The Sky, the Tree, & the Lawn

Reflections on the Dharma

The sky is existing today and it's a beautiful blue color with scattered clouds. Only, it isn't existing, it's not today, there's nothing blue up there, and clouds aren't real.

Our minds evolved to have a Graphical User Interface that allows us to interpret reality in some way—in a way that aids our survival. The easiest way to think about things is in terms of categories and, if possible, binary oppositions. We think in terms of "this" vs. "that" or "me" vs. "you," reifying complex phenomena into simple categories. The brain operates on essentialist pattern-recognition software and always simplifies things as much as it can. The brain pretends that compositions and abstractions are singular concrete entities with a specific essential nature.

So we get the construct of a "sky" but seldom question what the sky is. There's a nigh infinite number of random particles floating in the atmosphere and the light from the sun undergoes Rayleigh scattering when it shines through them, causing the wavelengths of light that reach our eyes to be such that our brains interpret the sky as blue. There is no blue screen up there—there's nothing blue there at all, and no thing corresponding to sky. There's just an unfathomably large number of atoms floating up there and interacting with each other. And each of those is not a single coherent thing either but a composition, a cluster of other things interacting. The sky is not a thing. It lacks essence. It's ultimate nature is emptiness (emptiness in the Buddhist sense of lacking essential nature at its core—lacking any essence that makes it what it is).

I look at the tree and at the lawn and my brain likes to categorize things and reify them, giving them names so that it can pretend that they are single unified beings with some essence or "self-nature." If I look for the essence of the tree, there's no there there. It's composed of a trunk and bark and leaves...but these aren't real things either. They're impermanent and fleeting—temprory compositions that arise interdependently with other things. The whole mass of the tree boils down to myriads of disparate chemical reactions. The lawn where I am meditating isn't a thing. There's dirt, rocks, grass, dandelions, clover, ants, dead insects, bird poop, dead plant matter, some compost, some trash. The lawn is a construct. It pertains to "conventional reality" and not to "ultimate reality." It's not really real.

I said the sky is beautiful today but also that it's not today. What is today? I don't mean to ask what day of the week but rather to inquire into the ultimate nature of "today"? Today isn't a thing. It's a construct. It's a linguistic and social convention that we have created in order to facilitate coordination between people and to make sense of past events. Ultimately, there is only the present moment. No one ever experiences yesterday or tomorrow. And even the concept of a "day" is totally a construct. It only exists in a relative manner. From the ultimate point of view, there's no such thing as a day. The thing is empty, devoid of essence, but we have made it into a reality via convention. It's a useful myth.

I also said that there are clouds up there in the sky. But what are clouds? They're just clusters of water vapor. The cloud isn't a concrete thing but a sort of epiphenomenon that emerges as a result of lots of water vapor being close together. It's like a mirage, an illusion.

You may say, "But not everything is like a lawn or a cloud. Some things are really real." Perhaps so, but the really real is nothing that we know about or interact with or can even fathom. Neither science nor philosophy seems to have located it. Even if we turn inwards and use introspection to examine ourselves, we find emptiness. There is no essential self-nature there—no core being or unified real thing, just a composition, a construct, an illusion. I have thoughts that randomly enter my mind, cells in my body, atoms and chemical processes, emotions, sensations, relationships and social roles, etc. Which of these things is the essential, defining characteristic of who I am? The idea of "I," "me," or a "self" is no more real than the sky. Thinking that the self is ultimately real is about like thinking that the sky is a unified thing and not a convenient metaphor that makes it easier to think about a world that is more mysterious and unfathomable than we could ever imagine.

And the heart of the Buddhadharma, as far as I understand it, is this: most of our suffering—our anxieties, fear of death, fear of failure, doubts, shame, embarrassment, etc.—springs from this illusion that the self (and other things) are really real. We have attachments and desires that are natural enough but we live in a world where all things are fleeting. All things come to an end. Everything is impermanent. The utopia we build today will be gone tomorrow. The hell we are going through today will also be gone tomorrow. It's all just a dynamic process or flow and nothing really lasts. If we can come to realize—to really internalize—the reality of emptiness, we can let go of attachments and clinging and learn to be happy going with the flow and simply being a bubble or a wave temporarily manifesting on the surface of the vast sea of interdependently arising phenomena.

The Mahayana would go a step further and say that we should cultivate loving kindness towards all living things and devote ourselves to the bodhisattva path, vowing to seek the well-being of all sentient beings. This entails wanting to assist in the liberation of all beings from the cycle of suffering by helping them to see the true nature of reality. Original Buddhism allowed for a self-interested quest for enlightenment but the Mahayana, carrying Buddhist first principles to their logical conclusion, said there can be no self-interested attainment of nirvana because self-interest assumes a distinction between "self" and "other"—and if you haven’t transcended that duality by realizing it’s illusory nature, then you can’t attain nirvana.