Yesterday while driving I wrestled with the concept of sunyata, nothingness, or emptiness. It suddenly struck me that the mind is not very good at dealing with this. In fact it cannot grasp ‘nothingness’. We have two blind spots in our vision, one in each eye, yet we are not aware of them. The mind fills in what is missing. If we look through one eye we are not aware that there is a hole in our vision. Similarly we are not aware of the periphery of our vision. This is why the representation of looking through binoculars in the cinema, seeing through a template like a figure-of-eight on its side, strikes us as false. We just do not see like this. To see the periphery of vision we would have to see it as the dividing line between vision and no vision. But we cannot see ‘nothing’. ‘Nothing’, by definition, does not exist.
Normally what we understand as ‘nothing’ is relative nothingness. We say the room is empty, nothing in it. We do not mean this literally because, literally, it is not a true statement – there is air, magnetic fields etc. What we mean is ‘nothing of significance’. The boy says he is doing nothing. What he means is nothing of significance, or nothing he should not be doing, or he might be telling a lie. By ‘nothing’ we usually mean ‘empty’, a box, a room, space, or we mean non activity. Emptiness is not nothingness. It implies a container, walls, a boundary of some sort. By ‘nothing’ what we mean is ‘relative nothingness’, or nihility as Nishitani calls it.
‘Absolute nothingness’ cannot be grasped. There is nothing to be grasped. Absolute nothingness does not exist as we understand existence. Most people understand the cosmos to be the result of the explosion of the Big Bang expanding outwards into space. Before the big Bang there was no space. There was nothing. The Big Bang initiated both something – matter and energy, and nothing – the relative nothingness of the empty space between the stars. Whether the Big Bang emerged from absolute nothingness we have no way of knowing.
When we go to sleep there is a hazy awareness of time passing. When we wake in the morning we know – experientially, not just by deduction – that time has passed. There were times during the night when we were dimly aware. There were dreams. When I had my heart op, however, I experienced ‘nothing’ while I was unconscious. One moment I was lying in the operating theatre, the next I was waking up in the recovery room. There was no interval, no awareness of time having passed, although by deduction I knew that it had. The two moments were instantaneous, one merging seamlessly into the other. Try as I would I could not recall either the extinction of consciousness nor the moment of waking. One moment I was awake in the operating theatre, the next I was awake in the recovery room. This hiatus bothered me. It annoyed me that I did not have the faintest glimmering, not just of the interval, but that there had even been an interval. Only by deduction did I know that time had passed. ‘Nothing’ cannot be experienced but it can be deduced.
Neither the relative ‘nothingness’ of empty space, or non-activity, nor absolute nothingness as I have described it are what Buddhism means by ‘nothingness’, or ’emptiness’ (sunyata). More on this later.