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

by Robert Wright

Look again at the final line of that passage from the Samadhiraja Sutra. It says that all things are “without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.” This sutra isn’t denying the reality of the buzz-saw sound waves that were hitting my ear, the “qualities” I was observing, but it seems to be saying that the “essence” I normally see beneath the qualities—essence of buzz saw—is a matter of interpretation; it’s something I’m choosing to construct, or not, from the qualities. Essences don’t exist independent of human perception. This is the version of the emptiness doctrine that makes sense to me, and it’s the version most widely accepted by Buddhist scholars: not the absence of everything, but the absence of essence. To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we’re naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a