Wrote this yesterday and have since expanded on it. Maybe
John Tan can comment on this.
IMO, when we talk about non-arising and emptiness, there is the level
of emptying conventions and the level of emptying pure presence. The
conventional level pertains to seeing dependent designation, and what I
wrote about convention 'creating' subject and object.* This is the part
where the sutra talked about "man with an illness of the eyes who sees
an [illusory] flower in the sky, or a second moon."**
The key in
anatta however is not only seeing how convention brings about
fabrication but how the absence of a subject leads to the ceasing of
fabricating a background and simultaneously direct taste of presence as
foreground. But this is not the same as seeing ignorance and dependent
designation. After anatta, one does not necessarily realize the
emptiness of conventionally designated subject and objects. And
furthermore does not necessarily taste total exertion, empty/non-arising
nature of Presence, and their simultaneity. They are different
'gradients' of insight which has to do with the degree that the
emptiness of self/Self is extended to all phenomena.
Also in
emptiness and dependent origination there can be like a direct taste of
total exertion and illusoriness of that foreground presence as
colors/sounds/etc. IMO the emptiness of Presence requires first a direct
taste of Pure Presence as all phenomenal appearances, and this requires
anatta which simultaneously sees through the ghostly image of
Presence-as-background and realizes Presence-as-manifold or
Presence-as-thousand-faces followed by penetrating the very nature of
that direct and immediate foreground Presence. Otherwise we are simply
negating on the level of conventions and not seeing the very Presence as
illusory appearance, or Presence as the very interplay or
interrelations of dependencies and thus non-arising.
That is,
that very pure presence as forms is seen to be illusory, appearing but
not truly created, like mere painting on water. Nothing truly there or
anywhere. Also the sense of total exertion and illusoriness complements
each other (although one usually gets glimpses of either one to the
exclusion of another at first), because the red of the rose is the total
exertion of my body turning towards a certain direction, my seeing or
focusing on the red, my breathing, heart beating and all conditions are
what's exerting 'red', and therefore that 'red' is truly nothing there
or anywhere, and is thus only a magical illusion. This total exertion
and magical illusion can be recognised by taste. When looking at many
different glasses the reflections change as you walk, the water bursting
upwards from the water fountain is also a result of the whole body mind
activity of focusing, acting, seeing, etc in certain ways. Which is to
say, arising/abiding/ceasing of phenomena do not make any sense as all
phenomena are only vivid appearance that appears only with the moment's
dependencies (not to be confused as 'existing only for a moment,
therefore non-arising').
And when I say whole body-mind-universe
as dependencies it may seem to imply that there is a body mind or
universe moving or interacting with each other in order to produce a
certain effect, but that is not so. For body mind universe (aka
summarised as "conditions") are entirely also conditionally appearing
and non-arising 'mere painting on water'. In other words as the Zen
Master Hong Wen Liang wrote to me years ago, 空花在眼,一翳墜落 ,一空在眼,眾翳墜落。 With
empty flower in vision, one illusion (as in sky flower) falls away, one
emptiness in vision, all illusions fall away. Not only is phenomena
empty, but when whole body-mind is empty, then all is empty. For when
exerting a single phenomena all conditions that exerts are not
themselves 'existing things interacting or producing other existing
things' but mere relations like reflections upon reflections in the
nodes of the net of indra. They are not only deconstructed into a single
flow but are all themselves empty-non-arising-Presencing. And what we
call dependencies are empty phenomena relating with empty phenomena.
And I should also add: not only is whole body-mind empty, but emptiness
IS the whole body-mind-universe. It is none other than the vividly
manifesting 'forms' with its apparent shapes and dimensions, its
apparent dimensionality (Which I will elaborate in the next paragraph)
VIA dependency IS its emptiness, because emptiness is precisely
dependent arising (so therefore the emptiness and illusoriness of
phenomenal appearances does not contradict all mundane causalities and
responsibilities -- you can't just act irresponsibly in the 'real world'
without 'real world' consequences unlike lucid dreams or video games
like GTA. Emptiness/dependencies 'actualizes' or 'exerts' as vivid
appearances). Whatever appears is empty due to dependencies, appearances
are mere appearances due to dependencies, and appearances are empty and
non-arising due to dependencies, and there is no emptiness to be spoken
of apart from non-arising phenomenal appearances. Emptiness is the very
vividness of forms appearing exactly as it is, with no 'depth' or
'lustre' subtracted from it, and yet simultaneously tasted to be
illusory or nowhere 'there' at all.
Another aspect of vision (in
contrast to other senses like sound and sensation which only differs in
loudness and intensity) is that there is apparent depth involved. Anatta
demolishes centerpoint and thus everything appears sort of gapless,
distanceless, depthless. But it is not sufficient to demolish
'locality'. And locality is also somehow related to the perception of
depth or dimensions through vision. That things are located in certain
places are due to certain colors in vision interpreted as depth. For
example, if you went to a good 3D movie with 3D glasses (btw, Ready
Player One in IMAX 3D is pretty good -- their movie has complex and
well-designed 3D), things that appear flat on screen suddenly becomes
more alive as if apparent objects on the screen take up a life of their
own by assuming three dimensions with locations in front of and behind
the screen.
But at the same time logically we know that the
stuff that 'pops out' in front of the screen moving towards you isn't in
actuality coming out of the screen towards you, they are not located
anywhere but 'on the screen' -- just take off your 3D glasses and it
becomes as clear as day. That is just common sense. But for most people,
that common sense does not get applied to the 'real world' (which means
the commonly experienced conventional reality/karmic vision with
glasses off), in 'real world' without the glasses we think that the
colors of vision imply actual depth and locality to inherently existing
objects, including 'screen is over there', 'table is here', and so
forth. Depth is actually just impressions based on delineating colors
into objects of varying sizes (smaller objects appear more 'distant')
plus the saturation/contrast of colors - (Wiki: Aerial perspective – Due
to light scattering by the atmosphere, objects that are a great
distance away have lower luminance contrast and lower color saturation.
Due to this, images seem blurry the farther they are away from a
person's point of view. In computer graphics, this is often called
"distance fog." The foreground has high contrast; the background has low
contrast. Objects differing only in their contrast with a background
appear to be at different depths. The color of distant objects are also
shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum (e.g., distant mountains).
Some painters, notably Cézanne, employ "warm" pigments (red, yellow and
orange) to bring features forward towards the viewer, and "cool" ones
(blue, violet, and blue-green) to indicate the part of a form that
curves away from the picture plane.)
However, we attribute those
colors to be characteristics of objects existing on their own side (on
the objective side) in and of itself (although colors do not apply to
many other animals or beings, and if we investigate the quantum
structure of things we find almost completely empty space), with
locality, apart from appearance/conditionality, just as we (by
ignorance) attribute the aspect of luminous clarity or 'awareness' to a
subjective side existing in and of itself apart from
appearance/conditionality. This attribution is the power of ignorance
driving conventional reality into apparent existence.
But by
seeing presence/vision/forms as a play of conditionality, then all
colors that conventionally imply 'depth' and 'dimension' are simply a
dependently originating mirage that is unlocatable and non-originating.
Even the so called 'depth' and 'dimension' are merely non-dimensional
colors/appearances and impressions arising due to conditions. Why
non-arising? Because what dependently originates is non-arising -- like
the 3D glasses and the 3d-designed-film-images manifesting various '3
dimensional' images in dependence, yet its appearance does not in any
way imply an actual locality or depth or dimension or the creation of
some real objects anywhere. And as I wrote in another post, it's not so
much that a self-existing I over here walk towards a self-existing park
over there but rather my walking manifests
illusory-yet-vividly-Presencing space-time, buildings, trees and parks.
However the illusoriness of Presence is not the same as the sutra about
the "man with an illness of the eyes who sees an [illusory] flower in
the sky, or a second moon."**, even though that it is equally important.
Rather, it's the man with clear sighted vision sees pure presence as
illusory display.
* "What is convention? Conventions are not just verbal words occurring in thought.
Conventions are alive!
They bring I, universe, car, movement alive.. or red patches into “the redness of rose”. The power and magic of conventions."
** Excerpt from The Sutra of Complete Enlightenment
"What is ignorance? Virtuous man, since beginningless time, all
sentient beings have had all sorts of delusions, like a disoriented
person who has lost his sense of direction. They mistake the four great
elements as the attributes of their bodies, and the conditioned
impressions of the six sense objects as the attributes of their minds.
They are like a man with an illness of the eyes who sees an [illusory]
flower in the sky, or a second moon.
"Virtuous man, there is in
reality no flower in the sky, yet the sick man mistakenly clings to it.
Because of his mistaken clinging, he is not only deluded about the
intrinsic nature of the empty space, but also confused about the arising
of the flower. Because of this false existence [to which he clings], he
remains in the turning wheel of birth and death. Hence this is called
ignorance.
"Virtuous man, this ignorance has no real substance.
It is lik a person in a dream. Though the person exists in the dream,
when [the dreamer] awakens, there is nothing that can be grasped. Like
an [illusory] flower in the sky that vanishes into empty space, one
cannot say that there is a fixed place from which it vanishes. Why?
Because there is no place from which it arises! Amidst the unarisen, all
sentient beings deludedly perceive birth and extinction. Hence this is
called the turning wheel of birth and death.
"Virtuous man, one
who practices Complete Enlightenment of the causal ground of the
Tathagata realizes that [birth and extinction] are like an illusory
flower in the sky. Thus there is no continuance of birth and death and
no body or mind that is subject to birth and death. This nonexistence of
[birth and death and body and mind] is so not as a consequence of
contrived effort. It is so by its intrinsic nature.
"The
awareness [of their nonexistence] is like empty space. That which is
aware of the empty space is like the appearance of the illusory flower.
However, one cannot say that the nature of this awareness is
nonexistent. Eliminating both existence and nonexistence is in
accordance with pure enlightenment.
"Why is it so? Because the
nature of empty space is ever unmoving. Likewise, there is neither
arising nor perishing within the Tathagatagarbha. It is free from
conceptual knowledge and views. Like the nature of dharmadhatu, which is
ultimate, wholly complete, and pervades all ten directions, such is the
Dharma practice [of the Tathagata] of the causal ground.
"Because of this [intrinsic completeness], bodhisattvas within the
Mahayana may give rise to pure bodhi-mind. If sentient beings in the
Dharma Ending Age practice accordingly, they will not fall into
erroneous views."
At that time, the World Honored One, wishing to clarify his meaning, proclaimed these gathas:
Manjusri, you should know
that all Tathagatas,
from their original-arising causal ground,
use wisdom to enlighten
and penetrate ignorance.
Realizing that ignorance is like
a flower in the sky,
they are thus liberated from the continuance
[of birth and death].
Like a person [seen] in a dream who
cannot be found when [the dreamer] awakens,
awareness is like empty space.
It is impartial and equal, and ever unmoving.
When enlightenment pervades all ten directions,
the Buddha Path is accomplished.
There is no place where illusions vanish,
and there is no attainment
in accomplishing the Buddha Path,
for the intrinsic nature is already wholly complete.
By this, bodhisattvas
can give rise to the bodhi-mind.
Sentient beings in the Dharma Ending Age
through this practice will avoid erroneous views.