In one variation of the many flavors of Buddhist traditions, there’s a specific method for getting at the heart of reality that was championed by a Tibetan saint from the 14th century, Je Tsongkhapa. This method takes you through a series of thought exercises where your direct experience shows you what is real and what is not. With this method, you’re not operating on beliefs anymore, you’re simply taking all available information and doing the math.

The conclusion you lead yourself to is that everything (every thing) is empty of concrete, inherent existence and cannot exist from its own side as a separate, discrete, long-lasting thing for the simple reason that there is nothing that you can point to which does not depend on other things for its existence. Everything arises in dependence upon other things, hence the title for this dynamic, “dependent arising.” Je Tsongkhapa called the logic which clarifies dependent arising the “King of Reasonings.” It’s a deceptively simple method at first glance, but where it leads to has profound implications.

The thrust of the exercise goes like this: You take any thing, any object, either a physical object like an apple, or a conceptual object like a thought or the idea of you yourself, and simply observe that this thing, or any quality of this thing, depends on other things for its existence, therefore it is impossible that this thing or quality could exist independently on its own. It’s empty of existing from its own side.

However, the assumption has always been that we and all the objects we perceive are separate, discrete things, having a solid, objective reality, and that as one of those separate things, we are each living in a world that is separate from us. However, when you do this exercise and you can’t actually find any separately existing things or qualities of things, this reasoning dismantles that assumption. When you thread the needle like this, using ordinary logic to systematically walk your mind to the only possible conclusion, you’re left with a big “Huh?”, a state of not knowing. If you can stay there for a little bit, a new possibility presents itself.

For instance, no one ever questions that the thing we call an apple exists. On a conventional level, this particular object functions perfectly in a way that we can all agree is how an apple should function. But, where exactly is apple? Is apple in the skin of the apple? In the meat? In the seeds? In the stem? Was there an exact point in time when the apple appeared, when the flower became the fruit? Can you separate apple from the sun, the soil, the water, the tree? Where exactly does the tree end and the apple begin? “Apple” entirely depends upon so many causes, conditions and parts, and most importantly on a mind which designates it as apple. The seemingly separately existing thing called apple arises in dependence upon other things for its existence. Therefore, it’s impossible for “apple” to exist out there, on its own, from its side, as a discrete, separate object. It exists, but it’s unfindable other than as a conceptual designation on a conventional basis. The apple exists — but only in dependence on other things.

In another example, observe how a candle flame exists. When we light a candle, the heat of the match causes the solid wax to become a liquid, and this liquid wax is drawn up through the cotton wick. Combustion occurs as the molecules of liquid wax reach a certain temperature, combine with the oxygen in the air, causing the liquid wax to become a gas as it ignites and light is produced. The combusting gases are lighter than the surrounding atmosphere, which causes the flame to rise, giving it that candle flame shape. As the gaseous wax/oxygen mixture is exhausted, combustion ceases and the residue of this reaction is dissipated into the air. It is the act of millions of molecules transforming in this way over and over again which we call a candle flame, making it really more of a verb than a noun. It is in no way a solid thing, independent, permanent and unitary, yet this is how we view it. A candle flame does exist that we can speak about, point to, light, or extinguish, but when we break it down like this and try to actually find the candle flame, it is no more than a flurry of activity, arising in dependence upon a momentary confluence of causes and conditions. It is ultimately empty of existing in the way that it appears, and all seemingly separate objects are exactly like this, whether they are physical or mental phenomena.

We assume that we have knowledge of ourselves and the world, and this assumption functions nicely when interacting with others. I can say, “Would you like an apple?” or, “I lit the candle.” and we both know what that means. However, the thinking, conceptualizing mind goes further than that, adding on an additional layer that isn’t there. That conceptualizing mind not only divides the world up into separate things, but makes them appear to us as possessing their Is-ness, quality, and substantiality from their side.

Observe how an object’s Is-ness, its quality of being a separate, independent thing seems to spring forth from the object, to seemingly announce itself from the side of the object. No thought or analysis is involved in this deception, it just appears automatically. From a Buddhist perspective, this innate habit is carried in our subtle consciousness through lifetimes. We look at a chair, and its chair-ness seems to project outward from the chair to our eyes. It seems to own its qualities. Not only does it seem to own the quality of chair-ness, but all of the add-ons the mind builds upon it, like, “it’s my grandmother’s chair,” or “the chair I fell off of when I was two.” You can clearly observe this illusion of independence when you bring a chair home from a tag sale. It previously meant something to the owner, but those particular qualities get left behind the moment you put it in your trunk.

Many problems arise the moment that one of those add-ons becomes, “It’s my chair” because we ourselves are a dependent arising as well. Upon examination, we can’t find a separate, discrete, self-existing Me anywhere. This Me that we think we are, which we’ve built up a lifetime of stories about, is simply not there. There is a small-m me that does exist, that comes and goes, that thinks and sits and cooks, and we can all agree that you’re you and I’m me and we can sit together and play cards. But the conceptualizing part of our minds unconsciously, innately adds on an additional layer, a big-M Me that is profoundly separate from you and we grasp at this Me as the overriding reality of our world, the primary point of reference for all our thought, words and actions. This belief cascades into a lot of problems and this was Lord Buddha’s key insight.

Feeling that we are a separate thing from life is, by default, a state of imagined incompleteness where we yearn for something that we can’t quite put our finger on and can’t ever seem to arrive at, which forces us to go on a hunt for it through people, things and experiences — even spiritual experiences. If I’m under the spell of this false self, it causes a violent pushing away of things which I don’t want and a grasping at the things I do want, as if there existed some final resting place where I could succeed in achieving one or the other. Lord Buddha stated that all unhappy states of mind like hatred, fear, jealousy, blame, and pride spring from this dynamic of clinging to an inherently existing I, which in turn causes us to engage in negative behavior which reinforces our separateness but does nothing to quench it. The seed of all suffering is this clinging to an I which doesn’t and has never existed.

It’s impossible to be separated from the wholeness that we yearn for, because there is only the illusion of separation; we are never actually separate in the way that we imagine. The good news is that we can directly experience that this separateness is not real. Dependent arising is something we can observe for ourselves, and reflecting on it repeatedly, meditating on it, has the effect of destroying this illusion. It is said that even doubting that the big-M Me is empty of existing in the solid way that it appears has the power to rip the illusion to shreds.

Glimpsing the emptiness of the false self and other phenomena doesn’t instantly put an end to destructive states of mind, but it handicaps them tremendously and allows you to begin to see through them. These unpleasant states are the Me’s reaction to the world of duality — you can’t have pleasure without pain, light without dark, wealth without poverty, health without sickness, right without left. But when we begin the process of seeing reality clearly, then self-existent, solid phenomena begin to break down, and we no longer feel the need to control them.

Imagine what your world would be like if you no longer believed that you ended at your skin. That you had no boundary, no wall between yourself and your environment, other people, plants, rocks, planets, the entire universe. Then, taking care of others would become equally as important as taking care of yourself, there would be no difference in the two. This is why love feels so good and hatred feels so bad. In love, we are more in sync with how life actually exists, as the rigid sense of separation temporarily loosens.

Meditating on dependent arising starts out as a purely mental exercise, but when you engage repeatedly in this dissecting of what we took to be so, it triggers a deeper seeing of Tsongkhapa’s conclusion: that nothing exists from its own side and that all phenomena exist only through dependent designation. Reality continues to function, but without the solidity and separateness that we habitually project onto it.

The thinking mind creates complex, fleshed-out narratives and assumes them to be solid and unchangeable, allowing them to have power over us to either deliver or withhold something we want, and we’re all under the spell of our own particular story. When we believe that these stories have power over us, then they do. Taking the time to examine ourselves, other people, objects and situations and their accompanying narratives individually, to discover for ourselves if they truly exist or not in the strong way we feel they do is time well spent, and can go a long way to see life for what it is.

To reinforce the discovery that nothing exists from its own side, separate from our conceptual imputations, you can observe your beliefs in seemingly self-existent things that appear to jump out strongly at you, beliefs that trigger powerful attraction or repulsion. These can be people close to you, institutions, political figures, bank accounts, health problems, anything that causes your mind to be agitated in some way. These triggers are excellent examples of how we fabricate stories about our lives, offering us an inside look at the normally hidden way the mind works. The immediate benefit of using these triggers as meditation objects is that we can soften the upsetting story our mind is telling us about them, releasing them from our demands that they change somehow so that we can be happy, but the real prize is being released in total from all stories, enabling us to see the world as it is, right here, right now.

Try this short exercise: Bring to mind a recent occasion when you were triggered, when you were particularly angry, upset or indignant. The false, big-M Me appears very solid and real to us at these times. Holding this solid image of yourself in your mind, try to locate exactly where it is. Is it somewhere specific in your body? In your senses? Your feelings? Your thoughts? See if you can pinpoint where it is, its exact location. If it exists, it shouldn’t be that hard to find. But when we see for ourselves how this strongly grasped, solid sense of I can’t be found, something shifts within us, enabling a new perspective to dawn.

There’s no arguing that there is a me here, a body/mind that is something like a candle flame, somewhat constant but always changing from second to second, arising in dependence on millions of causes and conditions, but this me isn’t the problem. The problem me is the one we cling to as unchanging, separate, solid, and most importantly, vulnerable.

Meditating on the logic of dependent arising is something you can do in day-to-day life — you don’t need to be sitting on a cushion and burning incense. The other night my family and I went out with a powerful pair of binoculars to try to take a peek at the Neowise comet. We were a little late to the party and it had faded away, so we turned the binoculars on the moon, which was about 7/8ths full. Then we noticed that there were two very bright stars to the left of the moon, so we aimed the binoculars towards the stars. The “stars” turned out to be Saturn, with its ring, like a flat plate on an angle, and Jupiter, which appeared a little bigger. But lo and behold, what blew our minds was that we could see three of Jupiter’s (79!) moons, lined up in a straight line off to the planet’s right side. I’d never seen that before and it was like spotting a rare animal in the wild. I couldn’t quite grasp what I was seeing. We Googled it, and Jupiter is 550 million miles from Earth, an inconceivable distance.

But — we didn’t actually see Jupiter’s moons from their own side; what we were seeing was sunlight reflected off of the moons. That light enters my eyes and gives rise to a visual experience, but where that landing place is, I don’t really know. We say, “I saw the moons,” but if I do the above dependent arising exercises nicely, and simply talk myself through how these moons depend on their parts, their causes and conditions, and their designation, it’ll put me in my place. My thinking mind likes to put a label on it, calling it Jupiter’s moons, and then believes in the label as a real thing which exists out there independently, separate from me, when all that has happened is a dependently arisen experience, empty of any solid, self-established core. The moons, the light, the distance, vision itself, the label — all arise together in dependence; none of them can be found existing from their own side.

But in the very next instant, the thinking mind innately layers on a Seer, the one who sees, and thinks that it’s this small, limited, fragile, separate thing called Me, and then (and here is where the switch happens) we believe with all our hearts that the Seer came first, before the seeing. This is the plot twist in the story where we get kicked out of Eden by becoming separate from God/Life. Really looking to see if we can find this self-existent Seer is the beginning of the end of separation.

Oddly, the only thing that will soothe the separate Me is its own absence — not its annihilation, but the discovery that it never existed in the way it appeared. This meditation on dependent arising can, in time, deliver that absence, laying bare the ground of reality as it is. In a direct seeing of reality, the subject/object dichotomy loosens, but there is no inherently existing one who sees this. This is a paradox that doesn’t make any sense at all to the thinking mind. Conceptual thought can’t go there and this is pretty frightening to the thinking mind. Not knowing is cause for alarm to the thinking mind; knowing is the mind’s raison d’être, for in knowing things it can believe that it’s safe. If the mind can believe that it knows, then it can fabricate a story of safety, which is essential in a world where there is absolutely no control.

Understanding the way things exist is what Lord Buddha calls wisdom, and he asserts that this is the key to dissolving the feeling that we’re incomplete. But again, this isn’t something that must be believed in; it’s something that is experiential, that you can show yourself and see directly. To make our minds more pliable for this comprehensive shift in how we see things, Buddha recommends that we cultivate love and compassion. I find this to be a terribly fascinating piece of information — that love is an integral component of a radical shift in one’s reality. I also find it interesting that you can come across this same advice in many spiritual traditions. Take this quote from Jesus: “Love your enemies, do good to those who harm you.”

Let that sink in for a minute. What kind of a person says things like that? (I get a kick out of that refrain in the Bible, where Jesus says something that blows everyone’s mind, then the author reports: “…and they were astonished!”) This revolutionary advice is mirrored in a line from a prayer by Langri Tangpa, a tenth-century Tibetan Buddhist saint:

Whenever I see beings who are wicked in nature and overwhelmed by violent negative actions and suffering, I shall hold such rare ones dear, as if I had found a precious treasure.

Pretty astonishing. This isn’t just your routine, pious admonition to be good and to behave ethically, which most people can sign on to. We can all see the benefit of being honest, not hurting people, trying to help others and so forth, but this seemingly unhinged suggestion to love your enemies is on a whole other level; it draws an unambiguous line in the sand. And just as you might expect, from the false Me’s point of view it’s also a terrible idea.

When someone appears to make our life difficult, the natural reaction of the false Me is to retaliate or somehow get rid of them, for in its imagined separateness it believes that the person out there is a threat to its happiness that must be conquered or changed. But Jesus and Langri Tangpa are on to an essential insight: radical love and compassion are crucial because the attitudes and behaviors they express are in sync with how things actually exist — as profoundly interdependent. In placing all blame neatly at the doorstep of the separate Me, they are inviting us to level up our game, to enter an entirely new paradigm that has the power to dissolve our separateness and its negative repercussions.

On a fundamental level, we are not the separate, permanent, independent things we think we are, and when we believe we’re separate, this sets up a tug of war with reality that we can never win. Developing powerful love and compassion opens us up to how things actually exist, to reality itself. Training our mind in loving our enemies is a vital tool to facilitate this opening, a powerful key to stopping our problems. Fostering the birth of deep compassion — especially a turbo-charged version of it that Buddhists call the “Mind of Enlightenment” — is considered so important in some forms of Buddhism that it is cultivated at the beginning and end of all practices as your singular motivation.

Granted, loving one’s enemies is a tall order, but the teaching recommends not starting with your mortal enemy — start with the guy who cuts you off in traffic and work your way up. Tell yourself a different story. Maybe he’s rushing to get to the drugstore to buy medicine for his sick child. It’s an equally valid story as thinking he’s a selfish jerk. Tibetan Buddhism is masterful at this kind of thought transformation, using situations that agitate the mind as fuel for developing compassion, and has produced reams of material on these techniques.

Developing love and compassion is made more possible through developing wisdom, so these states of mind not only support each other, they are inseparable. When we finally begin to disconnect from the false image of ourselves as the small, limited, fearful, separate Me, we realize that there is no inherently existing Me to defend, protect, or put first, which is the pivotal shift that allows authentic love and compassion to arise. Compassion makes space in the heart for wisdom to take root, while wisdom gradually undermines the ingrained habit of organizing life around the false Me.

It’s good to remember that nothing is exempt from emptiness. Lord Buddha himself, his teachings, bondage, liberation, wisdom and compassion — none of these exist from their own side; they too are dependent arisings, dependent on their causes, conditions, and conceptual designation, and therefore are empty. But this does not mean that nothing exists or that nothing matters. Rather, things do not exist in the concrete way we thought they did, and this is what makes growth and positive change possible. If things possessed their own fixed nature from their own side, change would be impossible. Being empty, they are workable.

Meditating on emptiness takes the charge off our imagined separateness, which is an extremely lonely and uncomfortable place to inhabit when it feels real. We don’t feel it all the time — when we lose ourselves in nature, in a good book, while dancing, cooking, or creating art, the neurotic sense of Me recedes for a while — but we all know the feeling of being possessed by fear, anger, guilt, jealousy, or dread, when it feels like it’s us against the world. Discovering for ourselves that this Me is merely a phantom is powerful medicine for what ails us.

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Footnote

In the Gelugpa–Prāsaṅgika tradition following Je Tsongkhapa, to say that phenomena are “empty” does not mean that they do not exist, nor that they exist only as mental events. Rather, emptiness refers to the absence of inherent existence: things do not exist from their own side, independent of causes, conditions, parts, and conceptual designation. Phenomena exist conventionally and function reliably, but they are unfindable under ultimate analysis apart from dependent designation on appropriate conventional bases. Emptiness and dependent arising are therefore two ways of describing the same reality.