THERE WERE NAMES for that undifferentiated existence-tissue. One of those names was dark-enigma (玄), which Lao Tzu uses for the impossible task of naming this tissue as it is in and of itself before any names, before Absence and Presence give birth to one another, and before all the other words and concepts and distinctions we use to approach the nature of existence: existence-tissue, Tao, tzu-jan, heaven and earth, yin and yang. This dark-enigma is described perfectly at the end of the Tao Te Ching’s first poem:
In perennial Absence you see mystery,
and in perennial Presence you see appearance.
Though the two are one and the same,
once they arise, they differ in name.
One and the same they’re called dark-enigma,
dark-enigma deep within dark-enigma,
gateway of all mystery.
Dark-enigma is a return to consciousness prior to language and the utilitarian differentiation of things we need for survival. It is, in a word, the existence-tissue here in the beginning when we open our eyes to find there is no distinction between consciousness and empirical reality, when we find they are a single whole: vast and deep, everything and everywhere.
As soon as you conceptualize it, name it even with this first name, dark-enigma, that immediacy and wholeness is lost. Dark-enigma can only be known in immediate experience, which is immediate experience here in the beginning, here where there is no conceptualizing or knowing. But it is possible to suggest the nature of this experience, as Lao Tzu does at the end of his first poem. Dark-enigma cannot be portrayed directly because it is exactly the generative existence-tissue prior to the distinctions of forms, of names, or even of consciousness separate from things; but that immediate experience of dark-enigma is suggested everywhere in landscape paintings.
The dark-enigma tissue cannot be known in the realm of distinct forms, nor can it be known in the realm of formlessness, because formlessness precludes knowing. But it can be glimpsed where forms are in the process of appearing out of or disappearing into the emptiness of formlessness. Hence, the nature of Chinese landscape paintings, with their forms blurred at the edge of appearance and disappearance, dark even if that blur is usually full of light: mountains half hidden in mist; villages almost lost in lacustrine distances; things themselves—rocks and trees, mountains and houses and people—suggested only by sketched outlines and otherwise more formlessness than form. And seen with a mirror-deep mind, this blurring is also the blurring of consciousness back into the undifferentiated existence-tissue. The pictorial suggestion of dark-enigma, of the existence-tissue without form, is especially dramatic in Stone-Waves’ Between River and Mountain, where the blurring of things into an emptiness of water and mist seems to be in the process of being consumed by a field of black ink swelling and obliterating form with the shadowy tissue of dark-enigma, thereby making dark-enigma itself the subject of the painting:
Shih T’ao: Between River and Mountain (1667)
Palace Museum, Beijing