[MD] What's Emptiness?

[david buchanan]

"The MOQ says that what sometimes accidentally occurs in an insane asylum but occurs deliberately in a mystic retreat is a natural human process called dhyana in Sanskrit. In our culture dhyana is ambiguously called 'meditation'. Just as mystics traditionally seek monasteries and ashrams and heritages as retreats into isolation and silence, so are the insane treated by isolation in places of relative calm and austerity and silence.... 
This Western treatment of dhyana is a beautiful example of how the static patterns of a culture can make something not exist, even when it does exist. People in this culture are hypnotized into thinking they do not meditate when in fact they do.
Dhyana was what this boat was all about. It's what Phaedrus had bought it for, a place to be alone and quiet and inconspicuous and able to settle down into himself and be what he really was and not what he was thought to be or supposed to be. In doing this he didn't think he was putting this boat to any special purpose. That's what the purpose of boats like this has always been ... and seaside cottages too ... and lake cabins ... and hiking trails ... and golf courses ... It's the need for dhyana that is behind all these.
Vacations too. ... how perfectly named that is ... a VACATION, an emptying out ... that's what dhyana is, an emptying out  of all the static clutter and junk of one's life and just settling into an undefined sort of tranquility.
That's what Lila's involved in now, a huge vacation, an emptying out of the junk of her life." (Lila, page 375-6)  [dmb adds: In the story line, Lila is below deck in a catatonic state, clinging to her "baby".]

"Americans don't have to go to the Orient to learn what this mysticism stuff is about. It's been right her in America all along. In the Orient they dress it up with rituals and incense and pagodas and chants and, of course, huge organizational enterprises that bring in the equivalent of millions of dollars every year. American Indians haven't done this. Their way is not to be organized at all. They don't charge anything, they don't make a big fuss, and that's what makes people underrate them.   Phaedrus remembered saying to Dusenberry just after that peyote meeting was over, 'The Hindu understanding is just a low-grade imitation of THIS! This is how it must have really been before all the clap-trap got started'." (Lila, page 408)