Śūnyatā can't "arise", in a #Buddhist sense of being dependent on a condition, because śūnyatā occurs only when all conditions for sensory experience are absent (śūnya). It can't "cease" because there is no present (aśūnya) condition you can remove to make it stop.

This is why śūnyatā is an asaṃskṛta (unconditioned) dharma. A mental state that does not depend on the presence of conditions.

#buddhiststudies #buddhism

@jayarava
I have trouble sometimes in shifting gears between the later Mahayana notion of sunyata and the EBT one. It'll always just be a product and extension of anatta with a big dash of anicca at heart for me, which of course the suttas' version is too-- but I think of it as a direct insight rather than a practice to undertake.

@AndyLowry I doubt anyone really understand what was intended by anattā. Anicca is fine as far as it goes, but it's really quite a banal observation: http://jayarava.blogspot.com/2011/09/everything-changes-but-so-what.html

@jayarava
Banal, sure, but it's not something people are much aware of while going about their day.

When my most recent teacher did his intro-to-Buddhism courses, he'd say that "it's not that there's no self, it's just that if you look for it you can't find it," which I thought was not bad especially in that setting where someone may have never encountered such a radical concept before.

@AndyLowry The problem is explaining why this is a problem.

I don't have to "look for a self", I *am* a unique being *however you look at it*. Everytime I turn around, *there I am*. Same with enlightened people too, btw. All have distinct and recognisable personalities.

Just because some Iron Age Brahmins were obsessed with ātman, doesn't mean I am. I'm not. Never have been.

@jayarava
Okay, but there are times when that autopilot sense-of-self just dissolves. It can be brought back pretty easily and usually does by itself anyway, after an hour or so. I've seen several possible explanations for that, usually having something to do with artificially wearing out the brain's Default Mode Network and forcing its shutdown (which is why and how koans work when they do, I reckon). Anytime something like that has happened with me, there was an intense unresolvable-by-logic problem I desperately wanted an answer to. Never used koan study myself, despite belonging to the Linji bunch that focuses on it, just happens by accident every time.

The best writing I've seen on the topic of no-self is that of the Christian ex-nun Bernadette Roberts. Her "The Experience of No-Self" is astonishing, partly because the poor woman had a permanent (!) kensho or awakening or whatever and then spent the rest of her life trying to explain and describe it using Christian terminology.

Always been a little sad that she didn't have any Buddhist friends who could have told her that words already existed to use in talking about the things she was talking about, but then again reading through her decisions on what to call things and how to discuss them is interesting in its own right.

Her book costs more than I think it should, but is available for loan on the trusty Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/experienceofnose00robe

@AndyLowry Hmm.

An experience that is interpreted as "no self" does not mean "I have no self" any more than the experience of watching the sun go down means "the sun revolves around the earth". Right?

@jayarava
The sun DOES go around the earth, but the math is much clumsier from that perspective. 😜

It's not the self that disappears, but the everyday normal ever-present internal "me" reference almost all of us rely on all the time. An event happens, but it doesn't happen to me, it just happens, if that makes any sense.

The temporary, in and out experience of this kind of thing isn't a big hairy mystical deal. Musicians and athletes get in states like that all the time, where everything just happens by itself. "Flow" and all that. The biggie experience where death isn't a problem anymore and everything you see seems to be as though for the first time seems to me to be just a more thorough version of the same basic thing.