Prudence Primrose

随筆Essays

Compassion Is Physics Applied to Consciousness

18 October 2025 · 2 min read

'Buddhists come from the Vedic/Brahminic peoples and inherit their assumptions about the universe, one of those being that the self is empty and through that emptiness it is eternal and thus it is timeless. Nirvana means “The Final Blowing Out”1 of consciousness which Buddhism inherits the assumption from the idea of the Brahman2 as being the fundamental building block of creation (similar to Neoplatonism’s origin of God3), basically the cosmological concept of “Nothingness.” Buddhism takes that same Vedic hunger for the absolute but inverts it inward, where the Brahmin reached out to the heavens4, the Buddha reached inward to the structure of experience itself. The transcendent became introspective. It wasn’t “God beyond” but “mind seen through.”

But because of the concept of “Dependent Origination,”5 (pratītyasamutpāda ) which posits that everything has a shared origin and is interrelated and interdependent on one another, we all make up a single body of 'things.” Thus the idea of “Nirvana,” which Buddhism did not invent but was in vogue via the 'Sramaṇic' traditions6 of the Buddha’s contemporary time, is seen as unattainable in Buddhism unless every single living being attains enlightenment7, which is impossible. So even the desire to “leave reincarnation forever” is seen as selfish and cowardly, because there’s no way to escape dependent origination, so you must master the mind which is the gateway to consciousness and thus the way, and help others do the same. This is where the individual dissolves into the cosmic ecology. You are the wheel of Samsara itself. Liberation therefore isn’t escape; it’s intimacy with existence so total that escape stops making sense. The “Bodhisattva” isn’t a saint but a being who understands that compassion is simply physics applied to consciousness.

Buddhism is not a religion that makes value judgements; it does not demand you follow its precepts. It simply describes reality, causality, cause and effect; it describes and maps reality in the hopes it will guide people to awakening/actualization. It does not moralize how the Jewish religions do. In that sense it’s more like a natural science of mind than a theology8. Ethics arise not from law but from insight, see the chain of suffering clearly enough, and compassion is the only rational response. “Sin” becomes misunderstanding; “virtue” becomes lucidity.

Emptiness (śūnyatā) isn’t nihilism9. It’s the realization that because nothing possesses inherent existence, everything participates in everything else. Interpenetration. The world breathes through itself, nothing stands alone. That’s why in Mahayana, samsara is nirvana10; it was never a prison, only a mirror. The problem was thinking the mirror was glass instead of reflection.

If you stretch that forward into modern thought, Buddhism ends up anticipating both systems theory and phenomenology11, consciousness and world co-arising, perception and existence folding into each other. Reality is recursive, self-modeling, and alive. That’s what “awakening” really is: when the universe realizes it’s looking at itself through your eyes12.

Notes

By the editor.

  1. Nirvana (Pali nibbāna) is the image of a flame going out when its fuel is spent. In the Fire Sermon the Buddha says everything is burning with greed, hatred and delusion, and nibbāna is the fire's end. Whether that is the end of consciousness, or only of craving, is a long dispute among Buddhist schools and scholars, and the Pali texts avoid saying either. source ↩
  2. The Upanishads make Brahman the ground of everything and identify it with the self: tat tvam asi, 'you are that' (Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7), and aham brahmāsmi, 'I am Brahman' (Brihadaranyaka 1.4.10). Buddhism takes the identification of self with a ground and turns it into an inquiry about what 'self' means. source ↩
  3. Plotinus (third century) taught the One, beyond being and mind, as the source from which all things proceed and to which they return. His biographer Porphyry says Plotinus joined an imperial campaign to the East in order to study Persian and Indian thought. The parallel with the Upanishadic Brahman is old, though scholars debate how far there was any direct borrowing. source ↩
  4. The Buddha mocks this reach in the Tevijja Sutta (Digha Nikaya 13), where Brahmins who have never met Brahmā teach the path to union with him. He compares them to a line of blind men, each holding on to the one in front. source ↩
  5. The Buddha's own formula, in the Samyutta Nikaya, runs imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti: when this is, that is. Its best-known application is the twelve links, from ignorance to old age and death. Nagarjuna later makes it the same thing as emptiness (Root Verses 24.18), and Thich Nhat Hanh renders the idea as 'interbeing.' source ↩
  6. The Buddha, Mahavira the Jain teacher, and the Ajivika leader Makkhali Gosala were contemporaries in the Ganges plain around the fifth century BCE. Ashoka's edicts in the third century BCE address both śramaṇas and brāhmaṇas as the two kinds of holy men, which is evidence that the two streams were seen as distinct. source ↩
  7. This is the Mahayana bodhisattva ideal. Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra (eighth century) vows to remain as long as space endures, to dispel the world's suffering, and the bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha is the one who vows not to become a Buddha until hell is emptied. Earlier schools hold that an arahant can reach nirvana in a single life. source ↩
  8. The Dalai Lama wrote in The Universe in a Single Atom (2005) that if science proved a Buddhist claim wrong, Buddhism would have to change. The Buddha's Kalama Sutta (Anguttara Nikaya 3.65) tells the Kalamas not to accept a teaching on tradition, scripture or authority alone, and the raft simile of the Alagaddupama Sutta says the teaching is to be left behind once crossed, an image she takes up in Buddhism in the United States. source ↩
  9. Nagarjuna's Root Verses on the Middle Way 24.18 equates dependent origination with emptiness, and then calls it a 'middle way.' The point is that emptiness is not nothing: because things have no fixed essence, they can change and relate. Without emptiness, he argues in the same chapter, nothing could happen. source ↩
  10. Nagarjuna says in Root Verses 25.19 that there is not the slightest distinction between samsara and nirvana. Interpreters differ on whether this means identity or that the two cannot be told apart. She makes the same two-truths move in What the Ghosts Actually Are, where she writes of two truths and says samsara and nirvana are one. source ↩
  11. Joanna Macy's Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory (1991) argues the two share a view of causes as reciprocal. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch's The Embodied Mind (1991) set Buddhist mindfulness beside phenomenology and cognitive science. source ↩
  12. Carl Sagan said it in Cosmos (1980): we are a way for the cosmos to know itself. She takes the same turn in her poem You Remember, Don't You? and teaches in What the Ghosts Actually Are that the mind you have is the Mother's mind. Her wording there is that humans are the neurons of God. source ↩