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100-597: While Christianity and Western sociologists and psychologists view a state of emptiness as a negative, unwanted condition, in some Eastern philosophies such as Buddhist philosophy and Taoism , emptiness ( Śūnyatā ) represents seeing through the illusion of independent self-nature. In the West, feeling "empty" is often viewed as a negative condition. Psychologist Clive Hazell, for example, attributes feelings of emptiness to problematic family backgrounds with abusive relationships and mistreatment. He claims that some people who are facing

200-443: A pet or trying Animal-Assisted Therapy ; getting involved in spirituality such as meditation or religious rituals and service; volunteering to fill time and bring social contact; doing social interactions , such as community activities, clubs, or outings; or finding a hobby or recreational activity to regain their interest in life. In Austria philosopher/educator Rudolf Steiner 's (1861–1925) thinking, spiritual emptiness

300-611: A few of the elements common to violent boys". A professor of human development, Garbarino claims that violent boys have an "alienation from positive role models" and "a spiritual emptiness that spawns despair". These youth are seduced by the violent fantasy of the US gun culture, which provides negative role models of tough, aggressive men who use power to get what they want. He claims that boys can be helped by giving them "a sense of purpose" and "spiritual anchors" that can "anchor boys in empathy and socially engaged moral thinking". Spiritual emptiness

400-481: A finger can point at other things but not at itself, etc.). This means then, that the self could never desire to change itself and could not do so; another reason for this is that, besides Buddhism, in the orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy the unchanging ultimate self ( ātman ) is perfectly blissful and does not suffer. The historical Buddha used this idea to attack the concept of self. This argument could be structured thus: This argument then denies that there

500-582: A form of pragmatism . However, K. N. Jayatilleke argues the Buddha's epistemology can also be taken to be a form of correspondence theory (as per the Apannaka Sutta ) with elements of coherentism , and that for the Buddha it is causally impossible for something which is false to lead to cessation of suffering and evil. Gautama Buddha discouraged his disciples and early followers of Buddhism from indulging in intellectual disputation for its own sake, which

600-472: A meaningful and purposeful life." The concept of "emptiness" was important to a "certain type of existentialist philosophy and some forms of the Death of God movement". Existentialism, the "philosophic movement that gives voice to the sense of alienation and despair", comes from "man's recognition of his fundamental aloneness in an indifferent universe". People whose response to the sense of emptiness and aloneness

700-421: A means to liberation or salvation. It was a tacit assumption with these systems that if their philosophy were correctly understood and assimilated, an unconditioned state free of suffering and limitation could be achieved. [...] If this fact is overlooked, as often happens as a result of the propensity engendered by formal Occidental philosophy to consider the philosophical enterprise as a purely descriptive one,

800-446: A pragmatic point of view, it is best to abstain from these negative actions which bring forth negative results. However, the important word here is intentionally : for the Buddha, karma is nothing else but intention/volition, and hence unintentionally harming someone does not create bad karmic results. Unlike the Jains who believed that karma was a quasi-physical element, for the Buddha karma

900-427: A sense of emptiness is seen as a negative psychological condition, it is often associated with depression. As such, many of the same treatments are proposed: psychotherapy , group therapy, or other types of counselling. As well, people who feel empty may be advised to keep busy and maintain a regular schedule of work and social activities. Other solutions which have been proposed to reduce a sense of emptiness are getting

1000-425: A sense of emptiness try to resolve their painful feelings by becoming addicted to a drug or obsessive activity (be it compulsive sex, gambling or work) or engaging in "frenzied action" or violence. In sociology, a sense of emptiness is associated with social alienation of the individual. This sense of alienation may be suppressed while working, due to the routine nature of work tasks, but during leisure hours or during

1100-457: A single religious founder. While the focus of the Buddha's teachings is about attaining the highest good of nirvāṇa , they also contain an analysis of the source of human suffering ( duḥkha ), the nature of personal identity ( ātman ), and the process of acquiring knowledge ( prajña ) about the world. The Buddha defined his teaching as " the Middle Way " ( Pāli : majjhimāpaṭipadā ). In

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1200-408: A slightly later period that still preceded the final redactions of the various Buddhist canons." According to some scholars, the philosophical outlook of earliest Buddhism was primarily negative, in the sense that it focused on what doctrines to reject and let go of more than on what doctrines to accept . Only knowledge that is useful in attaining liberation is valued. According to this theory,

1300-458: A state of emptiness, the "still mind of the sage is the mirror of heaven and earth, the glass of all things", a state of "vacancy, stillness, placidity, tastelessness, quietude, silence, and non-action" which is the "perfection of the Tao and its characteristics, the "mirror of the universe" and the "pure mind". Buddhist philosophy [REDACTED] Religion portal Buddhist philosophy

1400-426: A visual sense or a moral sense are appreciated in genres such as film noir . As well, travellers and artists are often intrigued by and attracted to vast empty spaces, such as open deserts, barren wastelands or salt flats, and the open sea. In visual arts emptiness and absence were recognized as phenomena that characterize not only particular works of art (e.g. Yves Klein ) but also as a more general tendency within

1500-458: A way that was "devoid of spirit", with their minds becoming "dimmer and darker", and increasing empty of spirit. Louis Dupré , a professor of philosophy at Yale University, argues that the "spiritual emptiness of our time is a symptom of its religious poverty". He claims that "many people never experience any emptiness: they are too busy to feel much absence of any kind"; they only realize their spiritual emptiness if "painful personal experiences --

1600-860: A wide range of organizations, including the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, the National Institute for Mental Health, the American Medical Association , the National Black Child Development Institute, the National Science Foundation , the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, and the FBI . In addition, Garbarino's work is associated with the School of Human Ecology at Cornell University under

1700-403: A writhing of views, a fetter of views". One explanation for this pragmatic suspension of judgment or epistemic Epoché is that such questions contribute nothing to the practical methods of realizing awakeness during one's lifetime and bring about the danger of substituting the experience of liberation by a conceptual understanding of the doctrine or by religious faith. According to the Buddha,

1800-409: Is a conceptual construction overlaid upon a stream of experiences, just like a chariot is merely a conventional designation for the parts of a chariot and how they are put together. The foundation of this argument is purely empiricist , for it is based on the fact that all we observe is subject to change, especially everything observed when looking inwardly in meditation. Another argument supporting

1900-399: Is a key principle of design. He claims that it has become an obsessive quality that is the "driving force in contemporary American taste". Muschamp states that "along with the commercial interests that exploit this interest, it is the major factor now shaping attitudes toward public spaces, urban spaces, and even suburban sprawl." Films that depict nothingness, shadows and vagueness, either in

2000-453: Is able to stop one addiction, such as compulsive sex, they often just trade it in for another addictive behaviour, such as gambling or overeating. A number of novelists and filmmakers have depicted emptiness. The concept of "emptiness" was important to a "good deal of 19th–20th century Western imaginative literature". Novelist Franz Kafka depicted a meaningless bizarre world in The Trial and

2100-432: Is always dependent on, and caused by sensations gained by the sense organs ( āyatana ). Sensations are always dependent on contact with our surroundings. Buddha's causal theory is simply descriptive: "This existing, that exists; this arising, that arises; this not existing, that does not exist; this ceasing, that ceases." This understanding of causation as "impersonal lawlike causal ordering" is important because it shows how

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2200-402: Is based on Ellis' 1994 collection of short stories of the same name . The film, which is set amidst the decadence of the early 1980s, depicts an assortment of socially alienated, mainly well-off characters who numb their sense of emptiness with casual sex, alcohol, and drugs. Contemporary architecture critic Herbert Muschamp argues that " horror vacui " (which is Latin for "fear of emptiness")

2300-524: Is fruitless, and distracts one from the ultimate goals of awakening ( bodhi ) and liberation ( mokṣa ). Only philosophy and discussion which has pragmatic value for liberation from suffering is seen as important. According to the Pāli Canon , during his lifetime the Buddha remained silent when asked several metaphysical questions which he regarded as the basis for "unwise reflection". These "unanswered questions" ( avyākṛta ) regarded issues such as whether

2400-410: Is not worried about something that does not exist. Furthermore, Gautama Buddha argued that the world can be observed to be a cause of suffering ( Brahman was held to be ultimately blissful in the orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy ) and that since we cannot control the world as we wish, the world cannot be the self. The idea that "this cosmos is the self" is one of the six wrong views rejected by

2500-604: Is obscured by the darkness of delusion conceive of an essence of things and then generate attachment and hostility with regard to them. In an interview, the Dalai Lama stated that tantric meditation can be used for "heightening your own realization of emptiness or mind of enlightenment ". In Buddhist philosophy , attaining a realization of emptiness of inherent existence is key to the permanent cessation of suffering , i.e. liberation . Even while an ordinary being, if upon hearing of emptiness great joy arises within again and again,

2600-444: Is often connected with addiction, especially by Christian-influenced addiction organizations and counsellors. Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous , argued that one of the impacts of alcoholism was causing a spiritual emptiness in heavy drinkers. In Abraham J. Twerski's 1997 book Addictive Thinking: Understanding Self-Deception , he argues that when people feel spiritually empty, they often turn to addictive behaviors to fill

2700-565: Is one permanent "controller" in the person. Instead, it views the person as a set of constantly changing processes which include volitional events seeking change and an awareness of that desire for change. According to Mark Siderits: What the Buddhist has in mind is that on one occasion one part of the person might perform the executive function, on another occasion another part might do so. This would make it possible for every part to be subject to control without there being any part that always fills

2800-539: Is still clear that resisting and even refuting a false or slanted doctrine can be useful to extricate the interlocutor, or oneself, from error; hence, to advance in the way of liberation. Witness the Buddha's confutation of several doctrines by Nigantha Nataputta and other purported sages which sometimes had large followings (e.g., Kula Sutta, Sankha Sutta, Brahmana Sutta). This shows that a virtuous and appropriate use of dialectics can take place. By implication, reasoning and argument shouldn't be disparaged by Buddhists. After

2900-667: Is that this unease arises out of conditions, mainly craving ( taṇhā ) and ignorance ( avidyā ). The third truth is then the fact that whenever sentient beings let go of craving and remove ignorance through insight and knowledge, suffering ceases ( nirodhā ). The fourth truth is the Noble Eightfold Path , which consists of eight practices that end suffering. They are: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness , and right samādhi (concentration, mental unification, meditation). The highest good and ultimate goal taught by

3000-400: Is the ancient Indian philosophical system that developed within the religio-philosophical tradition of Buddhism . It comprises all the philosophical investigations and systems of rational inquiry that developed among various schools of Buddhism in ancient India following the parinirvāṇa of Gautama Buddha (c. 5th century BCE), as well as the further developments which followed

3100-418: Is the inherent and eternal unsatisfactoriness of life. This unpleasantness is said to be not just physical pain and psychological distress, but also a kind of existential unease caused by the inevitable facts of our mortality and ultimately by the impermanence of all beings and phenomena . Suffering also arises because of contact with unpleasant events, and due to not getting what one desires. The second truth

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3200-468: Is to give excuses live in bad faith; "people who face the emptiness and accept responsibility aim to live 'authentic' lives". Existentialists argue that "man lives in alienation from God, from nature, from other men, from his own true self." Crowded into cities, working in mindless jobs, and entertained by light mass media, we "live on the surface of life", so that even "people who seemingly have 'everything' feel empty, uneasy, discontented." In cultures where

3300-619: The Dharma is not an ultimate end in itself or an explanation of all metaphysical reality, but a pragmatic set of teachings. The Buddha used two parables to clarify this point, the 'Parable of the raft' and the Parable of the Poisoned Arrow . The Dharma is like a raft in the sense that it is only a pragmatic tool for attaining nirvana ("for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of holding onto", MN 22); once one has done this, one can discard

3400-474: The Dharmacakrapravartana Sūtra , this is used to refer to the fact that his teachings steer a middle course between the extremes of asceticism and bodily denial (as practiced by the Jains and other Indian ascetic groups) and sensual hedonism or indulgence. Many Śramaṇa ascetics of the Buddha's time placed much emphasis on a denial of the body, using practices such as fasting , to liberate

3500-514: The Kālāma Sutta the Buddha tells a group of confused villagers that the only proper reason for one's beliefs is verification in one's own personal experience (and the experience of the wise) and denies any verification which stems from a personal authority, sacred tradition ( anussava ), or any kind of rationalism which constructs metaphysical theories ( takka ). In the Tevijja Sutta (DN 13),

3600-669: The Gandhāran Buddhist texts (which are the earliest manuscripts containing discourses attributed to Gautama Buddha), has confirmed that their teachings are "consistent with non-Mahayana Buddhism, which survives today in the Theravada school of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, but which in ancient times was represented by eighteen separate schools." However, some scholars such as Schmithausen , Vetter , and Bronkhorst argue that critical analysis reveals discrepancies among these various doctrines. They present alternative possibilities for what

3700-515: The Mādhyamaka and Sautrāntika schools of Buddhist philosophy in ancient India, Peter Deller Santina writes: Attention must first of all be drawn to the fact that philosophical systems in India were seldom, if ever, purely speculative or descriptive. Virtually all the great philosophical systems of India: Sāṃkhya , Advaita Vedānta , Mādhyamaka and so forth, were preeminently concerned with providing

3800-556: The Vedas as providing access to truth. The historical Buddha denied the authority of the Vedas , though, like his contemporaries, he affirmed the soteriological importance of holding the right view ; that is, having a proper understanding of reality. However, this understanding was not conceived primarily as metaphysical and cosmological knowledge, but as a piece of knowledge into the arising and cessation of suffering in human experience. Therefore,

3900-478: The existentialist French authors sketched a world cut off from purpose or reason in Jean-Paul Sartre 's La Nausée and Albert Camus ' L'étranger . Existentialism influenced 20th century poet T.S. Eliot , whose poem " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock " describes an "anti-hero or alienated soul, running away from or confronting the emptiness of his or her existence". Professor Gordon Bigelow argues that

4000-609: The philosophy of mind , the philosophy of time , and soteriology in their analysis of these paths. Pre-sectarian Buddhism was based on empirical evidence gained by the sense organs (including the mind ), and the Buddha seems to have retained a skeptical distance from certain metaphysical questions , refusing to answer them because they were not conducive to liberation but led instead to further speculation. However he also affirmed theories with metaphysical implications, such as dependent arising , karma , and rebirth . Particular points of Buddhist philosophy have often been

4100-476: The spread of Buddhism throughout Asia . Buddhism combines both philosophical reasoning and the practice of meditation . The Buddhist religion presents a multitude of Buddhist paths to liberation ; with the expansion of early Buddhism from ancient India to Sri Lanka and subsequently to East Asia and Southeast Asia , Buddhist thinkers have covered topics as varied as cosmology , ethics , epistemology , logic , metaphysics , ontology , phenomenology ,

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4200-442: The "highest yoga tantra initiation"; realizing the emptiness of inherent existence of the mind is the "fundamental innate mind of clear light, which is the subtlest level of the mind", where all "energy and mental processes are withdrawn or dissolved", so that all that appears to the mind is "pure emptiness". As well, emptiness is "linked to the creative Void, meaning that it is a state of complete receptivity and perfect enlightenment",

4300-563: The "mirror of the universe" and the "pure mind". The Tao Te Ching claims that emptiness is related to the "Tao, the Great Principle, the Creator and Sustainer of everything in the universe". It is argued that it is the "state of mind of the Taoist disciple who follows the Tao", who has successfully emptied the mind "of all wishes and ideas not fitted with the Tao's Movement". For a person who attains

4400-502: The Abhidharma analysis was ultimate truth (paramattha sacca), the way things really are when seen by an enlightened being. The Abhidharmic project has been likened as a form of phenomenology or process philosophy . Abhidharma philosophers not only outlined what they believed to be an exhaustive listing of dharmas (Pali: dhammas), which are the ultimate phenomena, events or processes (and include physical and mental phenomena), but also

4500-585: The Brahmanical belief expounded in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad that the unchanging ultimate self ( ātman ) was indeed the whole world, or identical with Brahman . This concept is illustrated in the Alagaddupama Sūtra , where the Buddha argues that an individual cannot experience the suffering of the entire world. He used the example of someone carrying off and burning grass and sticks from

4600-469: The Buddha a belief counts as truth only if it leads to successful Buddhist practice (and hence, to the destruction of craving). In the "Discourse to Prince Abhaya" (MN.I.392–4) the Buddha states this pragmatic maxim by saying that a belief should only be accepted if it leads to wholesome consequences. This tendency of the Buddha to see what is true as what was useful or "what works" has been called by Western scholars such as Mrs Rhys Davids and Vallée-Poussin

4700-645: The Buddha must at least have taught some of these key teachings: According to N. Ross Reat, all of these doctrines are shared by the Pāli Canon of Theravāda Buddhism and the Śālistamba Sūtra belonging to the Mahāsāṃghika school. A recent study by Bhikkhu Analayo concludes that the Theravādin Majjhima Nikāya and the Sarvāstivādin Madhyama Āgama contain mostly the same major Buddhist doctrines. Richard G. Salomon , in his study of

4800-489: The Buddha rejects the personal authority of Brahmins because none of them can prove they have had personal experience of Brahman , nor could any of them prove its existence. The Buddha also stressed that experience is the only criterion for verification of the truth in this passage from the Majjhima Nikāya (MN.I.265): Furthermore, the Buddha's standard for personal verification was a pragmatic and salvific one, for

4900-509: The Buddha's death, some Buddhists such as Dharmakirti went on to use the sayings of the Buddha as sound evidence equal to perception and inference. Another possible reason why the Buddha refused to engage in metaphysics is that he saw ultimate reality and nirvana as devoid of sensory mediation and conception and therefore language itself is a priori inadequate to explain it. Thus, the Buddha's silence does not indicate misology or disdain for philosophy. Rather, it indicates that he viewed

5000-412: The Buddha's epistemic project is different from that of modern philosophy ; it is primarily a solution to the fundamental human spiritual/existential problem. Gautama Buddha 's logico-epistemology has been compared to empiricism , in the sense that it was based on the experience of the world through the senses . The Buddha taught that empirical observation through the six sense fields ( āyatanā )

5100-581: The Buddha's teachings as recorded in the Gandhāran Buddhist texts , we need to train the mind in meditation to be able to truly comprehend the nature of reality, which is said to have the Three marks of existence : suffering, impermanence, and non-self ( anātman ). Understanding and meditation are said to work together to clearly see ( vipassanā ) the nature of human experience and this is said to lead to liberation. Gautama Buddha argued that compounded entities and sentient beings lacked essence, correspondingly

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5200-514: The Jeta grove and how a monk would not sense or consider themselves harmed by that action. In this example, the Buddha is arguing that we do not have direct experience of the entire world, and hence the self cannot be the whole world. In this Buddhist text, as well as in the Soattā Sūtra , the Buddha outlines six wrong views about self: There are six wrong views: An unwise, untrained person may think of

5300-456: The answers to these questions as not understandable by the unenlightened. Dependent arising provides a framework for analysis of reality that is not based on metaphysical assumptions regarding existence or non-existence, but instead on direct cognition of phenomena as they are presented to the mind in meditation. The Buddha of the earliest Buddhists texts describes Dharma (in the sense of "truth") as "beyond reasoning" or "transcending logic", in

5400-407: The appearance of a permanent self in this world of change is the cause of suffering ( duḥkha ), and the main obstacle to the attainment of spiritual liberation ( mokṣa ). The most widely used argument that the Buddha employed against the idea of an unchanging ego is an empiricist one, based on the observation of the five aggregates of existence ( skandhā ) that constitute a sentient being, and

5500-487: The body, 'This is mine, this is me, this is my self'; he may think that of feelings; of perceptions; of volitions; or of what has been seen, heard, thought, cognized, reached, sought or considered by the mind. The sixth is to identify the world and self, to believe: 'At death, I shall become permanent, eternal, unchanging, and so remain forever the same; and that is mine, that is me, that is my self.' A wise and well-trained person sees that all these positions are wrong, and so he

5600-539: The causal relations between them. In the Abhidharmic analysis, the only thing which is ultimately real is the interplay of dharmas in a causal stream; everything else is merely conceptual ( paññatti ) and nominal. James Garbarino James Garbarino is an author and professor at Loyola University Chicago . He has specialized in studying what causes violence in children, how they cope with it and how to rehabilitate them. Garbarino has served as consultant or adviser to

5700-531: The cycle of philosophical upheavals that in part drove the diversification of Buddhism into its many schools and sects only began once Buddhists began attempting to make explicit the implicit philosophy of the Buddha and the early texts. The Four Noble Truths or "Truths of the Noble One" are a central feature to the teachings of the historical Buddha and are put forth in the Dharmacakrapravartana Sūtra . The first truth of duḥkha , often translated as "suffering",

5800-685: The death of a loved one, the collapse of a marriage, the alienation of a child, the failure of a business" shock them into reassessing their sense of meaning. Spiritual emptiness has been associated with juvenile violence. In John C. Thomas' 1999 book How Juvenile Violence Begins: Spiritual Emptiness , he argues that youth in impoverished indigenous communities who feel empty may turn to fighting and aggressive crime to fill their sense of meaninglessness. In Cornell University professor James Garbarino 's 1999 book Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them , he argues that "neglect, shame, spiritual emptiness, alienation, anger and access to guns are

5900-460: The desire to find a Middle Way between philosophical views seen as extreme. Edward Conze splits the development of Indian Buddhist philosophy into three phases: Various elements of these three phases are incorporated and/or further developed in the philosophy and worldview of the various sects of Buddhism that then emerged. Philosophy in ancient India was aimed mainly at spiritual liberation and had soteriological goals. In his study of

6000-513: The differentiation of "my" suffering and someone else's. Instead, an enlightened person would just work to end suffering tout court , without thinking of the conventional concept of persons. According to this argument, anyone who is selfish does so out of ignorance of the true nature of personal identity and irrationality. The main Indian Buddhist philosophical schools practiced a form of analysis termed Abhidharma which sought to systematize

6100-458: The doctrine of non-self , the "argument from lack of control", is based on the fact that we often seek to change certain parts of ourselves, that the "executive function" of the mind is that which finds certain things unsatisfactory and attempts to alter them. Furthermore, it is also based on the "anti-reflexivity principle" of Indian philosophy , which states an entity cannot operate on or control itself (a knife can cut other things but not itself,

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6200-423: The existentialist theme of "spiritual barrenness is commonplace in literature of the 20th century", which in addition to Eliot includes Ernest Hemingway , Faulkner, Steinbeck and Anderson. Film adaptations of a number of existentialist novels capture the bleak sense of emptiness espoused by Sartre and Camus. This theme of emptiness has also been used in modern screenplays. Mark Romanek 's 1985 film Static tells

6300-404: The eyes moisten with tears of great joy, and the hairs of the body stand on end, such a person has the seed of the mind of a complete Buddha; He is a vessel for teachings on thatness , and ultimate truth should be taught to him. After that, good qualities will grow in him. The Dalai Lama argues that tantric yoga trainees need to realize the emptiness of inherent existence before they can go on to

6400-446: The fact that these are always changing. This argument can be put in this way: This argument requires the implied premise that the five aggregates are an exhaustive account of what makes up a person, or else the self could exist outside of these aggregates. This premise is affirmed in other Buddhist texts , such as Saṃyutta Nikāya 22.47, which states: "whatever ascetics and brahmins regard various kinds of things as self, all regard

6500-526: The five grasping aggregates, or one of them." This argument is famously expounded in the Anātmalakṣaṇa Sūtra . According to this text, the apparently fixed self is merely the result of identification with the temporary aggregates of existence ( skandhā ), the changing processes making up an individual human being. In this view, a 'person' is only a convenient nominal designation on a certain grouping of processes and characteristics, and an 'individual'

6600-466: The gradual training also requires that a disciple "investigate" ( upaparikkhati ) and "scrutinize" ( tuleti ) the teachings. The Buddha also expected his disciples to approach him as a teacher in a critical fashion and scrutinize his actions and words, as shown in the Vīmaṃsaka Sutta . Some Buddhist thinkers even argued that rational reflection and philosophical analysis was a central practice which

6700-419: The highest happiness. This perspective sees immoral acts as unskillful ( akusala ) in our quest for happiness, and hence it is pragmatic to do good. The third meta-ethical consideration takes the view of not-self and our natural desire to end our suffering to its logical conclusion. Since there is no self, there is no reason to prefer our own welfare over that of others because there is no ultimate grounding for

6800-542: The historical Buddha, along with the related monistic Hindu theology which held that "everything is a Oneness" (SN 12.48 Lokayatika Sutta ). The historical Buddha also held that understanding and seeing the truth of non-self led to un-attachment, and hence to the cessation of suffering, while ignorance ( avidyā ) about the true nature of personality ( prajña ) led to further suffering and attachment. All schools of Indian philosophy recognize various sets of valid justifications for knowledge ( pramāṇa ) and many see

6900-408: The historical Buddha, which is the attainment of nirvāṇa , literally means "extinguishing" and signified "the complete extinguishing of greed, hatred, and delusion (i.e. ignorance ), the forces which power saṃsāra ". Nirvāṇa also means that after an enlightened being 's death, there is no further rebirth. In earliest Buddhism , the concept of dependent origination ( pratītya-samutpāda )

7000-413: The history of modern art and aesthetics . Following Davor Džalto 's argument on the modern concept of art, the gradual elimination of particular elements that traditionally characterized visual arts , which results in emptiness, is the most important phenomenon within the history and theory of art over the past two hundred years. The Buddhist term emptiness (Skt. śūnyatā ) refers specifically to

7100-418: The idea that everything is dependently originated , including the causes and conditions themselves, and even the principle of causality itself. It is not nihilism , nor is it meditating on nothingness. Instead, it refers to the absence (emptiness) of inherent existence. Buddhapalita says: What is the reality of things just as it is? It is the absence of essence. Unskilled persons whose eye of intelligence

7200-400: The inner void. In contrast to having an empty stomach, which is a clear feeling, having spiritual emptiness is hard to identify, so it fills humans with a "vague unrest". While people may try to resolve this emptiness by obsessively having sex, overeating, or taking drugs or alcohol, these addictions only give temporary satisfaction. When a person facing a crisis due to feeling spiritually empty

7300-399: The lama is claiming that what is thought to be real—our thoughts and feelings about people and things—"exists by being merely labeled". He argues that meditators who attain knowledge of a state of emptiness are able to realize that their thoughts are merely illusions from labelling by the mind. In Taoism , attaining a state of emptiness is viewed as a state of stillness and placidity which is

7400-595: The leadership of Urie Bronfenbrenner who began Head Start programs in the US. Garbarino has written on the causes of violent behavior in children and how they cope with stress . He has studied the impact of war on children, including children in Kuwait , Iraq , Bosnia , and Croatia . He has also conducted many interviews with children who have been convicted of violent crimes in the United States, concluding that abuse and neglect at an early age are contributing causes to

7500-525: The merging of the "ego with its own essence", which Buddhists call the "clear light". In Ven. Thubten Chodron's 2005 interview with Lama Zopa Rinpoche, the lama noted that "ordinary beings who haven't realized emptiness don't see things as similar to illusions", and one does not "realize that things are merely labeled by mind and exist by mere name". He argues that "when we meditate on emptiness, we drop an atom bomb on this [sense of a] truly existent I" and to realize that "what appears true...isn't true". By this,

7600-513: The middle" ( majjhena dhammaṃ desana ), which claims to be a metaphysical middle path between the extremes of eternalism and annihilationism , as well as the extremes of existence and non-existence. This idea would become central to later Buddhist metaphysics, as all Buddhist philosophies would claim to steer a metaphysical middle course. Apart from the middle way, certain basic teachings appear in many places throughout these early Buddhist texts , so older studies by various scholars conclude that

7700-407: The mind from the body. Gautama Buddha , however, realized that the mind was embodied and causally dependent on the body, and therefore that a malnourished body did not allow the mind to be trained and developed. Thus, Buddhism's main concern is not with luxury or poverty, but instead with the human response to circumstances. Another related teaching of the historical Buddha is "the teaching through

7800-417: The nirvanic life. The Buddha outlined five precepts (no killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, or drinking alcohol) which were to be followed by his disciples, lay and monastic. There are various reasons the Buddha gave as to why someone should be ethical. First, the universe is structured in such a way that if someone intentionally commits a misdeed, a bad karmic fruit will be the result. Hence, from

7900-492: The processes that give rise to suffering work, and also how they can be reversed. The removal of suffering that stemmed from ignorance ( avidyā ), then, requires a deep understanding of the nature of reality ( prajña ). While philosophical analysis of arguments and concepts is clearly necessary to develop this understanding, it is not enough to remove our unskillful mental habits and deeply ingrained prejudices, which require meditation , paired with understanding. According to

8000-429: The raft. It is also like medicine, in that the particulars of how one was injured by a poisoned arrow (i.e. metaphysics, etc.) do not matter in the act of removing and curing the arrow wound itself (removing suffering). In this sense, the Buddha was often called "the great physician" because his goal was to cure the human condition of suffering first and foremost, not to speculate about metaphysics. Having said this, it

8100-408: The real significance of Indian and Buddhist philosophy will be missed. For the Indian Buddhist philosophers, the teachings of Gautama Buddha were not meant to be taken on faith alone, but to be confirmed by logical analysis and inquiry ( pramāṇa ) of the world. The early Buddhist texts mention that a person becomes a follower of the Buddha's teachings after having pondered them over with wisdom and

8200-422: The role of the controller (and so is the self). On some occasions, a given part might fall on the controller side, while on other occasions it might fall on the side of the controlled. This would explain how it's possible for us to seek to change any of the skandhas while there is nothing more to us than just those skandhas. As noted by K.R. Norman and Richard Gombrich, the Buddha extended his non-self critique to

8300-469: The self is without essence ( anātman ). This means there is no part of a person which is unchanging and essential for continuity, and it means that there is no individual "part of the person that accounts for the identity of that person over time". This is in opposition to the Upanishadic concept of an unchanging ultimate self ( ātman ) and any view of an eternal soul . The Buddha held that attachment to

8400-441: The sense that reasoning is a subjectively introduced aspect of the way unenlightened humans perceive things, and the conceptual framework which underpins their cognitive process, rather than a feature of things as they really are. Going "beyond reasoning" means in this context penetrating the nature of reasoning from the inside, and removing the causes for experiencing any future stress as a result of it, rather than functioning outside

8500-403: The spiritual emptiness of life in the US suburbs. Wes Anderson 's 2007 film The Darjeeling Limited is about three brothers who "suffer from spiritual emptiness" and then "self-medicate themselves through sex, social withdrawal, and drugs." The 2008 film The Informers is a Hollywood drama film written by Bret Easton Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki and directed by Gregor Jordan . The film

8600-539: The subject of disputes between different schools of Buddhism, as well as between representative thinkers of Buddhist schools and Hindu or Jaina philosophers. These elaborations and disputes gave rise to various early Buddhist schools of Abhidharma , the Mahāyāna movement , and scholastic traditions such as Prajñāpāramitā , Sarvāstivāda , Mādhyamaka , Sautrāntika , Vaibhāṣika , Buddha-nature , Yogācāra , and more. One recurrent theme in Buddhist philosophy has been

8700-552: The surreal story of a struggling inventor and crucifix factory worker named Ernie who feels spiritually empty because he is saddened by his parents' death in an accident. Screenwriter Michael Tolkin's 1994 film The New Age examines "cultural hipness and spiritual emptiness", creating a "dark, ambitious, unsettling" film that depicts a fashionable LA couple who "are miserable in the midst of their sterile plenty", and whose souls are stunted by their lives of empty sex, consumption, and distractions. The 1999 film American Beauty examines

8800-565: The system as a whole. The Buddha's ethics are based on the soteriological need to eliminate suffering and on the premise of the law of karma . Buddhist ethics have been termed eudaimonic (with their goal being well-being) and also compared to virtue ethics (this approach began with Damien Keown). Keown writes that Buddhist Nirvana is analogous to the Aristotelian Eudaimonia , and that Buddhist moral acts and virtues derive their value from how they lead us to or act as an aspect of

8900-441: The teachings of the early Buddhist discourses (sutras). Abhidharma analysis broke down human experience into momentary phenomenal events or occurrences called " dharmas ". Dharmas are impermanent and dependent on other causal factors, they arise and pass as part of a web of other interconnected dharmas, and are never found alone. The Abhidharma schools held that the teachings of the Buddha in the sutras were merely conventional, while

9000-465: The universe is eternal or non-eternal (or whether it is finite or infinite), the unity or separation of the body and the self ( ātman ), the complete inexistence of a person after death and nirvāṇa , and others. In the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta , the historical Buddha stated that thinking about these imponderable issues led to "a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views,

9100-612: The violent behavior of these children. He has served as an expert witness involving issues of trauma, violence, and abuse in both civil and criminal trials. Garbarino and his coauthors have also conducted many interviews with other high school students and teachers about bullying and social problems at school to help understand ways to improve the school environment. Garbarino recommends that violence prevention begin at an early age by recognizing underlying causes and addressing them before they expand. He advocates programs that provide assistance to young at-risk children and parents, including

9200-401: The weekend, people may feel a sense of "existential vacuum" and emptiness. In political philosophy, emptiness is associated with nihilism . Literary critic Georg Lukács (born in 1885) argued against the "spiritual emptiness and moral inadequacy of capitalism", and argued in favour of communism as an "entirely new type of civilization, one that promised a fresh start and an opportunity to lead

9300-474: Was a later addition. according to Vetter and Bronkhorst, dhyāna constituted the original "liberating practice", while discriminating insight into transiency as a separate path to liberation was a later development. Scholars such as Bronkhorst and Carol Anderson also think that the Four Noble Truths may not have been formulated in earliest Buddhism but as Anderson writes "emerged as a central teaching in

9400-633: Was a major problem in the educated European middle class. In his 1919 lectures he argued that European culture became "empty of spirit" and "ignorant of the needs, the conditions, that are essential for the life of the spirit". People experienced a "spiritual emptiness" and their thinking became marked by a "lazy passivity" due to the "absence of will from the life of thought". In modern Europe, Steiner claimed that people would "allow their thoughts to take possession of them", and these thoughts were increasingly filled with abstraction and "pure, natural scientific thinking". The educated middle classes began to think in

9500-510: Was a volitional mental event, what Richard Gombrich calls "an ethicised consciousness". This idea leads into the second moral justification of the Buddha: intentionally performing negative actions reinforces and propagates mental defilements which keep persons bound to the cycle of rebirth and interfere with the process of liberation, and hence intentionally performing good karmic actions is participating in mental purification which leads to nirvana ,

9600-471: Was engaged in philosophical inquiry. Siddartha Gautama (c. 5th century BCE) was a north Indian Śramaṇa (wandering ascetic), whose teachings are preserved in the Pāli Nikayas and in the Āgamas as well as in other surviving fragmentary textual collections, collectively known as the early Buddhist texts . Dating these texts is difficult, and there is disagreement on how much of this material goes back to

9700-424: Was most likely limited to processes of mental conditioning and not to all physical phenomena. Gautama Buddha understood the world in procedural terms, not in terms of things or substances. His theory posits a flux of events arising under certain conditions which are interconnected and dependent, such that the processes in question at no time are considered to be static or independent. Craving ( taṇhā ), for example,

9800-498: Was necessary for the attainment of insight in meditation. Thus, Mahayana philosophers like Prajñakaragupta argue that one is not a yogi "merely because of meditation ", rather, one must meditate, listen to the teachings and understand them by "reflecting through rational inquiry" (yukti-cintāmaya). Only through this method which combined rational reflection and meditation will the wisdom that leads to enlightenment arise. Scholarly opinion varies as to whether Gautama Buddha himself

9900-429: Was taught in earliest Buddhism and question the authenticity of certain teachings and doctrines. For example, some scholars think that the doctrine of karma was not central to the teachings of the historical Buddha, while others disagree with this position. Likewise, there is scholarly disagreement on whether insight into the true nature of reality ( prajña ) was seen as liberating in earliest Buddhism or whether it

10000-515: Was the proper way of verifying any knowledge claims. Some Buddhist texts go further, stating that "the All", or everything that exists ( sabbam ), are these six sense spheres (SN 35.23, Sabba Sutta ) and that anyone who attempts to describe another "All" will be unable to do so because "it lies beyond range". This text seems to indicate that for the Buddha, things in themselves or noumena are beyond our epistemological reach ( avisaya ). Furthermore, in

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