Emptiness and Compassion

The present paper aims at clarifying the relationship between the idea of emptiness (śūnyatā) and that of compassion (karunā) in Mahayana Buddhism. Mahayana scriptures say that a Buddha in its Dharma-body (dharma-kāya) is constantly in deep and immovable meditation, having no concepts, uttering no words, and making no acts, but that compassionate, salvific acts for all beings are manifested from him naturally and effortlessly. This theory posed a question of how Dharma-body having no concepts can teach beings and make salvific acts. Mādhyamika philosophers are of the opinion that although Dharmabody of a Buddha teaches nothing, manifested Buddha-bodies (nirmāna-kāya), emanated from Dharma-body, teach Dharmas in various ways to all beings, and that the compassionate acts by the manifested Buddha-bodies are caused by the powers of the previous vows and merits, moral as well as religious, which the Buddha avowed and accumulated respectively while he was still a Bodhisattva. Eckel likens this interpretation to a rock thrown into a karmic pond : Although the rock itself lies deep on the bottom, ripples created by the thrown rock continues for a long time to spread out on the surface of the water. The interpretation of the Mādhyamikas, however, left unsolved the problem of how Dharma-body is able to create manifested bodies. The difficulty of the Mādhyamika explanation is due to the fact that they regarded Dharma-body as impersonal truth of emptiness. Unlike the Mādhyamikas, Yogācāra thinkers recognized the existence of ground cognition (ālayavijñāna), which manifests all erroneous phenomena, including ego-consciousness, conceptural thinking, as well as false representations of unreal external objects. This ground cognition, however, is transformed into pure wisdom bereft of all concepts and representations by means of 'transformation of the basis' (āśrayaparāvrtti) or enlightenment that is made possible by prolonged and earnest religious practices. This pure wisdom is none other than Dharma-body of a Buddha. Through the transformation of the basis, the former ego-consciousness is changed into great compassion, and the previous concepts and representations into worldly but pure knowledge. Thus, the Yogācāra philosophers successfully explain how Dharma-body, which is not impersonal emptiness but the absolute wisdom, makes all salvific acts by emanating various manifested Buddha-bodies endowed with compassion and worldly knowledge. In the last section the author briefly explains relationships between the threefold Buddha-body and the four kinds of wisdom of a Buddha, both of which were expounded by the Yogācāra Buddhists