Barriers to Emptiness

 teaches how to overcome the barriers that prevents perceiving the world as an extraordinary network of intricate relationships.

The goal of Mahayana Buddhism, and Zen in particular, is to open the mind to the truth of Emptiness, the view that impermanence, interdependence, and intimacy underlie all existence. The entire phenomenal world arises from causes and conditions and lacks a persisting fixed self-nature. All forms are interdependent; nothing stands alone unaided in the world. The heart of Buddha’s teaching is captured in his statement, “I teach the nature of suffering [dukkha] and its cessation.” The study guide Barriers to Emptiness, addresses suffering and cessation. It introduces a means to expand the understanding of the nature of dukkha and the means to resolve its effects. This guide facilitates an individual’s understanding of the first and third Noble Truths by examining the operation of the conditioned states that are the root of suffering (1st Noble Truth), and the Liberated Activities that express the cessation of suffering (3rd Noble Truth). It communicates how the barriers of conditioned states operate within an individual, and then describes the freedom of Liberated Activities that appears with transformation of the barriers. Learning to regard dukkha as a focus of study and reflection, and to recognize how to work with conditioned states, promotes right view and right thought, the first two steps on the Eightfold Path.

The six examples are the barriers that the six traditional Buddhist schools of India focused on resolving.

A SUMMARY TABLE OF THE SIX EXAMPLES OF BARRIERS TO EMPTINESS