| All is empty. All is meaningless. The essence of the Panna Sutra is the message of empty relativity. The Panna Sutra is a famous Buddhist guidance and teaching book.
It consists only of 262 Chinese characters, but the message is deep and extraordinary. Buddha’s enlightenment shows us deep analysis of the mind with thorough introspection. He suggests that a mind is comprised of 5 elements including perception, thinking, behavior, emotion, and representation, but these elements are always changeable and unstable, and therefore we can not rely on them. Also, leading a life with an unreliable mind is like the wandering and changing of clouds. All material things are deemed dissolute and are lost in the end.
Our existence has the same destiny as all material things. Our lives are the same as clouds, winds, fire, and are an extremely small part of the endless cosmos. Our bodies are false beings as a transient combination of materials, and the mind is also a false phenomenon with which many people are preoccupied. All these false beings result in pain and agony in our lives. Our major illness is preoccupation with unbelievable phenomena and the belief in absolutely real beings. The only resolution of this illness suggested by Buddha is the complete elimination of all thinking and desire. This message sounds like Bion's dictum that is without memory or desire. Buddha's demand sounds impossible in modern life, but Freud's demand to free the mind, similarly, is not easy.
I reviewed the Panna Sutra from a psychoanalytic perspective, but this work seemed useless or unnecessary in trying to explain the big tree with a seed. Here I did not analyse the Panna Sutra itself, but focused on its messages. Buddha’s messages reflect ancient Indian thought and philosophy, the need to cut off all pleasure, desire and thought. Buddha seems to reject the separation and individuation, maturation process, and devote himself to unification and integration, the infantile omnipotent oceanic feeling state, and the auto-generating condition of ecstasy. In reality we can regress to childhood or go forward to the aging process.
Metaphorically speaking, the mind is like a dish. Emptiness is a precondition for fullness. An empty mind is like a storm in a cup. If an analyst's mind is empty, he or she will be able to better understand the subject's mind, except for the fee problem. I believe this is true empirically in all psychotherapeutic settings, but not realistically. |
