Lama Yeshe in meditation, Assisi, Italy, 1983. Photo by Andrea Antonietti, courtesy of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

Lama Thubten Yeshe, who founded FPMT with Lama Zopa Rinpoche, gave a timeless teaching on emptiness and daily life in September 1983. Here’s an excerpt:

Good morning all of you. The director of Vajra Yogini institute has asked me to speak about the integration of emptiness into everyday life.

What is emptiness? Emptiness (Skt: shunyata) is the reality of the existence of ourselves and all the phenomena around us. According to the Buddhist point of view, seeking reality and seeking liberation amount to the same thing. The person who doesn’t want to seek reality doesn’t really want to seek liberation, and is just confused.

If you seek reality and you think that it has to be shown to you by a Tibetan Lama, that you have to look for it outside yourself, in another place—maybe in Shangri-la!—then you are mistaken. You cannot seek reality outside yourself because you are reality.

Perhaps you think that your life, your reality was made by society, by your friends. If you think that way you are far from reality. If you think that your existence, your life was made by somebody else it means that you are not taking the responsibility to understand reality.

You have to see that your attitudes, your view of the world, of your experiences, of your girlfriend or boyfriend, of your own self, are all the interpretation of your own mind, your own imagination. They are your own projection, your mind literally made them up. If you don’t understand this then you have very little chance of understanding emptiness.

This is not just the Buddhist view but also the experience of Western physicists and philosophers—they have researched into reality too. Physicists look and look and they simply cannot find one entity that exists in a permanent, stable way: this is the Western experience of emptiness.

If you can imagine that then you will not have any concrete concepts; if you understand this experience of physicists then you will let go of your worldly problems—but you don’t want to understand.

At the energy level there is space and there is body, and both have the same four elements. There is an interdependence between these two energies, the one around us and our own energy.

You check up, analyze: your skin, your bones, your nose, face are only energy, no more. If you try to separate them from energy then nothing will be left of your skin, your bones, your nose, your face. Everything is simply energy. If you understand the energy level of existence, if you really understand who you are, what you are in this way then you will break down your concepts, your uptightness, you will break down the preconceptions you have of your own self-existence. But no way! You are always uptight and that is why you have problems.

It seems to me that we twentieth century people are against nature, against reality, the very opposite of reality. Each moment we build up our artificial, polluted ego; we cover ourselves with heavy ego blankets—one, two, ten, one hundred blankets against nature, against reality.

In industrialized countries we disturb nature, we don’t appreciate the value of nature. Nature has its own value but we shake nature, we completely change it, we don’t respect the harmony of nature. We destroy this harmony because we don’t communicate with nature.

Modern life is the product of the intellectual mind, and we create it. The intellectual mind is superstition. We don’t understand reality, and the intellectual life that we live keeps us far from reality.

So we don’t accept what we are. We are always looking to cover ourselves with thick blankets and say “This is me.” We hide our own reality and run away from natural beauty, completely neglecting it. By not touching our reality our modern life becomes so complicated and we create problems with our superstitions. We are like a spider spinning his web, climbing on his thread then falling down; climbing up again and falling down again. In the same way we build our own intellectual web, a way of life, that is so complicated, that doesn’t touch reality, that is so difficult to live in. This construction arises from our own mind and does not arise from anything else.

If I said you are nothing, you are zero, that you are nothing that you think you are, then you would be shocked. “What is this monk saying?” But what if I say that it is the truth! In fact you are non duality, non self-existence. You do not exist, relatively or absolutely, as you think you do. If you really understood this then you would really gain satisfaction and peace. But as long as you hold on to the fantasy, concrete conception of yourself and project this wrong conception onto your environment, then no way will you understand reality! …

Excerpted from “How to Let Go: How to Integrate Emptiness in Everyday Life.” Lama Yeshe gave this talk at Institut Vajra Yogini, Marzens, France, on September 5, 1983. It was published in the FPMT’s Wisdom Magazine in 1984, shortly after Lama Yeshe’s death. This teaching also appears in the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive ebook The Enlightened Experience, Volume 2.

Through timely advice, news stories, and updates, FPMT.org and Mandala Publications share the wisdom culture inspired and guided by the teachings of FPMT founders Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche.