It’s an old Buddhist teaching but was clearer to me at the weekend… the rose growing on the pile of shit (or more usually the lotus flower growing from the pond mud).
The simple point is that the rose is made from the shit, yet in particular its smell is appealing while the shit is unappealing. How remarkable that what is horrible can become what is desirable. This is the teaching of emptiness.
It is sensible to think that something substantial passes from the shit to the flower, and this would not be entirely wrong, but what is that “thing”.
In scientific terms it is the atoms of the shit and its bad smell that can be transferred and reorganised into the atoms of the rose and its pleasant fragrance.
But as has been discovered the quarks in atoms can be reorganised to produce different atoms so atoms are not the real building blocks. And, as will be discovered (if Buddhist theory is correct) there are no fundamental building blocks and whatever we take as the fundamental untransmutable base will always be changeable as its components become reorganised.
So what began as an Democritic (after Democritus) reductionist analysis to explain the qualities of things by find the components which bring those qualities into the mix rather flounders as we discover the nature of reality. Indeed a flower is made of nothing different from the shit, but it is never-the-less different. The flaw is thinking that the nice flavour of a sponge cake is somehow a mixture of the flavours of flour, butter and sugar. But these when mixed taste horrible. Something new has emerged that wasn’t there before, an illusion that is caused in our senses by these raw materials.
This is a slightly simplistic version because it is not that something nameless passes between the shit and the flower. The rose needs nutrients but also sunlight, water and carbon-dioxide. Like the cake the ingredients alone are not enough, it requires heat in the oven to help reform the structures of the ingredients. This is the full picture that when the correct conditions all come together then and only then does the emergent property appear. It is not that something nameless passes from the ingredients to the product, but that the resulting “form” is entirely new depending only upon the interaction of its component conditions.
One may persist in the view that something is present in the conditions that is passed and reformed into the product, but then one may observe that the conditions themselves are only emergent properties caused by as the result of preceding conditions. So we can always rewrite the ingredient list as an infinite series of prior conditions and never have need to mention a root and core substance.
One however should not attach to the idea of emptiness and of flux and change only. It is only the less common side of the coin. The common side of the coin is still valid which views station stops of emergent properties linked together by the railway tracks of processes. It is just that this view lives side by side with the view that sees the station stops as simply momentary hiatuses in the endless cycle of train services.
