One Might As Well Burst Out Laughing
On Longchenpa, groundlessness, and the joke that takes a lifetime to get
Since things neither exist nor don't exist,
are neither real nor unreal,
are utterly beyond adopting and rejecting,
one might as well burst out laughing.
— Longchenpa Rabjampa, 14th century
There is a kind of laughter that is genuinely funny, and that is the strange part.
It arrives at the edge of a great deal of earnest effort: the years of practice, the accumulated understanding, the careful construction of a position on things, and then the sudden recognition that the position itself was the problem. It is not mockery, though relief is folded into it.
It is not the small, local amusement of a joke about one thing, because no single mismatch exists to point to and laugh at. It is what happens when the mind finally stops arguing with what is and, in one undefended moment, sees the comedy of having argued so hard for so long.
Longchenpa Rabjampa was a fourteenth-century Tibetan master of the Nyingma school, and this verse belongs to a tradition in which the highest teaching is not a doctrine but a pointing: towards the nature of mind before it has organised itself into positions.
The verse offers no view to adopt. It dismantles the machinery of adoption and rejection, leaving you standing in the open air of that dismantling, with nothing to hold on to and nowhere in particular to fall.
One might as well burst out laughing, because it is funny and because the alternative is to keep doing what we have been doing.
The problem of the solid world
We experience the world, most of the time, as made of solid, reliable things. Objects with edges. Selves with histories. Problems with solutions, and solutions with outcomes. The mind that navigates daily life must work this way; it would be impossible to function otherwise. You cannot make breakfast, keep an appointment, or listen to someone in distress if you are constantly dissolving the furniture of experience into its emptiness.
The difficulty arises when we carry this mode of apprehension into domains where it does not serve us. When we treat our sense of self as a fixed object that can be adequately protected or improved. When we treat our suffering as a problem to be solved rather than an experience to be met. When we treat our views as accurate descriptions of reality rather than as the mind's temporary attempt to make experience navigable.
The contemplative traditions, at their most rigorous, are unanimous on one point: the solid world is a construction. Not an illusion in the sense that it is unreal or unimportant. A construction in the sense that it is assembled, moment by moment, from the raw material of experience by a mind that assembles so quickly and habitually that it mistakes the result for something it found rather than something it made.
The Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna, to which Longchenpa's Dzogchen tradition is not unrelated, calls this sunyata: emptiness. Things are empty of inherent existence. They are not nothing. They arise, appear, have effects, and matter.
They do not exist as the grasping mind assumes they do: fixed, independent, self-contained entities with essences that inhere in them and persist through time. The chair is a chair because we call it so, in a context that renders the category useful, in a moment that will not last. The self is a self in the same way.
This is where most presentations of the teaching stop: in emptiness. With the dissolution of the fixed self, the permeable boundary between inside and outside, and the recognition that what you took to be substantial is, on investigation, more like weather than furniture.
Longchenpa does not stop there. He takes one further step, the step that produces the laughter.
The second dissolution
Since things neither exist nor don't exist.
The first move, the one most Western readers of Buddhist philosophy encounter, dissolves the notion of solid existence. Things are not as fixed and substantial as we assume. The self is not the unified, continuous, independently existing entity it appears to be. This is disorienting, and it is meant to be. It loosens the grasp of the grasping mind on its assumed solidity.
The second move is less often made, and it is the one Longchenpa's verse turns on.
Things do not simply fail to exist. They also fail not to exist. The emptiness is itself empty. The view that dissolves the solid world is not itself a solid view. The teaching that things lack inherent existence does not itself possess inherent existence. The groundlessness has no ground beneath it.
It is the same difficulty people have with an expanding universe. The instinct is to ask what it is expanding into, as though some larger emptiness must be waiting on the outside for the edge to move through. There is no into. There is no further container.
There is only more space, and the question assumes a boundary that never existed. The mind wants a floor beneath the floor, an edge to the edgelessness. There isn't one, not because it is hidden, but because the question was based on a mistake.
This is where the practitioner, the person who has worked hard to achieve the first dissolution, sometimes encounters a subtle difficulty. Having relinquished the solid world, they have found, or believe they have found, something to hold in its place: emptiness, awareness, or the open ground of mind before it contracts into positions.
They experience this as an achievement, a place to rest, and, finally, the right view.
Longchenpa's verse addresses this directly. It leaves nothing out. Emptiness is not a position. Awareness is not a refuge. The open ground is not something you can stand on without it opening further. Things are neither real nor unreal. The teaching of unreality is itself neither real nor unreal. The mind that has arrived at groundlessness and now rests there comfortably has found another floor. Laughter comes when that floor goes too.
What the mind does with this
The ordinary response to groundlessness is anxiety. The mind that loses its footing grasps for something to hold on to, and if nothing is available, it tends to contract, harden, and manufacture certainty where none exists. We are very practised at this. Political certainties calcify in the face of complexity. Therapeutic positions solidify into identity. Spiritual attainments become new forms of the ego they were meant to dissolve.
The anxiety is understandable. The mammalian nervous system did not evolve for groundlessness. It evolved to predict, to rapidly identify threats and resources, and to construct a model of the world stable enough to act within.
Equanimity in the face of genuine ontological openness is not the organism's default condition. It has to be, in some sense, learned, stumbled into, or received.
What Longchenpa points to with laughter is a different response to the same groundlessness. Not anxiety, not indifference. Something more like the recognition that the long labour of trying to find the right view, the right position, the right way to hold experience, was itself a form of comedy. The mind searching for solid ground in a world that has none, building floors that open, constructing positions that dissolve, arriving and arriving and always finding that arrival was provisional.
Why laughter, specifically, rather than a calmer form of acceptance? A joke works by building a frame in earnest, a structure solid enough to stand inside, and then revealing that the frame was never load-bearing. The setup is not cancelled.
It happened; it was followed in good faith, and it turns out it was resting on nothing the whole time. That is the shape of what the verse does to the seeking mind. The argument is followed in good faith: neither existent nor non-existent, neither real nor unreal.
It is built with total seriousness, and it gives way not because it was wrong but because it was never going to hold weight. Anxiety is what happens when the mind still believes the frame should have held. Indifference is what happens when the frame was never taken seriously enough to matter. Laughter is what is left when the frame was built as carefully as possible, gave way anyway, and nothing was lost in the giving.
The laughter does not mean that nothing matters. Longchenpa was not a nihilist. The tradition he worked in is among the most ethically demanding in the world. That things matter and that they are empty of inherent existence are not in contradiction. A dream can move you to tears. Waking from it does not retroactively empty the grief of its quality.
The laughter means: the project of securing a final, solid, adequate account of things is over. Not because you have found one, but because you have finally stopped needing to.
The therapeutic ear
I sometimes notice a quality in clinical work, in the sessions, that does something. It is not exactly understanding, though understanding may be present.
It is the moment when a person, even briefly, stops managing their own suffering. When the story they have been holding about what happened, what it means, and what needs to happen next loosens its grip, what is left is not a resolved problem but an openness: a quality of not-yet-knowing that feels, against all expectation, like relief rather than threat.
The suffering does not disappear in these moments. The circumstances that produced it remain. What shifts is the relationship to the suffering: from a problem requiring a solution to an experience to be met. The person is still there. The pain is still there. The requirement that the pain be otherwise than it is has, at least temporarily, lifted.
This is, I think, a small version of what Longchenpa points to. Not the full recognition, not the laughter that arrives after a lifetime of serious practice in the nature of mind. The early edge of the same territory: the possibility of meeting what is here without the mind's usual work of choosing what to keep and what to refuse, the restless management of experience towards an adequate outcome.
Adopting and rejecting are exhausting. They are the primary activities of the defended mind: moving towards what promises relief, away from what threatens exposure, selecting from experience what can be admitted and excluding what cannot. We do this so continuously that it barely registers as a choice. It feels like perception. It feels like responding to what is there, not choosing at all.
To be, even briefly, beyond adopting and rejecting is to discover that what is here, unmanaged, is not what the defended mind feared. It is not an abyss. It is not a verdict. It is experience, arising, changing, passing. The groundlessness turns out not to be the threat the mind was braced against, but something more like air. You were always in it.
The bracing was the difficulty, not the ground.
The joke
Longchenpa's verse is structured as a logical argument that arrives at an illogical conclusion. Since things are thus, therefore: laughter. That, therefore, is the move that breaks the form. Logic does not conclude in laughter. Philosophy does not bottom out in comedy. The verse uses the apparatus of reasoning to arrive somewhere reasoning cannot take you, then names what is found there.
This is deliberate. It is a trap for the earnest mind, the mind that wants to read the verse as another position to be understood and adopted. You can follow the argument: neither existence nor non-existence, neither real nor unreal, beyond adoption and rejection.
The mind tracks the moves, nods at the precision, and begins to form a view. Then the conclusion arrives, and there is nowhere to put it. The mind reaches for its filing system, only to find nothing to file it under.
That is the teaching: not the content of the verse, but the experience of finding the habitual machinery briefly at a loss, and of recognising that this was always, from the beginning, the situation it was in.
We have been trying to find solid ground in a groundless world, and we have been doing so very seriously, with great effort and considerable sophistication. In a certain light, the effort has been magnificent. In the same light, it has also been a prolonged refusal to notice what was always already the case.
Things are neither real nor unreal. Grief is real. Laughter is real. The self that grieves and laughs is neither real nor unreal. All of it is here, in this moment, which is neither real nor unreal, will not last, and is utterly sufficient.
One might as well burst out laughing.
Rory Singer
You can also read this post on our Substack journal, Unfolding.