Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

by enlightenment and liberation. For

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all of this means informing your responses

Emptiness, you may recall, is, roughly speaking, the idea that things don’t have essence. And the perception of essence seems to revolve, however subtly, around feelings; the essence of anything is shaped by the feeling it evokes. It is when things don’t evoke much in the way of feelings—when our normal affective reaction to things is subdued—that we see these things as “empty” or “formless.”

The view from nowhere, the view of impartiality, shouldn’t be confused with a view of indifference. The view from nowhere can—and, I’d argue, should—involve concern for the well-being of all people (and, if we’re going to be true to Buddhist teaching, and to fairly straightforward moral logic, concern for the well-being of all sentient beings†). The point is just that the concern would be evenly distributed; no one’s welfare is more important than anyone else’s.

And here’s the key thing: seeing these little, almost trivial truths on a regular basis, in a disciplined way, can help us see bigger, less trivial truths.

And because the Buddha’s prescription is a prescription not just for liberation from suffering but for right conduct, the word dharma’s denotations include a specifically moral one. Indeed, dharma can be thought of as natural law both in the sense of the law that the physical universe complies with and the moral law that we strive to comply with.