Karma and Emptiness
A Tibetan framework for reducing your suffering
Buddhist philosophy has been immensely helpful to me. It’s given me effective tools and an overarching framework for managing my anxiety and other unpleasant states of mind. More broadly, there’s been a surge of Western interest in Buddhist ideas over the last few years. I suspect this is because these ideas are so compatible with the spirit of inquiry in the scientific worldview.
I was looking for a Buddhist community to practice with when I moved to NYC. To my pleasant surprise, I serendipitously found one based on a Tibetan lineage. Specifically, Je Tsongkhapa’s lineage. Given that it’s around 2500 years old, “Buddhism” isn’t a monolith. Rather, it’s a collection of lots of different lineages and beliefs. This post is about two ideas that seem to be fundamental in the classes I’ve taken from Je Tsongkhapa’s lineage.
How malleable is your reality?
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
- George Box
Imagine that someone shows you a pen. In that moment, your mind’s instinctive response is to label that constellation of cylindrical plastic and metal as a “pen”. If you close your eyes and take a step back from this label of “pen”, many diverse labels spring into your imagination. For example, the pen could be a “hair stick”. Or a paper hole puncher. Perhaps the pen could be a hundred other things. What’s more, it seems that not everyone on this planet seems to instinctively label the pen as a “pen”. When you were an infant, you didn’t see it as a “pen”. Maybe you saw it as a chew toy or something to throw around. If you visit an adult in an isolated tribe in the Amazon, they won’t instinctively perceive and label it as a “pen”.
Clearly, the “pen”-ness of the pen isn’t something that’s present in the pen. In fact, it’s empty of any such essence or narrative. If it actually did possess such a fundamental essence, then everyone would perceive it as a “pen”. To be clear, this isn’t to say that the pen isn’t real! It’s absolutely real. It’s real for you. Your mind instinctively and forcibly labels that stimuli as a pen, because its primary function for you is a pen. And something caused this primary function to change over time.
Moreover, the specific experience you have of the pen is totally unique to you. Put another way, “objective reality” isn’t a complex enough idea to adequately encapsulate what reality seems to be. What you’re experiencing at every moment is definitely real. But your experience is idiosyncratic to you. Everything you see, touch, hear, smell, think, etc. is real because those things function in that way for you, in the moment that you perceive them. However, like the pen, your mind takes this combinatorial explosion of stimuli that don’t have an essence or narrative, and it assigns labels to them.
The idea that the reality we’re forced to experience is malleable over time due to the inherent absence of a fundamental essence in all things, is called emptiness.
What causes this reality to change?
Well, if reality is indeed malleable in this way, what causes it to change? Why do you label a pen as a “pen”? According to Buddhist philosophy, the reality that you’re forced to experience in the present moment is conditioned by the movements of your mind in the past. Specifically, it’s the accumulation of your mind observing your thoughts, speech and actions.
Your mind is something that’s susceptible to habituation. That is, whatever thoughts, speech and actions you take in the world eventually become the habits of your mind. If you act generously in the world, then your mind becomes that much more likely to force you to perceive generosity in the world. It’s similar to how your reality was forced to present you with a “pen”. If you’re someone that often thinks deeply cynical thoughts, at least some of your actions are likely to be cynical in nature. This in turn is likely to force you to perceive more cynicism in the world, potentially creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This framework is quite liberating because it gives you a blueprint for how you can start changing the texture of your reality. By the time you’ve reached a moment where you’re forced to perceive and label something in a specific way, it’s too late to change that moment. However, you can take advantage of the moment to plant helpful seeds via your thoughts, speech and actions, that will hopefully ripen into forcing you to experience a better reality in the future.
This idea that our actions can change the reality we’re forced to experience is called karma. In Sanskrit, “karma” literally means “action”. Despite popular belief, it isn’t some cosmic scale keeping balance of merit and demerit. It’s just a framework describing how the movements of one’s mind can eventually shift one’s reality.
Closing thoughts and an invitation
Taken together, the ideas of emptiness and karma are profound. The emptiness of the fundamental essence of things implies that although what you perceive in the moment is real, it’s capable of changing in the future. Karma gives you a framework for how you can acquire more agency in manipulating the reality that you’re forced to experience. Within this worldview, the goal is to keep engaging in good karma (i.e. “action”), and keeping emptiness at the forefront of your mind, until your mind forces you to experience a reality of pure bliss.
“O monks, just as a goldsmith tests gold by rubbing, burning, and cutting before buying it, so too, you should examine my words before accepting them, and not just out of respect for me.”
- The Buddha from the Sutra of Dense Array
Don’t take these ideas dogmatically. Reality doesn’t behave this way just because some random monk a thousand years ago said it does. I'm not entirely sure that reality truly behaves this way. Dogmatism goes against the spirit of inquiry that’s at the core of Buddhism. Take these ideas as a provocation to become curious about the true nature of your reality. Run an experiment! Try putting these ideas into practice and see if it works for you. If the ideas don’t work, become curious about why they didn’t work.