One for All and All for One

Dr. John Guy

Alexandre Dumas beautifully summarized Buddha’s View of Emptiness with his Musketeers’ pledge. Buddha deeply experienced the infinite web linking all sentient life. Only when we understand what Buddha meant by emptiness can we develop real compassion. I‘ve often wondered why compassion is such a necessary attribute. Why can we not be emancipated from Samsara with only a deep understanding of emptiness alone? Do I really need compassion as well?
In order to answer these questions we have to really examine what Buddha meant when he talked about emptiness. Does it mean that we are nothing at all? If we and everyone we meet are nothing, we would have no need for compassion. In the west our view of the world and how it works has been greatly influenced by scientists like Copernicus and Newton and the Greek philosophers who preceded them. In their world, all phenomena can be dissected and precisely described. Something is either black or white, it exists or it does not. This mechanistic view of the universe began to change with Einstein’s theories of Relativity and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
Dr. David Bohm summarizes contemporary physics interpretation of our universe most eloquently. “One is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical idea of analyzability of the world into separately and independently existing parts…We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent ‘elementary parts’ of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness (interpenetration) of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independently behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within the whole.”
Buddhists express the same idea when they call the ultimate reality Sunyata- Emptiness, or the Void. The phenomenal manifestations of the Void, like subatomic particles, are not static and permanent, but dynamic and transitory, coming into being and vanishing in one ceaseless dance of movement and energy. Being transient manifestations of the Void, the things in this world do not have any fundamental identity. Our individual selves and all we experience are inherently empty of autonomous existence. That does not mean that we and our experiences are nothing or meaningless. It means that these things do not exist independently. They can not stand alone. Everything, every living being, only manifests or functions in relation to every other thing or being. Your view of yourself and this newsletter which you are currently reading are mere approximations of reality.
The Avatmsaka Sutra is traditionally believed to have been delivered by the Buddha while he was in deep meditation after his awakening. In the last part of the sutra called the Gandavyuha, it tells the story of a young pilgrim, Sudhana, and gives a most vivid account of his mystical experience of the universe, which appears to him as a perfect network of mutual relations, where all things and events interact with each other in such a way that each of them contains, in itself, all the others.
The Tower is as wide and spacious as the sky itself. The ground is paved with innumerable precious stones of all kinds, and there are within the Tower innumerable palaces, porches,
windows, staircases, railings, and passages, all of which are made of precious gems…
And within this Tower, spacious and exquisitely ornamented, there are also hundreds of thousands… of Towers, each one of which is as exquisitely ornamented as the main Tower itself and as spacious as the sky. And all these towers, beyond calculation in number, stand not at all in each other’s way; each preserves its individual existence in perfect harmony with all the rest; there is nothing here that bars one tower being fused with all others intermingling and yet perfect orderliness. Sudhana, the young pilgrim, sees himself in all the towers as well as in each single tower, where all is contained in one and each contains the all.
The Tower in this passage is, of course, a metaphor for the universe itself, and it’s perfect mutual interpenetration. Interestingly, this sutra makes it clear that this interpenetration is an essentially dynamic interrelation which takes place not only spatially but also temporally. Once we begin to develop insight into emptiness as the interpenetration of all phenomena, we begin to realize our deep need for compassion. We no longer see ourselves as lonely autonomous islands pitted against the universe. We start to see the faint tentacles of the infinite web that connects us in an intimate way to everyone and every thing. We begin to sense the myriad of vibrations in this web. All others’ suffering touches us and our suffering becomes theirs. When we understand this, we realize that compassion for every other being is really compassion directed at ourselves. Emptiness becomes compassion. We all join with D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, “All for one and one for all”!