Some notes on Collapse, Harding, Nishitani and Sunyata
December 2003
Collapse of a rich and fragile selfhood
It is possible, in one moment, for everything that someone has thought themselves to be personally, to collapse. All the ideas that the person has held about themself, all the ideas about their accomplishments and their status, suddenly fall flat, down to nothing.
It is as though something that inhabited a rich three dimensional space – my life – suddenly evacuates to leave a footprint, of zero height.
Writing these notes is an attempt to explore what’s left when such a momentary collapse of “selfness” occurs - an experience in which one’s true being seems to reside in a field (experienced as an unknowable matrix or deep structure).
The notes consist of a quick look at the work of Douglas Harding (1909- ), then more detailed quotations from the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani (1900-1990).
In the following, comments in square braces, i.e. [], are mine.
Harding and the visual void
The true emptiness of seeing has been well described by Douglas Harding. This emptiness is available to anyone (who can see) at any time, and consists of meditating on the fact that the field of seeing is vacant – all that we see is content. In other words, when we look we see only the scene, and no artefacts of the seer, no “screen”.
(The quotations below are from D.E. Harding, On Having No Head – Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, Arkana 1986. See also the Headless Way web site.)
…the method [of the headless way] is quite simple and the same throughout. It consists of ceasing to overlook the looker – or rather, the absence of the looker.
(p 51)
..this vacancy is filled to capacity with the scene.
(p 10)
This emptiness (vacancy) can be applied to all the senses. We can have the experience of being filled to capacity with hearing, say of music or bird song, so there is an absence of a listener. (My exhibition Bird Field was an investigation of myself as “field” when listening to bird song.) And, of course, the emptiness of sensing points directly to the emptiness of consciousness itself, as Harding points out:
..this Central Void which is my very life-source.
(p 11)
The experience of momentary collapse, as described above, means however that no “way”, headless or otherwise, is at that moment necessary. The vacancy of consciousness in a personal sense is thrust upon one in a shocking way. And, by the way, the veracity of symbols is revealed, as for example when a hand movement becomes an immediate literal response, rather than merely a learned devotional act (see mudra).
Nishitani and the field of emptiness (Sunyata)
The remaining quotations are from From Keiji Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness trans. Jan Van Bragt, University of California Press 1982. They relate to the experience of emptiness, or vacancy; to what is described by Nishitani as the field of emptiness (the Buddhist idea of sunyata).
It is important to distinguish the “emptiness” of Nishitani and Harding from that of certain Western philosophers. As Nishitani says:
In contrast to the field of nihility [as, for example, in Nietzsche and even more so in Sartre] on which the desolate and bottomless abyss distances even the most intimate persons or things from one another, on the
field of emptiness [sunyata] that absolute breach points directly to a most intimate encounter with everything that exists. Emptiness is the field on which an essential encounter can take place between entities normally taken to be most
distantly related, even at enmity with each other, no less than between those that are most closely related.
(p 102)
It is also important to distinguish emptiness from the idea of emptiness:
As the absolute near side, emptiness cannot, of course, exist some “where” as some “thing”. Whatever is represented as emptiness, or posited as emptiness, is not true emptiness. True emptiness is nothing less than
what reaches awareness in us as our own absolute self-nature. In addition, this emptiness is the point at which each and every entity that is said to exist becomes manifest: as what it is in itself, in the Form of its true suchness.
(p 106)
By the “absolute near side” I take Nishitani to mean what we are directly aware of, for example when the “collapse” I referred to above occurs. The collapse, by momentarily destroying a constructed “selfhood”, leaves only an austere “near side” of awareness to register its void nature. This is quite a different thing from the “far side”, which I take to mean ideas of emptiness obtained by mentation, viewed through the lens of a “rich and fragile selfhood”.
For example, in Christianity it is sometimes said that Christ is “nearer then hands and feet” and this could possibly be a near side (particularly if Christ is understood as immediate awareness – as Eckhart Tolle so understands Christ); whereas a gleaning of the personality of Christ from the stories of the Gospels (possibly for the purposes of potential emulation) could be thought of as a “far side”.
Also central to Nishitani’s thought is the inextricable linkage between entities that in the West would often be taken to be incompatible opposites. For example, he speaks of death-life (as death-sive-life), the “sive” connector being used to indicate that the terms it connects are two poles of an inseparable prior unity. Hence on being:
Being is only being if it is one with emptiness [sunyata]. Everything that is stands on its own home-ground only on the field of emptiness, where it is itself in its own suchness. Even when we speak of things
reappearing in their substance, we mean only a substantiality that emerges from a unity with emptiness.
(p 124 –125)
And:
Within every human being a field of absolute non-form opens up as a point indeterminable as “human being” or some other “what”. To say that man becomes manifest as man from such a point is nothing other than the
original meaning of the claim that he exists as a man.
(p 125)
Here follow three uncharacteristically simple statements from a single page, which seem to me of particular practical importance to our daily lives, in the sense of how we locate our “selfhood”:
For us, the field of emptiness is something that we are aware of as an absolute near side. It opens up more to the near side than we, in our ordinary consciousness, take our own self to be. It opens up, so to speak, still closer to us than what we ordinarily think of as ourselves. In other words, by turning from what we ordinarily call “self” to the field of sunyata, we become truly ourselves…..
This means that the field of the so-called self, the field of self-consciousness and consciousness, is broken down. In a more elemental sense, it means that we take leave of the essential self-attachment that lurks in the essence of self-consciousness and by virtue of which we get caught in our own grasp by trying to grasp ourselves. It also means that we take leave of the essential attachment to things that lurks in the essence of consciousness and by virtue of which we get caught in the grasp of things in trying to grasp them in an objective, representational manner.
The self is not merely what the self is conscious of as self. The field of sunyata within which the world and things become possible opens up at the home-ground of the self as a self that is truly on the
home-ground of the self itself, that is, the original self in itself.
(p 151)
Who of us does not spend at least some of our lives “caught in our own grasp by trying to grasp ourselves”? In other words, our thoughts arise within our constructed “selfhood”, and turn back to habitually grasp the notions of ourselves – a viscous cycle of unreality, if we admit that the entire construction of “selfhood” can at any time collapse.
So what of the nature of consciousness? Nishitani speaks as follows:
All consciousness as such is empty at its very roots: it can only become manifest on the field of emptiness. Consciousness is originally emptiness.
Put in more general terms, there is a non-consciousness at the base of all consciousness, though not in the sense of what is called the “unconscious”. The realm of the unconscious, no matter how deeply it reaches
into the strata underlying consciousness, remains after all continuous with the realm of consciousness and on a dimension where, together with consciousness, it can become the subject of psychology. We speak of a non-consciousness here to
indicate that the unconscious as such is also empty from its very roots up.
(p 153)
If the proceeding position is accepted there may well be implications here for contemporary psychological and therapeutic practices.
In this final quotation, Nishitani comes close to elaborating on my experience of the “collapse of a rich and fragile selfhood” (my italics below):
At the ground of all knowing from the standpoint of the “subject”, there lies an essential not-knowing. The standpoints of consciousness and discursive (discerning) intellect and intuitive intellect are broken. The
standpoint of the subject that knows things objectively, and likewise knows itself objectively as a thing called the self, is broken down. This not-knowing is the self as an absolutely non-objective selfness, and the self-awareness that
comes about at the point of that not-knowing comes down to a “knowing of not-knowing”. This self-awareness, in contrast to what is usually taken as the self’s knowing of itself, is not a “knowing” that consists of the self’s turning to itself
and refracting into itself. It is not a “reflective” knowing. What is more, the intuitive knowledge or intellectual intuition that are ordinarily set up in opposition to reflective knowledge leave in their wake a duality of seer and seen, and
to that extent still show traces of “reflection”.
(p 154)
None of this, of course, is to say that the “rich and fragile selfhood” is in error. On the contrary, it is a natural psychic development. It is useful, however, to see selfhood as it really is, as both rich and fragile, yet also to realise that what once has collapsed can do so again, and maybe will do so today….
Thought vacancy
Harding’s visual vacancy is “filled to capacity with the scene”. By contemplating with Nishitani we can further sense the unreality of a selfhood orchestrating thoughts (also termed a “thinker”).
When thinking occurs, the field is filled to capacity with the thought. However, there arises the allusion (the thought) that there is a thinker. All that is happening is that other thoughts are occurring (which refer to previous thoughts), maintaining this allusion of thought-maker.
In such a way the delicate silvery web of selfhood is strengthened and maintained . The fact that it can completely collapse shows its basic unreality. What is left, what has reality, is the field, the capacity for thought-making, the thought vacancy. As Traherne said, “essence is capacity”.