Until the Sky Empties Itself of Names

Notes on awakening, impermanence, and the quiet refusal to escape the world

You cannot fix what does not exist.

The Bodhisattva Condition

We are told to find our purpose.

It starts early—career counselors, well-meaning friends, the soft-focus books that promise a map to meaning. The guidance counselor’s office with its motivational posters, slightly water-stained. The personality tests that sort you into neat categories: introvert, achiever, helper. We carry the question like a talisman: Why am I here?

I remember the exact afternoon I stopped believing in the question. Late September, the light already taking on that thin quality that precedes winter. I was sitting in a meditation hall in Santa Fe, the kind of place where people pay good money to eat quinoa and examine their suffering. The teacher, a former investment banker turned dharma instructor—there’s always that conversion story—was talking about the bodhisattva vow.

Buddhism, particularly the Mahāyāna kind, doesn’t answer that question. It dismantles it.

Not violently. More like the way fog erases a coastline—gradually, then all at once.

The Ache of Meaning

The search for purpose assumes that life is a problem to solve, a riddle with a correct solution. We imagine ourselves as protagonists in a bildungsroman, documenting our growth journey, accumulating wisdom toward some final revelation. But to a Mahāyāna practitioner, that assumption is itself the cause of suffering—dukkha. The craving for coherence keeps the wheel of samsara turning.

I used to keep journals, dozens of them, black Moleskines filled with attempts to narrate myself into significance. Reading them now is like watching someone try to photograph wind. All that effort to pin down a self that was never solid to begin with.

In this cosmology, life is not a straight line with a moral at the end. It is a cycle—birth, death, rebirth—spinning through cause and effect. Nothing permanent, nothing personal, only motion. The Sanskrit term is pratītyasamutpāda: dependent origination. Everything arising from conditions, nothing standing alone.

We are heirs to the myth of progress, to Aristotelian teleology, to the idea that everything has a purpose—that time moves forward and meaning accumulates. We imagine enlightenment as the ultimate promotion: climb enough mountains, meditate enough hours, and one day you’ll arrive at your truer, calmer self. The self you were always meant to be, waiting at the end of the path like a prize.

Mahāyāna says: there is no mountain, and there is no self climbing it.

There is only this moment, and the next, each one empty of inherent meaning, each one complete.

The Empty Sky

‘Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.’ The line from the Heart Sūtra lands like a riddle you feel before you understand.

I first encountered it in a used bookstore in North Beach, the kind with cats sleeping on the philosophy section. The translation was awkward, academic, but something in those words made me put down my coffee. Form is emptiness. The cup, the hand holding it, the afternoon light through dirty windows—all of it both there and not there.

Emptiness—śūnyatā—is not nihilism. This is the first thing they tell you, though it takes years to believe. It’s the recognition that nothing possesses an independent, permanent essence. The self, the body, the moon reflected in a puddle—all of it exists only through conditions, through relationship, through what Nāgārjuna called the endless web of designation.

The light reaching your eyes right now comes from a star already dying. The breath in your lungs has been shared by strangers and oaks and oceans. The calcium in your bones was forged in the heart of an exploding star billions of years ago. Nothing exists by itself.

To cling to a solid self is like trying to cup smoke. To insist on a personal ‘purpose’ is to mistake the mirage for the road.

And yet we do it, moment after moment. We talk ourselves into existence: I am the kind of person who. I always. I never. As if identity were a coat we could hang in the closet at night, unchanged.

The Bodhisattva’s Refusal

If the Theravāda path seeks individual nirvana—the blowing out, the exit from the cycle—the Mahāyāna bodhisattva does something stranger. They stand at the threshold of liberation and turn back.

They vow: Beings are numberless; I vow to save them.

It’s an impossible promise. A logical contradiction. How can you save numberless beings? How can you save anyone when there’s no one to save, no solid self to do the saving?

This isn’t sainthood. It’s realism, once you’ve seen through the illusion of separateness. Compassion (karuṇā) and wisdom (prajñā) are not moral choices but natural consequences of seeing clearly. Like how you automatically reach for someone who’s falling, before thought enters the equation.

Wisdom sees there is no self; compassion acts as though there were.

The bodhisattva moves through the world doing what must be done, knowing no one is doing it. They change diapers, answer emails, sit with the dying. Not because it will add up to something, but because that’s what the moment requires.

I think of my grandmother in her last months, how she would fold and refold the same towel, trying to make sense of a world that had stopped making sense. The aide who sat with her, a woman from Haiti who sang quietly while she worked, was practicing the bodhisattva path whether she knew it or not. Small mercies in an indifferent universe.

Everyday Samsara

I think about this sometimes in traffic, engines idling, everyone half-resentful of the delay. NPR voices discussing crisis with professional calm. A woman checks her reflection in the rearview mirror, adjusts her lipstick. A man drums his fingers against the steering wheel, late for something that matters less than he thinks. We are all trying to get somewhere.

The Zen Buddhist teacher Suzuki Roshi once said, ‘You are perfect as you are, and you could use a little improvement.’ The paradox makes Western minds short-circuit. How can both be true?

Mahāyāna says: this is it. Samsara and nirvana are not two. The moment you stop dividing the world into sacred and profane, you begin to see that enlightenment was never elsewhere. It was always here, in the waiting room, in the grocery line, in the difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding.

You can wake up while waiting at a red light.

You can touch emptiness while rinsing a cup.

The Zen poet Ryōkan wrote, ‘The thief left it behind—the moon at my window.’ Loss, gain, waiting—all of it part of the same moonlight. The thief takes what can be taken. What remains was never yours to lose.

This morning, making coffee, I watched the grounds bloom in hot water, that small explosion of darkness. For a moment, I forgot to want anything else. That forgetting—that’s the gate.

Interbeing

Thích Nhất Hạnh called it interbeing. Not a word that existed before he made it, pressing two concepts together like hands in prayer. Nothing stands alone; everything participates in everything else.

He would hold up a piece of paper and ask his students what they saw. Paper, they’d say. But look closer: in this paper is the cloud, the rain, the tree, the logger, the sun. Without any of these, no paper. The paper is made entirely of non-paper elements.

So too with the self. You are made entirely of non-you elements: your mother’s temper, your father’s hands, the books you read at sixteen, the lover who left, the city that raised you. Remove any of these and you wouldn’t be you. But gather them all together and still there’s no solid, separate self to be found.

He once wrote: ‘The next Buddha may take the form of a community—practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community that practices mindful living.’

Not a person. A community. A way of being together that makes awakening possible.

I thought of this during the pandemic’s worst months, watching mutual aid networks spring up overnight. Neighbors who’d never spoken delivering groceries to each other’s doors. The improvised care networks, the Zoom meditation groups, the strangers teaching strangers how to breathe through panic. The next Buddha, distributed across ten thousand acts of ordinary kindness.

A bodhisattva doesn’t retreat from the world. They enter it fully: taking out the trash, helping a neighbor, comforting a friend who is breaking apart like ice in spring. The work of awakening happens here, among errands and obligations, where compassion rubs against fatigue.

Maybe the purpose of life, if we can still use that word, is to learn how to live without asking for one. To move through the world with the kind of clarity that doesn’t require justification.

The bodhisattva is not a saint but an ordinary person who chooses, moment after moment, mercy over indifference.

A Practical Enlightenment

Modern culture borrows the aesthetic of Buddhism—the calm tone, the minimalist font, the meditation apps with British accents—but rarely the substance. Mindfulness becomes another way to manage the day, another productivity hack. Be present so you can be more efficient. Meditate so you can crush your quarterly targets.

I’ve sat in corporate meditation rooms, watched executives practice ‘strategic mindfulness’ between meetings about downsizing. The cushions are expensive. The intention is backwards.

Mahāyāna insists on something less marketable: there is no self to optimize.

You cannot fix what does not exist. You can only wake up from the dream that it needs fixing.

This awakening doesn’t erase pain. It transforms the relationship to it. The world still burns; the heart still breaks. Your mother still calls with news that makes you sit down in the middle of the kitchen. The difference is that you no longer imagine yourself as the only one inside the fire.

Everyone you’ve ever met is burning in their own way. Everyone is trying to make sense of a life that refuses to be made sense of. Once you see this clearly, compassion isn’t a choice. It’s what remains when the illusion of separateness dissolves.

The Thai Forest master Ajahn Chah used to say, ‘If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you will have complete peace.’ His students would nod sagely. Then he’d add: ‘But you’ll be dead.’ And laugh at his own joke.

The peace isn’t the point. The letting go is.

The Great Undoing

We think enlightenment will make us feel safe.

It won’t.

It makes us transparent.

I learned this the hard way, during what I later recognized as a period of spiritual emergency. (The therapist called it something else.) Months where the boundaries between self and world became negotiable. Where I couldn’t tell if the anxiety belonged to me or the person next to me on the bus. Where empathy became a kind of drowning.

Pema Chödrön once wrote: ‘We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again.’

To see emptiness clearly is to realize there was never anyone to protect, never a permanent ‘you’ to save. The ego doesn’t like this news. It fights back with everything it’s got: panic attacks, existential dread, the 3 a.m. certainty that you’re doing everything wrong. Or everything in the world is wrong.

The point isn’t safety; it’s freedom—from delusion, from the endless self-narration that turns every experience into a referendum on worth.

The bodhisattva lives inside that transparency. They walk into the burning house of the world not to escape it but to illuminate it. Not because they’re brave, but because they’ve seen through the illusion that there’s anywhere else to go.

Sometimes I catch myself trying to use Buddhism like armor, like a way to feel superior to the mess of being human. Then I remember: the mess is the path. The confusion, the petty irritations, the way I still check my phone too often—all of it is the raw material of awakening.

You don’t transcend the human condition. You compost it.

The Quiet Return

Every Mahāyāna story ends the same way. The hero reaches the edge of nirvana, sees the gates open—and steps back.

Not dramatically. Not with speeches about saving all beings. Just a quiet turn, like someone remembering they left the stove on.

They return to the market, the noise, the argument, the child crying in the cereal aisle. They buy vegetables. They pay the bills. They practice compassion until the illusion of ‘others’ dissolves completely.

There’s a koan: ‘Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.’ I do this now. Chop wood, carry water. There is a profound peace in that moment. Then the thoughts come rushing back in.

The difference is invisible from the outside. But the awakened person chops wood without the story of someone chopping wood. They carry water without the narrative of burden or accomplishment. They move through the world like wind through grass—present, effective, already gone.

Maybe that’s it—the closest we come to an answer.

To live not for purpose, but for presence.

To wake up, help someone else wake up, and keep going.

Until the sky empties itself of names.

Until there’s nothing left but this: breath, heartbeat, the next thing that needs doing.

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♪ Author’s Note

I started writing this during a week when everything felt thin—the news, the conversations, even the rituals of work. The mountain light had that quality of aftermath, everything too bright and somehow worn. I’d been reading the Heart Sūtra in the mornings, more out of restlessness than devotion, sitting on the front porch with coffee going cold.

Somewhere in those lines—’no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue’—I stopped needing life to explain itself. The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was wide, like the pause before rain. Like the moment before you remember what you were worried about.

I don’t claim to understand Buddhism. Twenty years of sitting on cushions, reading texts, attending retreats where everyone speaks in careful whispers—and still, understanding feels like the wrong word. It’s more like slowly learning a different way to fall.

I only know that when I stop asking the world for meaning, it becomes harder to hurt it. When I stop insisting on my own solid existence, there’s more room for others. And in small, almost invisible ways, that feels like enough.

The bodhisattva vow is impossible. That’s what makes it worth taking.

We save all beings by saving the being in front of us, right now, which might be ourselves. We end suffering by attending to this particular suffering, this particular moment, without needing it to mean more than it does.

The morning I finished this essay, a neighbor I barely know knocked on my door. Her father was dying. Could I watch her daughter for an hour? The girl, maybe seven, sat at my kitchen table drawing pictures of horses with wings. She didn’t need me to do anything but be there, occasionally saying yes, that’s a beautiful horse.

That’s the whole teaching, really. Show up. Say yes, that’s a beautiful horse. Repeat until the sky empties itself of names.

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Image ©2025 Gael MacLean