Emptiness in Zen/Chan literature

When you grasp emptiness as a concept

Emptiness is simply "ceasing to grasp". One cannot grasp emptiness as a concept, since it reifies not grasping.

There are many metaphors you can use to explain emptiness, such as "opening the hand of thought", "non-grasping", "putting a stop to conceptual thinking & pacifying one's mind", or "letting one's mind flow freely without dwelling on anything". That's all emptiness is.

Note, I italicized is after emptiness for a reason. Reality is best understood as a constant process rather than possessing discrete objects, and this means using "to be" verbs tends to elude this fact. Reality is chock-full of processes all the way down and without a bottom turtle or "underlying essence". One can liken reality to constant Becoming without fixed being (svabhāva). To be clear, "non-grasping" leads to a tacit & non-conceptual apprehension of the processual non-nature of reality.

Pointing to "emptiness" in terse words always feels a bit disingenuous. I feel poetry does a better job, but let's summarize what emptiness points to thus far:

Number One. Letting one's mind flow freely without dwelling on anything

Number Two. The Heraclitean flux of reality and lack of intrinsic identity in all phenomena, including the skandhas. One way to do this is by showing how every single process is contingent on other conditions or phenomena that is contingent on other conditions or phenomena... and ad infinitum

However, emptiness in Chan/Zen ALSO points to something else:

Number Three. The unity and interpenetration of opposites: these include Samsara & Nirvana, self & other, real & unreal, up & down, and much more. Since phenomena lack an intrinsic identity, then the border between opposites is largely illusory or quasi.

I will retranslate a sentence of the Diamond Sutra. First, I will give Red Pine's Translation:

"Since the possession of attributes is an illusion, Subhuti, no possession of attributes is no illusion, by means of attributes that are no attributes the Tathagata can, indeed, be seen."

Retranslation:

"Since processes that possess a bottom turtle are unreal, Subhuti, and processes that possess no bottom turtle are real, then by means of processes that are no processes the Thatagata can, indeed, be seen."

Since phenomena lack an intrinsic identity, then the border between opposites is largely illusory or quasi. This is largely done for the One Vehicle (Ekayāna) or prajnaparamita which leads one to realize inseparability with the All. One can say it leads one to realize he or she is of the All, not about.

Submitted December 17, 2017 at 05:59AM by CatsInAllDirections http://ift.tt/2CI2Nqg