The main body of the yoga meditation begins with the shunyata mantra, first, it’s significant that the words of this mantra are the original Sanskrit – just hearing or reciting them imparts great blessings.
Also, this mantra contains a profound explanation of the pure, fundamental nature of both human beings and all other existent phenomena. It means that everything is spontaneously pure – not relatively, of course, but in the absolute sense. From the absolute point of view, the fundamental quality of human beings and the nature of all things is purity.
We need to understand what the mantra means by nature, or natural. Much of the time we are unnatural; we go against our nature. Our ego tries to be clever and intelligent; it’s always dreaming up ways to generate hatred, anger and desire, but that’s bad, negative intelligence. It creates an artificial self and then believes that this artificial self is the real me: “This is me; look how beautiful I am.” We present an artificial emanation to ourselves, believe that this false image is real, and then present ourselves to others in that way.
As long as we’re on this kind of psychological ego trip we can never be natural. In order to touch our fundamental nature we have to go beyond our false self. When we do, we touch purity.
Thus the shunyata mantra also shows that the self-pity wrong conception that constantly repeats in our mind – “I’m hopeless, I’m impure, I’m a bad person, I’m evil, I can’t do anything, I can’t help myself, I can’t help others” – is completely deluded and an unnatural way to think. In other words, Lord Buddha’s philosophy and psychology teach us that we should not believe that we are totally negative or sinful by nature. That’s absolutely incorrect. Our fundamental nature is pure. The artificial cloud projected by our ego is not our nature; it’s just something fabricated by our intellectual ego. Therefore, we should disregard this wrong view and just be natural, as we are. – Lama Thubten Yeshe
The absence of inherent existence in all phenomena, which was explained by the Buddha in the sutras of the second turning of the Wheel of Dharma, and further elaborated upon by masters such as Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti.
Generally, all philosophies tend to fall into one of two extremes: ‘eternalism‘: believing in the existence or permanence of something, or ‘nihilism‘: believing in non-existence. Shunyata goes beyond both of these extremes, because it is neither permanent nor non-existing, and that is, ultimately, how things are.”
