The Buddha's different presentations of selflessness should be viewed in order as providing background for the Buddhist view of dependent arising. When Buddhists speak of dependent arising, they do so in terms of afflictive phenomena that are causes of suffering, whose consequences are suffering. This is explained in terms of the twelve links of dependent arising, which comprise those factors completed within one cycle of rebirth within the cycle of existence. Therefore, dependent arising is at the root of the Buddhist view.

If you do not understand selflessness in terms of dependent arising, you will not understand selflessness completely. People's mental faculties are different. For some, when it is explained that all phenomena are empty of inherent existence, it may seem that nothing exists at all. Such an understanding is very dangerous and harmful, because it can cause you to fall into the extreme of nihilism. Therefore, Buddha taught selflessness roughly for persons with such mental faculties. For practitioners of higher faculties, he taught selflessness on a subtler level. Still, no matter how subtle the realisation of emptiness may be, it does not harm their conviction in phenomena's conventional existence.

So, your understanding of emptiness should complement your understanding of dependent arising, and that understanding of emptiness should further reaffirm your conviction in the law of cause and effect.

This teaching is given by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Courtesy of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

[ top ]