For twenty years I was in turmoil
Seething and angry. But now my time has come!
The crow laughs, an arhat emerges from the filth,
And in the sunlight a jade beauty sings!
Ikkyu Sojun (trs John Stevens)
On social media a while back, a friend invited people to post what they felt were deeply meaningful spiritual quotes. As he was a Christian minister, the majority of the respondents quoted Christian scriptures or sayings of Christian mystics.
Me, I offered that central line from the Heart Sutra: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”
Although even as I shared it, I felt a cascade of hesitations. For a start both the words form and emptiness seemed to require unpacking. Especially for this crowd, most of whom were not particularly familiar with Buddhism, much less the Mahayana.
Then I realized how that was true for many of the other religious citations people shared. For instance, with “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son…” God, love, only begotten, and son, are all wild words with multiple meanings. None really meaningful without some context. Similarly with “Hear oh Israel, the lord our God is one God…” Again, Israel and God beg definition.
Maybe even that word one needs further exploration. A great mess that one.
We may think we know what words mean. And often we do. Although with these big ones we quickly discover the messiness of it. How goes that exchange in Through the Looking Glass?
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
With these really big words, all certainty about what is being said quickly dissolves as people offer their differing meanings, or at the very least act as if their words are different than yours. When we approach spiritual matters we find ourselves approaching some vast Tower of Babel.
So…
For the Zen way and the Mahayana meeting this phrase “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” is critical. It speaks to the shape of the world and of our human hearts and minds.
So what is it supposed to mean, this phrase? It offers to us an assertion that we are historic beings living in a flow of causal relationships. And it invites seeing this life, our life, yours, mine, as contingent. Contingent, but it is also real. Real. Another of those slippery words.
Because. And. At the very same time we beings living and shifting within history, are in fact every one of us in our temporal reality, wildly, wildly open.
We are in fact boundless. We present as discrete to each other, and even to ourselves. But our backs open into eternity. And. Another mystery inviting us. Within that boundlessness, we are one.
One. Back to that most difficult word. Perhaps why in the Zen way when we come to this moment instead of one, we say “not two.” As if that were enough to clarify the matter. On the one hand one and not two both mean the same thing. Yes. But. On another hand, the different uses open different doors of the heart.
And perhaps that’s what a big part of this is all about. Invitations. These words are meant to invite. If, that is, we’re willing to let go of our private worlds and enter into another. It all takes a certain surrender. A letting go.
Our Zen use of form and emptiness, once we begin to dig into it, once we open ourselves to it, reveals everything is about relationship.
We emerge out of relationship, we exist within relationship, we are broken and we are healed within relationship, and then in time we shall dissolve within relationship. You and me. The one. The not two.
And another thing, not unconnected. And which I saw so lively within those statements from my mostly Christian friends and their lines. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “If you take a step toward God, God will run a hundred miles toward you.”
Religions speak in the languages of poetry. Or, the good ones, do. Perhaps it’s just that the best aspects of religions do.
These sayings.
Poems. Songs. Rhythms and melodies.
Small wonder then that Zen especially is the mother of ten thousand poems. They sing the mysteries of relationship and our individual relationships. And then there is a waiting for the ear that can hear.
So here you go. What “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” really looks like on our way. How we meet, how we exist within it.
Here you go.
It’s past midnight
The moon has not yet risen.
In the deep dark we see a face from long ago
But you don’t recognize her.
Don’t think that’s strange.
This is the first of the five interlocking poems we usually attribute to the 9th century Chan master Donshan Liangjie. In John Tarrant & Joan Sutherland’s translation.
We find we’re being invited into what form and emptiness look like as we experience the truths to which the words point. Here not bare explication but rather something evoking our heart’s experience. Here we can realize the important words need to be ambiguous, open, slippery things. Specifically, if that word has a place in this, here we are encountering how our lives, our lived lives, yours and mine, experience the mysterious interplay that we call the two truths, form and emptiness.
The next poem of the five flips the look at our individual lives nestled within the boundless, and invites us to notice the boundless arising from our bodies and minds and hearts. Here the universal emerging from the particular. Hinting for our hearts how all the while this, this particularity that we name ourselves, you, me, does not end at our skin but includes the earth and the planets and the stars.
You find yourself to be an old woman
You’re sleeping late.
When you wake up you come upon an ancient mirror
And you see your own face clearly.
Try not to lose sight of it again and go chasing shadows.
Unpacking these verses is a lifetime’s work. As any good presentation of fundamental reality like these spiritual poems, these songs from the heart of the intimate – they tease and invite and at the very same time make a full presentation.
The Japanese term shingetsu means both realization and intimacy. What we find as we open ourselves to the songs of form and emptiness is this richness that is our realization, and which is found as we discover these mutable things these songs from the depths of our beings, point us on our way.
The third of these poems in Dongshan’s cycle is another expression of the world from the perspective of the boundless, this time as pleroma, the great empty now the fullness of all things.
You’re in the middle of nothing
There is a road that has no dust
Just don’t mention the names of sages and emperors
Then you’ll be more eloquent than they were in ancient times.
While the fourth poem is an expression of our living within the integration of the two truths.
Two swords are crossed.
There’s no way to retreat.
You’re a lotus in the fire
You can’t help it
You’re determined to go higher.
Of course, the words of this poem draw us on to one more expression. Here words like integration burn away. In fact each word burns away as it’s spoken. It is gone as soon as it appears.
Not deciding it is or it isn’t
Do you have the courage to be at peace with it?
Everyone wants to leave the endless changes
But when we finish bending and fitting our lives
We come and sit by the fire.
Our first attestation to these poems are found in the Record of Dongshan, as chapter 14. I think it’s important to quickly note there’s a second cycle of five poems. These first five, the ones I’ve shared, are expressions of the intimate way, of the living experience of those two truths. Different faces of the mystery. The next five, collected in the same book as chapter 15, are an outline of the path itself. Here I’m just noting they exist. Sort of a tease.
For this moment let’s stay with form and emptiness and these five poems.
Like the best of spiritual poetry, we don’t actually know who wrote the poems. They’re gathered in Dongshan’s Record and he’s usually listed as the poet. But actually there’s doubt hanging in the matter. Doubt. Like the way Zen invites us into our spiritual lives. In our tradition faith, another word to unpack, is at least in our Zen way paired with doubt. We get lots of smaller doubts, like who might be the actual author of the poems. But this is at its most interesting a foreshadowing of the great doubt that will invite our moving from appreciating these verses as things of beauty, to following them downwards into the depths of our hearts. A tumble vastly deeper than Alice’s tumble through the mirror.
Not only are words mutable, but in some ways, they are living things, magical things. They can awaken us. And we always need to be careful, because they also can lull us into slumbers of no good use. A sword with two very sharp edges. These ambiguous words are enormously powerful and therefore quite dangerous.
And of course they are the delight of our Zen ancestors. And these poems are a wonderous gift they’ve bequeathed us.
Form. Emptiness. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
From that tumble all the words. God. Heaven. Pure Land. One. Empty.
So, how to draw this together? What should we take away from this visit to the otherside of the mirror?
Well…
You find yourself to be an old woman
You’re sleeping late.
When you wake up you come upon an ancient mirror
And you see your own face clearly.
Try not to lose sight of it again and go chasing shadows.
The great invitation.
Looking into that ancient mirror. Seeing it from both sides.
Intimate.
Intimate.
In the distance, a crow laughs.
The illustration of God creating the lights in the firmament is by Johannes Wierix, between 1564-1615. The original is in the British Museum…