Tilting at rainbows
On emptiness and liberation from suffering
Don Quixote, the famous novel by Miguel de Cervantes, tells the story of a man who becomes so consumed by tales of chivalry that he loses touch with reality. One of its most iconic scenes features Don Quixote charging at windmills, believing them to be fearsome giants. This moment has given rise to the phrase "tilting at windmills," which describes engaging in futile or misguided battles against imagined threats. At least for Quixote, the windmills actually existed — he was relating to something, even if he was misperceiving what it actually was. Now imagine that he was troubled not by windmills but by rainbows instead, and it was these colourful mirages that he misperceived as fearsome giants. This would add an extra layer of absurdity to this struggle, given that no arched structure actually exists where the rainbow is perceived.
According to the Buddhist concept of emptiness, the whole world is made of rainbows. Not in a literal sense, but in the sense that nothing is self existing and solidly real in the way we typically perceive. When you first saw a rainbow as a child, you most likely thought that if you travelled long enough in its direction, eventually you would approach a colourful arched structure. The idea of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow points to this intuition — it can feel as if there should be a “end” at each side of the rainbow, two bases that support an immense multicoloured form in between them. By the time you reached adulthood, you most likely learned that there is no physical structure where the rainbow is perceived, the rainbow itself is a trick of the light. Due to the combination of humidity, sunlight and the position of the viewer, the light is refracted by the drops of water and appears as a spectrum of colours.
As an adult, the sight of a rainbow may strike you at beautiful, it may even kindle a sense of aware and wonder as you settle into the mere witnessing of it. The rainbow isn’t a threat, it doesn’t ask anything of you, it merely is, and its ephemeral nature, its transience, is part of its beauty. It is a full-spectrum gift, a display of what is possible, with no agenda, no ultimate reason.
If, as a child, you were very attached to the possibility of one day visiting the end of a rainbow, the discovery of their true nature may not strike you in this positive way at first. It could feel upsetting to discover that the thing you were attached to doesn’t exist in the way you thought it did, as a solid, independent, self-existing form. By the time you reached adulthood, however, you presumably would have got over this disappointment. If you asked this disappointed child if rainbows exist, they may have dejectedly answered “no” — they now believe rainbows are not real. If you ask the adult, they may understand and agree with this sentiment (there is indeed no physical structure where the rainbow appears), but they may also offer that it’s not accurate to say that rainbows don’t exist at all. Rainbows are neither entirely real nor entirely unreal. The word rainbow does refer to something, even if that something isn’t what we originally thought it was. Rainbows exist conventionally and interdependently. “Rainbow” is a conventional term, in the sense that we have conventions that dictate what we use the word rainbow to refer to. It exists interdependently, in that the rainbow is nothing more that the intersecting causes and conditions of humidity, light and the position of the viewer.
Every “thing” in existence turns out to exist only conventionally and interdependently. Everything is a rainbow. Seeing this can lead the heart to break open, figuratively speaking. Like the rainbow-obsessed child, we have been spending our lives chasing after things that we have been misperceiving, things that don’t actually exist as solid forms with their own independent existence. This chasing occurs in a paradigm of fearful separation from these imagined “things”, a paradigm of disconnection and closed heartedness. The discovery that the things you have been chasing are mirages can feel like heartbreak, but it is only the cage of fearfulness that is breaking. With the imagined reality of self and other seen through, the prison of separation dissolves, and the boundless energy of existence is free to relate to itself with total openness, total unconditional love.
“Form is no other than emptiness,
Emptiness no other than form.
Form is only emptiness,
Emptiness only form.
Feeling, thought, and choice,
Consciousness itself,
Are the same as this.”
— From the Heart Sutra
