Volume 34. December 20, 2022
In those immortal words of Buddhist wisdom sung by Christmas crooner Andy Williams:
“It’s the holiday season (the holiday season).
So whoop-de-do and dickory dock
And don’t forget to hang up your sock
‘Cause just exactly at twelve o’clock,
He’ll be coming down the chimney, down.
(He’ll be coming down the chimney, down.)
He’ll have a big fat pack upon his back
And lots of goodies for you and for me.
So leave a peppermint stick for old St. Nick
Hanging on the Christmas tree!
It’s the holiday season …
Help! I can’t get that song out of my head! It’s an ear worm.
An ear worm is a catchy piece of music that continuously occupies a person’s mind even after it is no longer being played.
During the holiday season (whoop-de-do and dickory dock, and don’t forget to hang up your sock … help me!), ear worms are played perpetually on the radio.
How do we get rid of an ear worm? Besides suicide?
Turn to Buddhist wisdom. (Meditation won’t help. I’ve tried.)
Nagarjuna, a second century Mahayana Buddhist thinker, posited the two-truth theory: conventional truth versus absolute truth.
Conventional truth is the world of form. You are you. A cat is a cat.
Absolute truth is the world of emptiness.
Nagarjuna holds that conventional truth is absolute truth.
How can that be so? How can something be real and yet empty?
He points to the Heart Sutra. This Mahayana sutra proclaims the perfection of wisdom: form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
The ground of reality is emptiness.
The historical Buddha teaches that since the world is an empty illusion, don’t attach to it. Attachment causes suffering.
The Holiday Season song by Andy Williams is conventional truth. It’s a snappy, feel-good, sing-along song. The happy world of form. Yet, in an absolute sense, it is as empty as the rest of us.
Suffering consists in clinging to what is ultimately unreal. The world is a persistent illusion, a garden of earthly delights. Suffering is clinging to this continuous feedback loop of catchy forms.
Finally, that song is out of my head.
Oh no!
“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire …”
Agh!
The Buddha Times 
Did Nagarjuna talk about the formless realm Buddha spoke about? Does emptiness mean formless or the void (sunnya) or both?
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Taken negatively, emptiness is the Void, nothingness. Taken positively, emptiness is perpetual potential. Anything can become anything else because all things are without a permanent self. All things are interconnected. The basis of reality, for Nagajuna, is emptiness. The historical Buddha woke up to this fact in his great awakening: all is one, one is all.
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