One of the reasons why it is regarded as difficult is because it is translated as “emptiness”.
A great spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle translates it beautifully as “spaciousness”.
He also pointed out that Jesus’s word “kingdom of heaven” expresses the same concept as 空 KUU (SUNYATA) / spaciousness.
It can be explained in Japanese ZEN kanji characters.
Japanese Buddhism uses Kanji character 空 KUU to express Pali SUNYATA.
In English it is translated as “emptiness”, it is also considered as emptiness by many Japanese people.
However, by using Eckhart Tolle’s word, 空 KUU (SUNYATA) is “spaciousness”, that beautifully connects the dots like below.
Let’s see Kanji characters:
We have two Kanji characters to express sky, one is 空 KUU and another is 天 TEN.
- 空 KUU means sky, spaciousness, emptiness, and air
- 天 TEN means sky, the heavens, and 天国 TENGOKU means the Kingdom of Heaven
You can see both characters imply the meaning of the sky.
This can testify Tolle’s teaching that Buddha and Jesus pointed the same thing “sky/the heavens/spaciousness”, not just “emptiness”.
SUNYATA 空
=spaciousness 空
=sky 空・天
=the Kingdom of Heaven 天
Why sky? Why spaciousness? are the important teaching of Jesus and Buddha?
Eckhart Tolle says:
“Because when you look up into the heavens, the sky– in many languages, it’s the same word. Then what is it that you see? You see the vast spaciousness. There are clouds here and there. And beyond the clouds, this vast spaciousness. There isn’t actually anything there. That is the sky or heavens is not an object. Or that we have a word for it, but the fact that we have a word for it does not mean that the sky is actually something that has an actual existence.
What I mean by that, I mean you can never arrive there. You can go up in a balloon or in a rocket, and you can never say, “Oh, I’m now in the sky.” Where is it? You can never touch it, because it’s just an appearance. The sky is just spaciousness.You can go into a cloud, but not into the sky. The sky, you never reach it. If you go up in a rocket, suddenly you’re in outer space. And there’s no more sky. Just absolute spaciousness. “
Tolle’s word, for me, always helps my understanding of difficult Buddhism terms.
If our world/universe is “spaciousness”, it can be no-thing/empty, at the same time, it can be infinite possibilities. That is the teaching of Buddha and Jesus.
In a book called “The Teaching of Buddha” ( Society for the Promotion of Buddhism, 1975, p.562)
It defines 空 KUU (SUNYATA) as Non-Substantiallity;
This is the concept that everything has neither substance nor permanence and is one of the fundamental points in Buddhism. Since everything is dependent upon causation, there can be no permanent ego as a substance. But, one should neither adhere to the concept that everything has substance, nor it does not. Every being, human or non-human, is in relativity. Therefore, it is foolish to hold to a certain idea or concept or ideology as the only absolute.”
By looking at the meaning of the words with Kanji made a lot more sense to me, which was an interesting experience.
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