plenitude and emptiness

[AUDIO AND TEXT]

This is the second talk given by Nona Strong Roshi at the August 2023 East-West meditation retreat at Mercy Center Burlingame.

Yesterday we talked about life’s dualities – the seemingly irreconcilable opposites that we encounter every day and everywhere. And last night, we read a selection from an early Christian mystic that some might say demonstrates a kind of coincidence of opposites that allows us to reconcile those dualities, to bring them into some kind of unity. Or so it appears, and I’m not going to try to rob anyone (including myself) of that appearance. Today, I’d like to talk about one of the more intriguing and for some, baffling pair of opposites put forth within our East-West tradition: form and emptiness.

In the Buddhist Heart Sutra, these two aspects of being (which to the logical mind exist at opposite poles) are unified. The Sutra says, “Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form.” That is, these are not two aspects of being but are equated. The Sutra goes so far as to say they are exactly equal. “Form is exactly emptiness, Emptiness exactly form.”

We can see a similar implication in the verse from the mystic Pseudo-Dionysius, titled in our retreat booklet, “If Only We Lacked Sight and Knowledge.” Nowhere does the writer use the term form or emptiness. Rather, he describes it all in terms of negation; he tells us what it is not. This feels to me like an invocation of Emptiness. And by fixing on negation, he implies a corollary existence, Form. Here:

There is no speaking of it, nor name or knowledge of it.

Darkness and light, error and truth – it is none of these. [Emptiness]

It is beyond assertion and denial, for it is beyond every assertion,

And by virtue of its preeminently simple and absolute nature,

Free of every limitation, beyond every limitation. [Emptiness as Form]

St. John of the Cross also speaks in terms of negation with his famous nada, nada, nada expression (see “Todo y Nada” at www.catholicculture.org and elsewhere), but he also gets a little closer to the Eastern sense of Form and Emptiness in his writings on Soul and Spirit and Dark Nights and such. Other Christian mystics, such as John Scottus, approach the same subject in different terms.

This is starting to get a bit esoteric, so I think I’ll stop trying to interpret other people’s writings here. I’m no scholar, and I don’t want to go tripping down the garden path; I’m sure you don’t want that either. So, I’ll quit while I’m ahead and just get to the point I’m trying to make. Which is what, exactly?

As I experience being, everything that is observable – things, ideas, thoughts, people, even time and space themselves – emerges from nothing, moment by moment. That is, Form emerges within or from Emptiness. All created things emerge through the Word (God). The Gospel of John that we read each morning says it clearly:

³ Everything came into being through the Word,
    and without the Word
    nothing came into being.
What came into being
⁴   through the Word was life,
    and the life was the light for all people.
⁵ The light shines in the darkness,
    and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light.

The things we perceive (the light) are undistinguishable from that which we don’t know and can’t perceive (the darkness). Forms (the light) are inseparable from the source, from Emptiness (the darkness). One can’t exist without the other. They are not-two; they are the same.

Now, I caution you not to try to figure this out intellectually. You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to do so, as I am doing to myself right now. You can tell that by how impossibly inadequate are my feeble attempts to articulate any of this.

Just let it boil down to this simple truth, expressed by mystics and theologians in many traditions throughout the ages. Emptiness (some use the word Nothingness) is full of everything that is now, has been, will be, or can be (Plenitude). Including us. Whatever we can experience is formed within and by and through (pick your preposition) that one, all-pervasive, boundless source. Including us. Not just the Good us, but also the Bad and the Ugly us.

Christians call the creator and all creation God, the Word. Buddhists call it the Absolute, Essential Nature, Original Nature, True Nature. The point is that all beings, again including us, are features of that Creation, that Nature. As I experience it at this point in my journey, we are all “happenings” within that Original Nature. And as such, we all are of one Essential Nature, one indivisible Substance. And being of one Substance, we are not separate from one another.

Yes, of course individuals exist. We can’t deny the evidence of our physical experience. But when you look at it, one perceived individual is defined only in relation to everything else that appears to exist around that perceived individual. And today’s physicists, cosmologists, scientists of many flavors are discovering more and more that demonstrates the fact that this is how it is.

And as Happenings of Essential Nature, we ought to be able to maintain a posture of lovingkindness for all the other Happenings (call them Beings or whatever term you prefer) in existence.

The watchword here is Love, if only we could see it. And that, my friends, is our bottom line.

Thank you.