Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c24.s2.3

c24.s2.3

The destruction of the idea of the self is, therefore, hardly to be achieved by direct means; it must in some degree come about by itself, as the result of far back causes, and as the outcome of following the methods laid down by ancient teachers. Meditation on the void is necessary, despite the danger of the method, for mere insistence on the void is even more evil than insistence on reality. Properly managed, like a magic rite duly accomplished, it attains its end, for, after causing the idea of existence to disappear, it ends with producing the disappearance of the idea of non-existence also. Just so a man who suffers from ophthalmia, if he learns that there are no real hairs floating before his eyes, first conceives the idea of the non-existence of the hairs, but, acting as if he saw none, finally comes to ignore even the illusion. Similarly, meditation on non-existence leads on to further advance culminating in the realization of the voidness of the void (śūnyatā-śūnyatā), and the mind freed from the ideas of existence and non-existence will rest for ever in the absence of any content or categories. The essential aim is to repudiate either affirmation or negation, or the combination of both or the denial of both; this is as ever the true middle way of the Buddhist.¹