Such feelings may be short, light, and easily forgotten, or they may lead to profound
depression, ennui, or an abaissement du niveau mental (Jung 1971: 451, 765). But
while all of these result from the fact of impermanence or emptiness, they are
emotional responses which are being experienced. This is different from the meaning
of emptiness as it is used in Buddhist philosophy, the absence of any permanent,
eternal, absolute, or unchanging essence in either things or people. There is no such
thing as emptiness which may itself be experienced. One cannot experience an absence
of something. (It is important to note that in some forms of Buddhism there is
discussion of direct, intuitive comprehension of emptiness, but that this is said to
occur only in very advanced, subtle meditative states, and is something very different
from the emotional experiences Gunn identifies.) Speaking of the ‘experience of
emptiness’ creates the danger of reifying emptiness as something that can be
experienced. It is in order to avoid just this reification of emptiness that Madhyamika
asserts the emptiness of emptiness.
Related to Gunn’s use of the idea of experiencing emptiness is the very difficult
issue of the epistemological status of experience (Pickering 1997:xii; Varela et al.
1991:15–33; Petitot et al. 1999:1). Certainly one of the ideas widely held in religious
studies and now becoming increasingly an issue in psychology is the assertion that
experience is irreducible and, therefore, an unquestionable source of valid knowledge.
Sometimes this argument is limited to what is called religious experience, which is
defined as experience of the transcendent absolute, but this simply creates a circular
argument.
This way of thinking about particular kinds of experience as inherently
self-validating enters contemporary American religious studies from the Romantic
emphasis on the irreducible character of experience as a defense of religion
(McCutcheon 1997:60). By analogy with biblical fundamentalism, this might be
called ‘experience fundamentalism’. Recent philosophy of religion has given this view
a renewed vitality as an epistemological proof for the existence of God. Not only is
this doctrinally problematic for Buddhism, which is atheistic, but there are
philosophical problems with the notion of an epistemology based on irreducible
experiences. The teaching of interdependence asserts that everything that exists is the
result of causes and conditions, and that when those causes and conditions change,
then existing things will change as well. Therefore, neither experience nor valid
knowledge can be irreducible, i.e. they are empty of any permanent, eternal, absolute,
unchanging essence. The value of experience in Buddhist practice and philosophy,
and in the interaction with psychology, cannot simply depend upon a kind of
experience fundamentalism, any more than it can depend upon a belief in substantive
essences or materialism. As Young-Eisendrath and Hall have expressed it:
the phenomenal experience of an emotion-laden image depends on the context
in which it arises, just as other images depend on the intersubjective world in
which they arise. From a Buddhist point of view, images that arise in core
emotional states are ‘real’ as much as the phenomenal world is real. Buddhists
do not privilege the material world as the generator of phenomena. They takeRICHARD K.PAYNE 179