They don't understand emptiness

This modern group of sham Buddhists who make up the Empty-ists don’t really understand emptiness (shunyata).  They are reading it as there is no independent existence, or the same, they are reading it as universal emptiness of independent existence.  This particular view adds up to nihilism no matter how one might slice and dice it with words.  

But emptiness, as far as the Buddha is concerned, means the emptiness of something, which is to say, in whatever place something is absent, one observes that particular place to be empty of it.  Zen master Tsung-mi explains it this way:  “When there is nothing in a jar, the jar is said to be empty—it does not mean that there is no jar.”  We can say that all the Five Aggregates are empty of reality.  If we look into them no reality or svabhâva can be found.  They are illusory or barren.  This is their emptiness.  We can also empty out this kind of emptiness (i.e., the lack of reality).  This is the emptiness of the absolute which is empty of the unreal.

Rather than play with Nagarjuna's poisonous snake of emptiness, the true adept of the Buddha first strives to attain pure Mind that is one without a second.  This allows him to see that everything is only a configuration of Mind.  With such a Mind it is easy to see that phenomena, of themselves, are empty of true reality and that pure Mind is empty of unreality.

Comments

[psychics]

Thumbs up guys your doing a really good job.

[Advent Child]

Most Zen guys believe that having a "wow" moment of kensho makes you a Buddha. It would be the same as saying seeing the White House makes you the president of the USA. Seeing something for a second is not becoming what you see, even if seeing "pure Mind". It's not that simple. It takes aeons, in fact, lifetime of cultivation, for followers of esoteric Buddhism / path of the Sages (including the "sudden enlightenment, gradual cultivation" path of Zen).