In the last post, I offered my revised version of the Heart of the Prajanaparimita, titled: The Earth Holders’ Heart Sutra. Take a look at the text in the previous post before reading further because this post begins to unlock the Sutra’s meaning.

Like the original Heart of Prajnaparamita, The Earth Holders’ Heart Sutra aims to dislodge the reader’s habitual thought patterns. Humans have a habit of thinking of things as fixed in space and time, solid, and in possession of a beginning, middle and end. But, this way of seeing leads to suffering. As spiritual creatures, we can look instead into the emptiness of all forms, feelings, perceptions, ideas, and even the emptiness of our own awareness. Let me give you an example of what I mean.

When we see a bear while hiking in the mountains we think, “Ah, there is a bear. It is about 600 pounds, loaded with sharp teeth and strong muscles, dangerous to humans. It was born from a mamma bear and someday it will likely die in the wild. Its life will be over and its body will rot into the soil.” If you were to have these thoughts in every day historical reality, you would not be wrong. But, as spiritual creatures, we do not dwell in historical reality alone. We know there is an ultimate reality that is equally obvious to the human eye when we look.

In ultimate reality we see the bear is empty of a separate self. It is fish, berries, clouds, river, soil, and sun. If you take away the river or poison the soil, there is no bear. This is not a foreign concept to ecologists because the study and protection of complex natural relationships is our bread and butter.

As a profession we are also good at seeing beyond birth and death. The bear’s life did not begin from nothing at “birth.” It is a continuation of evolutionary history and it manifests out of conditions in a particular kind of biological community. After its “death,” the bear will continue in its offspring and the many life forms benefitting from its organic waste. Even the bear’s legacy of claw marks through tree bark is part of the life cycle of the forest.

Seeing the bear as river and soil, as cubs and decaying tree bark, is seeing the bear as empty of a separate self.

Emptiness is the truth of all things; everything is a continuation of everything else. We can see our clothing as the cotton plant, the sheep, the worker in India, or the plastic soda bottle. Our shoes are the continuation of cow, rubber tree, and oil field. Nothing exists in the cosmos—at any scale—that is solid, unchanging, or independent. This is why The Earth Holders’ Heart Sutra says, there is “no [fixed] species, no sunset, no city, no ecosystem, and no environmental catastrophe.” Global warming too is empty of a separate self.

When we understand climate change as a condition dependantly co-arising with everything else in this present moment, then we also understand climate change is not a fixed monster with solidity and momentum. Knowing this changes everything.

The truth of emptiness is fact; it is not poetry or religious belief taken on faith. It is science. In my next post I will discuss the science of emptiness and why the truth of emptiness is inspiring to professional and citizen activists.