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

by Robert Wright

Though I’m using Weber to illustrate the Buddhist idea of emptiness, I should concede that he is in some ways not well suited to that purpose. He did study extensively in the Zen Buddhist tradition, but he has also studied in, and been influenced by, Hindu traditions. And there are parts of Buddhism he rejects—the most important of which, for our purposes, is the term emptiness. He considers the term, at best, misleading. He says he’s never known anybody who reached great contemplative depths and reported, “Oh, it’s a big void.” His own experience of the world is too rich to just call it empty without qualification. “I’ve used words like empty fullness or full emptiness,” he says. But whatever you want to call Weber’s experience of the world, it sounds very much like what Rodney Smith describes: a world in which things don’t have distinctive essences that set them sharply apart from one another. Though Weber, like Smith, can of course tell the difference between a chair and a table and a lamp, and responds appropriately to each, these items don’t project independent identities as forcefully as they used to; there’s a continuity to things. “There’s not that differentiation between them and their background,” Weber says. “They’re all one stuff.” He sometimes describes this “stuff” they seem to be made of as a kind of energy, but “there’s no differentiation in energy or how you feel about them.”