I’ve been having fun with the word “Nothing.” I think there is something extremely powerful and provocative about contemplating Nothing, no thing. And there is something even more transformative, indeed the pinnacle of enlightenment practices in Tibetan Buddhism—Dzogchen and Mahamudra—and that is Do Nothing. In these practices, which I will maybe post about soon, you simply rest in the nature of mind, and literally, do nothing. You don’t focus on the breath; you don’t try to calm your mind; you don’t try to maintain any type of meditation at all; you don’t even try to remain aware—if you feel groggy and fall asleep, great. But you also don’t “do” things like chase thoughts, and you don’t go into the future or the past, or any of the other “doings,” except that if they happen, you do nothing to them, just relax and let them be! Just continue to settle your mind, and be aware of the true nature of experience (without “doing” the being aware). So simple it’s not simple, and really hard. This is the highest teaching. I just touched on it as a reference. There is nuance: it’s not exactly doing nothing, as it requires having had previous direct experience of the nature of mind; and then rest in that and do nothing. Longchempa’s Buddhahood without Meditation is an authoritative text on Dzogchen practice.

I also want to touch on the other “Nothing” in Buddhism: Emptiness, or Shunyata in Sanskrit, and སྟོང་པ་ཉིད་ (pronounced: Tong Pa Ni) in Tibetan. Shunyata is the ultimate nature of reality, which, when realized and the realization is stabilized (that’s where Dzogchen and Mahamudra come in), is absolute liberation, aka Buddhahood. Now, here and there on this website I’m casually and jokingly using Nothing as a translation of Shunyata, and it is incorrect. There is a different word in Sanskrit and Tibetan for “nothing,” and the Buddha didn’t use that word to describe what he recognized as the ultimate nature of reality. He used the word that literally means “Emptiness.” Emptiness is not Nothing. Only nothing is nothing, it is no thing, there is nothing there at all, not even a vacuum or space, as that is still something. Emptiness refers rather to “being empty” or devoid of any inherent independent existence, permanence, and unchanging nature or essence. It is therefore devoid of conceptual designation because anything definitive you can say about it would be its essence, and it doesn’t have that. The Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is one of modern science’s approximations of this. I wish they had called it Heisenberg’s Emptiness Principle… so many more physicist would be reading Buddhism. Those who have, have found it very enlightening, pardon the pun.

So you can’t say anything in the affirmative about anything in reality… because if you dig deep enough, it isn’t actually there in that way. All you can say is that it isn’t this or that. Since the thing in question is not separate from you experiencing the thing and it’s not this or that, it’s often called “non-dual.” And even there, you are still using a concept to define something, so not even that. Emptiness is beyond all concepts frameworks, even of existence and non-existence. It is the Mystery. And that is the ultimate reality of you, of the screen in front of you, the room you are in, of thoughts, of the mind, the soul, everything. That’s right, it’s not nothing, it’s everything. A great text on this is Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness.

And here is where the two come together.
Doing nothing is resting in the mystery.

But for the sake of provacative and humorous quotes, I will mangle this Emptiness into “Nothing.” Simply, so that I can say silly things like

Nothing is everything.