information, or sound information, or it’s smell or taste or tactile information, or mental information. I think that is a good analogy of what primary consciousness is doing. It’s decoding this information, as it were, so that we are aware that it is visual, audio, etc. A computer does that as well.

Also, when we speak of ways of being aware of something, there are the types of primary consciousness, as I said, but then there are also mental factors or subsidiary types of awareness. “Subsidiary” is actually a quite literal way of translating the Sanskrit and Tibetan terms; it means that it is derivative from a primary consciousness. It’s something that accompanies and helps a primary consciousness in terms of, for instance, attention, interest, concentration. Somehow it deals with that information, and all the emotional content that is involved in how we are aware of that object, both positive and negative: we love that object, we hate that object, we like it, we dislike it.

Among those mental factors, two aggregates are made up of just one mental factor each, and they are feeling a level of happiness and distinguishing. We are able to distinguish, as I explained before, one object from another object in our sense field; otherwise, we can’t possibly deal with this information. Then, we feel some level of happiness or unhappiness in relation to that object. Or we could feel happy or unhappy not specifically about what we’re seeing in front of ourselves; we just feel unhappy in general.

We’ve covered four aggregates: forms of physical phenomena, primary consciousness, distinguishing, and feeling a level of happiness or unhappiness, that’s four. The fifth one is what I call “other affecting variables.” It’s all the other variables (things that change) that will affect our experience. This is the Sanskrit word “samskara,” and this aggregate is made up of all the other mental factors besides distinguishing and feeling a level of happiness, plus things that change (that are non-static) that are neither ways of being aware of something nor forms of physical phenomena, for instance, tendencies and habits. Also included in that category is the conventional “me,” a difficult topic.

In each moment of our experience, we’re going to have one or more items from each of these five aggregates, or bags – if we want to speak about them very loosely – five bags of things. They’re changing every moment, and they’re changing at different speeds, and there are troublemakers and problems in each of them. What appears to us in each of them, for example, can be either correct or incorrect, but there’s also an appearance of how it exists. It could appear as if it’s encapsulated in plastic and isolated from everything else, and that’s incorrect.

Primary consciousness is not so much a problem with that, but our ordinary feelings are either gross suffering and unhappiness – we certainly don’t want that – or they are ordinary happiness, which is also not the optimal thing that we could experience because it doesn’t last. We’re insecure about it because we don’t know what’s going to come next. It’s never satisfying, as we never have enough, and the more that we have, it changes into suffering. Like the happiness of eating ice cream: the more ice cream that we eat at one sitting, eventually that happiness is going to turn into pain.

Also, we distinguish things incorrectly; we think that if we do “this,” it’s going to make us happy, but in fact, it doesn’t. We distinguish reality incorrectly and project all sorts of hopes and expectations on others, and we distinguish that that’s going to be what’s really going to happen, and the other person is like this or like that, and it’s quite incorrect. Then, with these other affecting variables, we have all sorts of troublemakers: our disturbing emotions of aggression, hostility, clinging, jealousy, laziness. We want to get rid of all these unsatisfactory aspects.

This is all that’s going on from the point of view of what we’re experiencing. There’s this ever-changing conglomeration of these aggregate factors, and as it says here in the sutra this is devoid of self-establishing nature. Well, first of all, the whole experience is devoid of a self-establishing nature, and each little piece of it is devoid of a self-establishing nature, and “me” in all of this is devoid of a self-establishing nature. How does this work? What does this really mean?

This brings us back to the topic of mental labeling. For example, we might say, “I’m in a bad mood. I feel terrible, depressed, etc.” What is that? We need to analyze, because obviously this isn’t a nice experience. So, we are labeling these five aggregates – what we’re experiencing now, and it’s not just this moment but a period of time – as a bad mood. We now have a label “bad mood.” The basis for labeling it is these aggregate factors that are made up of all these parts that are each changing at a different rate every moment. We get an image of something very dynamic and moving, don’t we? Now the mental label of a “bad mood” is like a concept, and it can be expressed with these two words “bad mood.” 

“Category” – we’ve had many experiences of bad moods; they’re not all exactly the same, are they? But we have this general category “bad mood,” which is a concept of what a bad mood is. You have a word for it in Latvian and I have a word for it in English, so there’s some sort of verbal expression for it. It can be quite interesting because your concept of “bad mood” and my concept of “bad mood” could be quite different, couldn’t it? When I think in terms of the concept of a “good time,” what I consider a good time you might consider incredibly boring. Anyway, “bad mood” is not just a word or a category, is it? There is what’s called a “referent object.” The referent object is what this concept is referring to, and it’s referring to a bad mood, which conventionally does exist; it is correct. There’s a basis for labeling all these little parts that are changing all the time. There’s a mental concept and a mental label “bad mood,” and the “bad mood” is referring to something that conventionally we are experiencing, “I’m experiencing a bad mood.” It’s a way of putting together and referring to what we are experiencing.

Perhaps we can understand this with an easier example. We’re eating a meal – well, every individual moment, we’re doing something else! We’re lifting a fork, we’re putting something in our mouth, we’re closing our teeth, we’re swallowing. Each little piece is different, but we can refer to the whole thing as, “I’m eating a meal.” Conventionally, we are eating a meal – we did eat a meal – it’s not as though this is nonexistent, is it?

Furthermore, the referent object and the basis for labeling are not the same. That’s a very profound statement, but we have to understand it in a simple example. What is the meal? Is the meal lifting our fork with one piece of food from the plate to two centimeters above? That’s part of the basis for labeling, but is that the meal? Well, no. So, the meal is not identical to the basis – either any of its parts or the whole thing.. Actually, the more we analyze the more interesting it becomes. Did we eat the whole meal in one instant? No, but in each instant, we’re eating the meal. We start to really wonder what’s going on here. This topic of mental labeling is actually very profound when it starts to go deeper and deeper into analyzing what’s going on here with mental labeling.

Now the problem here is not our mental labeling what we’re doing as “eating a meal.” Whether we mentally label it as eating a meal or not, we’re still eating a meal, and we can still be in a bad mood. The mental labeling process doesn’t create the bad mood, just as the mentally labeled process of saying that this is a meal didn’t create the meal. To discover what the problem is, we need to differentiate between what I call a “referent object” (btags-chos) and a “referent thing” (btags-don). Actually, that’s not so easy to translate into many other languages, because the Tibetan words for the two are very similar. 

Remember yesterday we spoke about a focal support, and that our projections of how things exist do not have something behind them holding them up like a support holding up a piece of scenery in a play. A referent thing is like a focal support; it’s something behind that referent object that is sort of holding it up.

I have to explain that, because what appears to us is that “I’m in a bad mood,” and that bad mood appears to be something quite solid, and the nasty thing is that it feels very solid. All these things are changing all the time – these aggregates, what we’re looking at, what we’re hearing, etc. – they’re changing every moment, and how much attention we pay, and all of that’s changing every moment. However, the way that we’re experiencing all of it is through this mental label of “Ooh, bad mood!” Then, we think “bad mood” and a “bad mood” appears. We’re not talking about a visual appearance, but it sort of arises in our… Well, we would say in our mind, but it’s not as though the mind is some sort of stage, and the bad mood marched on and there it is, it’s standing there. Nevertheless, it appears all by itself as if it is establishing itself by its own power. In other words, it doesn’t appear to us as arising dependently on all the various causes and conditions that have produced this bad mood, and it certainly doesn’t appear to us as coming dependently on all the previous life karmic reasons for a bad mood arising. It doesn’t even appear to us that in each moment this bad mood itself is changing. It appears as a static, solid, “bad mood.” All right?

Then, all sorts of silly things, not silly, but unpleasant things get associated. We feel depressed. We feel the rest of the day is doomed to be terrible because we’re in a bad mood, etc. Although it is conventionally true – “convention” means that we have a convention, we have a way of referring to what we’re experiencing, to put it together – it is a valid convention that we’ve all agreed that this type of experience is a bad mood. It is conventionally correct that we’re in a bad mood. There is a referent object of a bad mood that can be mentally labeled on what we’re experiencing every moment that’s changing all the time. There’s a way of sort of generalizing what we’re experiencing. But there’s no referent thing behind it holding it up; in other words, there’s no actual thing, a bad mood, behind it, existing by itself independently of its causes and conditions and of the fact that it’s changing, and so on. That is what’s absent.

We process what we are experiencing almost like a computer. We process it in terms of various categories: hot, cold, dog, cat, like it, don’t like it. We process our information like that. We have language to express these categories, and we have dictionaries that give the definitions of these various terms, like the definition of a bad mood or the definition of a meal. However, even the definition in the dictionary is made up by somebody, just as the words are made up by a group of people who put together meaningless sounds and said this group of meaningless sounds is going to have a meaning. So, we have language based on concepts and the definitions of concepts, and words. That’s okay; we need them to communicate. So-called “reality,” and I use that word loosely, doesn’t correspond to that. Dictionaries and words and language imply boxes, that something fits either into this box, this word in the dictionary, or that box, that word in the dictionary; but things aren’t quite like that. I mean, think especially of emotions. We’re feeling an emotion, what box does it fit into?

We have language, we have mental labels, we have concepts, and they refer to things: there are referent objects, there’s the conventional truth of things, but the universe does not exist like a dictionary, in boxes. So, these groups of boxes are absent; there are no such things. Things existing in boxes would be like focal supports. There would be some box behind this bad mood, labeled “bad mood,” and what we’re feeling is sitting in it, existing there by its own power, independent of everything else 

When we talk about voidness, we’re talking about the total absence of that. If the universe existed made up of all these boxes, isolated, encapsulated by themselves – after all, each box is just a different entry in the dictionary – then each of these boxes would be establishing itself by its own power or by the power of some definition. You know, the definition of what goes in this box, and here it’s written, this, this, this and that definition, there it is! It goes in this box!

This is what’s described as a self-establishing nature. It is something inside an object that by its own power, divorced or isolated from anything else, establishes that it goes in this box and not that box. This is a very subtle distinction that’s being made here. In terms of the mental factor of distinguishing, things do have conventionally a defining characteristic that can be distinguished. There is a defining characteristic for a cat and a dog. A cat is not a dog, so there are conventionally defining characteristics, but these have fashioned by concepts and words. 

There are so many different types of animals that are thrown into that box “dog.” It’s really quite extraordinary that anybody would think that all of them would belong in the same box. Some scientists decided they’re all dogs, and made that classification, and decided upon some defining characteristics that make them a dog. Well, it doesn’t sweat, it has its tongue out all the time, it has a tail that it wags – maybe some other animals wag their tails – so anyway, they came up with some defining characteristics of what’s a dog. However, what are there when we look? There are just all these animals walking around, and they don’t have something with them like a little label that they wear around their necks saying, “I’m a dog,” do they? “I’m not a cat, I’m a dog.” There’s nothing on the side of this animal that by its own power makes it a dog. But it is a dog, conventionally, and we call it a dog. We don’t call it a cat. We’ve all agreed. Nevertheless, that category of “dog” is something that is established by mental labeling, by convention; it’s not something established on the side of that animal.

This is what this entire sutra is about. It’s saying that nothing has a self-establishing nature. When we believe that what appears to us actually corresponds to reality – this appearance of things having self-established natures, as if encapsulated in plastic all by themselves – then we are under the influence of confusion, ignorance, and unawareness. Because when we believe that this bad mood that we’re experiencing and that appears to be so solid and establishing itself sitting there making us feel so terrible – when we believe in that, that it corresponds to reality, then we really get depressed. We identify with it. “Poor me, I’m in a bad mood. Don’t bother me, don’t ask me to do anything because I’m in a bad mood.” The rest of the day is hopeless because we’re in a bad mood, and we not only experience suffering and unhappiness, but we create more – not just for ourselves, but for everybody that we meet.

It’s like, for instance, when we stub our toe: we’re walking and we bang against something in the dark, or whatever, and it hurts. We could panic, “Oh I stubbed my toe! It hurts so badly” and jump up and down and make a big deal out of it. Or we could say, “Well, conventionally I did stub my toe; conventionally it does hurt. So what?” Okay, we look to see if it is really injured. Do we have to put a bandage on it, or is it broken? We take it seriously, but then we go on with life. It hurts. Well, what did we expect? Of course, it’s going to hurt, but there isn’t this horrible monster thing: “Oh I’ve hurt my toe!” or “Oh I’m in a bad mood!” 

“Okay, I’m in a bad mood, so what?” So, we change what we’re doing. We could sit there and feel sorry for ourselves but that doesn’t help. It’s like, for instance, “I don’t feel like working today.” Well, so what? We go and we work anyway. If we need to take a break, well then, we get up from our desk, take a short break, and then we go back. We don’t make a big deal out of anything. My teacher Serkong Rinpoche always likes to use the expression “nothing special.” “Oh, you banged your toe, nothing special.” “Oh, you’re in a bad mood, nothing special.”

Well, nothing special has a very interesting connotation here because our Minister of Finance when he was asked about the crisis here and his English was so-so, let’s put it mildly, and he was saying “nothing special,” he was a student of Serkong Rinpoche!

That’s a very good example. If we make it into this “crisis,” then everybody gets depressed, and we feel hopeless: “There’s nothing that I can do!” However, if we understand that it arose from causes and conditions, then we start to analyze what can be changed so that we have a different mental label for it. It’s no longer a “crisis.”

Avalokiteshvara said, I’ll repeat the line: 

He or she needs to keep in view, fully and in detail, the five aggregate factors of his or her experience and those as devoid of a self-establishing nature.

That means that everything is changing, every moment – these five aggregate factors – and there’s nothing inside them that, by its own power, independent of causes and conditions and mental labels (like “bad mood” is a mental label), that establishes them as this or that.

Then, in the translation that I made, I followed the original Sanskrit because there have been some modifications in the way that it was translated into other Asian languages. Actually, the Sanskrit just says, “Form voidness, voidness form.” It’s the Chinese translation that added the word “is.” There is no word “is.” “Form is voidness, voidness is form.” The Sanskrit just has: 

Form – voidness; voidness – form.

It can’t be literally that form is voidness. Voidness is a static phenomenon: it’s a fact, it doesn’t change. Form is a physical phenomenon – or just forms in general: forms of feeling, forms of etc., and it changes from moment to moment. Form and voidness are certainly not identical, but in technical language, they share the same essential nature – that’s the technical jargon – which means that they are referring to the same thing, but from two different points of view. We can’t have one without the other. Like two sides of a coin, we can’t have just one side of a coin. If we have one side of a coin, we have the other side as well. The two sides of the coin, although they are not identical to each other, are referring to the same thing, aren’t they? This is referring here, “form – voidness; voidness – form,” to what’s known as the two truths about anything.

Conventional truth, well, we have form, and that’s referring to the appearance of things. The deepest truth about it is its voidness; form doesn’t exist in impossible ways. Impossible means with a self-establishing nature. If there are forms, appearances of things, they have arisen dependently on causes, conditions, parts. In fact, things can only appear and function because of their voidness. We can’t have a hand independently of fingers. It arises dependently on parts and mental labels. How did the mental label of “hand” arise? Is it that somehow there is a line at the wrist, and the portion that’s on the other side of that line is a hand. Where on the wrist? It’s a mental concept, isn’t it? If the existence of a hand is established – so, form – by evolution, and the growth from the fetus and the DNA, and it’s established from all the parts, all the cells of the fingers, and by a mental label “hand,” which is distinguishing a certain part of the body, so if it arises dependently on all of that, that means that it is devoid of a self-establishing nature: something inside it that, by itself, makes it a hand.

It’s important to relate all of this to our lives, our behavior. After all, Avalokiteshvara is being asked here, how do we conduct our behavior with this? Maybe it’s not so significant to us about our hand or about the wall, or something like that, unless we think, “Oh this terrible wall, it’s so ugly!” Think of it in terms of a bad mood, or this terrible person that we don’t like – you know, this big problem that we’re facing in life. These are the things that we have to understand are devoid of a self-establishing nature. Well, there’s the appearance, it’s conventionally like that; however, it’s devoid of establishing itself by its own power. There are all these causes, circumstances, etc., that are changing all the time, and there are the concepts and words with which we label them.

Also, when we understand this whole process of mental labeling, then we realize that we can change the mental label. That’s called “attitude training.” “Mind training” is how it’s usually translated, but it’s attitude training. We could label it a “crisis” and “a difficult time,” because it is a difficult time, conventionally, but then we could also label it a “challenge.” We could label it an “opportunity to change.” Based on how we label it, then the whole approach of how we experience it becomes quite different, doesn’t it? By changing the mental label of the present economic situation to “nothing special,” as your Minister has done, well what’s the purpose of that? The purpose is not to panic. Well, I don’t know what his purpose was, but if we look at it as “nothing special,” well it’s unrealistic to imagine that things are going to just constantly improve and get better and better and better and better. If we don’t panic then we see, “Well, how do we deal with the ups and downs that are going to be natural in samsara?”

This understanding of voidness doesn’t negate the fact that we lost our job, or our salary is lower, and it’s a difficult time. It doesn’t negate that, of course not. This is conventionally what’s going on, what we’re experiencing, but it does help us not to get depressed about it. Although it might feel like this horrible, horrible thing that has happened, that we don’t, what’s the word, we don’t give full belief into that. Okay, it’s arisen from this and that. We’re a little bit more relaxed and we see more realistically how can we deal with this? This is conventional reality; we have less salary, etc. Now, what do we do? We differentiate between the referent object – okay, it’s a difficult time, that’s true – from a referent thing, this monstrous horrible thing that has happened to “poor me.” Avalokiteshvara says, “form – voidness;” there’s form and there’s voidness. If something has dependently arisen, it is devoid of establishing itself. If it’s devoid of establishing itself, then it has arisen dependently on other factors: mental labels, parts, causes, etc.

Then, Avalokiteshvara amplifies this to make sure that we understand. He says: 

Form not separate from voidness; voidness not separate from form.

We can’t have one without the other. They come in the same package, like the two sides of a coin. The Sanskrit has one additional sentence here, which the Tibetans for some reason didn’t translate. Perhaps the edition that they got of the Sanskrit was missing this line, but in the Sanskrit edition, it says:

What has form, that has voidness; what has voidness, that has form. 

However, we have to be careful; it is hard to really translate this sentence in a way that doesn’t give a false or incorrect impression. It implies there is something that has form as if there is some sort of thing that is separate, and that thing has both form and voidness; it’s as if there were a thing separate from that, an object separate from that, that has these two qualities. It’s not like that. You know, having form, having voidness; having voidness, having form – however, there isn’t some base separate from this that has these things. That’s difficult to understand. It’s like if we think of an object and then we think of characteristics like size and weight and shape and so on, is there an object separate from its size and shape? Well, no. We can say the object has a size and it has a shape, and it has a weight, but there isn’t an object separate from all of that, is there? 

Then, Avalokiteshvara goes on: 

Similarly, feeling, distinguishing, affecting variables, types of consciousness – voidness.

With this, Avalokiteshvara mentions the voidness of all five aggregates.

We’ve covered quite a bit this morning. Are there any questions about it? 

When we have this sentence “form – voidness; voidness – form,” why is it repeated in these two ways? Is there significance to that?

There is a purpose to that. It has to do with a logical proof. If something arises dependently, then it cannot be self-establishing, so voidness. The fact that things arise dependent on other things establishes that it is not arising by its own power. Remember, His Holiness the Dalai Lama used the example of the fourth finger. If it is long, it arises as long dependent on being compared to the short finger, the fifth finger, but short compared to the middle finger. It doesn’t arise as long or short by its own power from its own side, so it’s devoid of the impossible way of existing. The fact that it arises dependently doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist; it means that it exists, but it is devoid of existing by its own power.

From the other point of view, the fact that it doesn’t arise from its own power – that it’s devoid of arising from its own power – doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist at all; despite being devoid of that, it arises dependently. Because it is devoid of existing by its own power, therefore, it is possible that it can arise based on other things, so dependent arising. In a sense, by formulating it in both ways, it’s saying that dependent arising proves that form is devoid of inherent existence or self-establishing existence, and the fact that form is devoid of self-establishing existence proves or establishes that it arises dependently.

Now, that is a rather complex formulation, so let me put it in structural form. Because it’s possible, that means that it’s not impossible, so that’s “form – voidness.” All right? “Possible” establishes “not impossible,” so it establishes that it’s possible. “Not impossible” establishes that it’s “possible.” We have to have both. Possible implies not impossible, and not impossible implies possible. Because we could misunderstand “possible,” and we might think possible in an impossible way, or if we think “not impossible,” we might think “not at all.” These two formulations are intended to help us to avoid the two extremes of positive affirmation of true existence, or nihilism (negating conventional existence).

What does it mean, that voidness is a static phenomenon? 

A static phenomenon is one that is not created by anything and that doesn’t change from moment to moment. There are some things that change from moment to moment that are not created either, like a mental continuum, but a static phenomenon doesn’t change from moment to moment. It’s not affected by other things. So, the voidness of something, its being devoid of an impossible way of existing, is always the case. It’s true about something – about anything, no matter what – throughout its entire continuum. This is another aspect of “form – voidness; voidness – form.” Form is a basis for voidness, and so form has voidness as one of its characteristics, and that characteristic doesn’t change so long as that basis exists.

Our body, for example, is a form and it came into existence, it has a beginning, its continuum, and it has an end when it disintegrates and falls apart. So long as it exists, the fact of it not existing by its own power doesn’t change. It’s a fact about it. That fact is only valid so long as our body exists. If our body doesn’t exist any longer, we can’t speak of the voidness of the presently-happening body. We can speak of the voidness of the previously-happening body, or the no-longer-happening body, but not the presently-happening body or the not-yet-happening body. The voidness of our body is not affected by our age. It’s not affected by where we are, whether we’re in this room or that room. It’s a fact. It stays always the same. That’s the meaning here of it being static. Okay?

Does it mean that voidness is the only characteristic that doesn’t change over time?

No. There are other static qualities. I don’t know if we could technically call it a “quality,” but there are other static facts about our body. For example, space, a very difficult thing to understand in the Buddhist context. Space is defined in Buddhism as the absence of anything tangible or obstructive that would prevent our body from occupying three dimensions. There is nothing preventing our body from occupying three dimensions regardless of where we are. We’re not talking about the wall that would obstruct our occupying, you know, where the wall is. We’re not talking about a characteristic of the wall. We’re talking about a characteristic of our body. Also, we’re not talking about the space that we occupy, that now we occupy the space, and then we move over, and then he moves into the space, and he occupies it, like a parking spot on the street. But we occupy – this body occupies – three dimensions.

It’s saying that there’s nothing preventing that, so this is why it’s always used as an analogy for voidness. Just as there is nothing preventing this body from occupying three dimensions, from a physical point of view in terms of how physical matter works, there’s likewise nothing – you know, voidness – there’s nothing preventing this body from functioning such as a self-establishing nature. This idea of space in Buddhism is something very abstract. It’s something that we don’t normally think of in our Western way of looking at things.