Philosophy Spotlight: Maluhia, Bristlecone Pine
“Reality is filtered through our eyes. Space and time, color and shape, beauty and meaning - we see only what our minds can construct. What could lie beyond the reach of our minds? Some confuse what they see with what is, others deceive themselves because they do not trust their own sight. The truth is not so simple. Observer and object are like two sides of a coin - neither can be represented without depending on the other.”
Inspiration: Nagarjuna’s Buddhism
Maluhia’s philosophy is an interpretation of sunyata, the Buddhist concept of emptiness and the origin of our game’s name. An object is empty if it has no traits without depending on external conditions such as an interaction with another object or a reaction from our senses. Nagarjuna argues that all things are empty, and the key to learning Buddhism is to understand what sunyata means for different schools of thought.
Colors are perhaps the easiest category to understand emptiness. The colors we see are not traits of the objects themselves, they are representations our minds use when reacting to the limited range of wavelengths we can see. If we imagine what each color would look like independently of our perception of them, we are left with an empty, indescribable concept.
Shapes are a more difficult category to explain. The shape of objects we see matches what we feel with our hands, so shape may not seem to depend on the reaction of either sense. However, consider the role our size plays in our perception - we can only see objects that are relatively large enough to be relevant to us, and we feel objects as solid when the gaps in them are not wide enough for us to pass through. But at an atomic level, neither shape is retained. The object’s surface is not the smooth layer it looks to be, and the gaps of empty space in each atom make up the majority of the object.
Emptiness applies to ethics and personal values as well. Values are empty because there is no objective fact independent of us about what should matter. Our values come from personal attachments that are heavily influenced by our environment. Notably, although Buddhism draws attention to our attachments as the source of suffering, it does not advocate the nihilistic view that we should not care about anything because nothing matters (doing so would, ironically, be a failure in applying emptiness to nihilism itself). Instead, understanding emptiness leads to an honest self-reflection on our psychology and the way we choose to live. Buddha himself gave practical advice to help people find peace and meaning through simple tasks such as spending more time outside or eating a moderate diet.
These arguments are just a sampling of how the philosophy of sunyata approaches different fields. Emptiness also applies equally to thoughts about aesthetics, causation, personal identity, and Buddhism itself. From a general perspective, emptiness is an alternative to both realist and nihilist philosophies. Contrary to traditional realism, we cannot know or conceive of anything about the world that does not depend on our limited representations of it. But this does not imply the nihilistic conclusion that the world we interact with exists only in our minds. Instead, the world, as we perceive it, is the result of a mutually dependent reaction of our senses to our surroundings.