The Heart Sutra is one of the shortest sutras in the prajnaparamita literature. A pithy and paradoxical distillation, it reports that “the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, while resting in prajnaparamita—transcendental wisdom—clearly saw the emptiness of all conditions. Oh, Sariputra,” he says, addressing one of the Buddha’s chief disciples, “form is no other than emptiness, and emptiness no other than form.” It proceeds from there to systematically dismantle and negate all of the formal tenets of Buddhism as a way of affirming that truth which is beyond any doctrine or conceptions. Hey, these things happen!
This poem is also a straight and parallel report. It seems, in this case, that the author, while riding the New York subway, clearly saw the emptiness of all conditions. The “date” referred to at the end of the poem was, in fact, my cousin, whom I rarely see. And we had agreed to meet for dinner at a restaurant on the Lower East Side. As I sat on the subway heading downtown, resting peacefully at heart and open to the buzz of subway activity around me, the scene melted—or should I say “being melted”—into what I never find better words for than “the great transparency”—being and non-being, form and emptiness, simply transparent to itself as one and the same. Any linguistic description can’t help but imply a subtle distinction that is simply not so. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is exactly form.
This mysterious paradox is only an obscure conundrum to our conventional minds. But it is experienced as the simple reality when the mind is empty of even its subtle conceptualizing activity, an activity in which even the things in our immediate experience are apprehended through a veil of conceptual understanding. To our ordinary way of thinking and seeing, things exist by virtue of being defined as separate from anything else and from the whole, just as we see life itself as separate from death. Everything has an outer edge and a middle, so to speak. Hence it takes up space; and thus space is not empty. All the real estate has already been taken. Everything is a done deal, although the deal is only a creation of our minds.
When this subtle and fundamental conceptualization ceases, when awareness itself becomes empty, the world becomes empty. There is no real estate. It is simply manifesting as it is, freshly in each moment. All is still present as it is, but what it is is empty of any separative and defining meaning the mind may have projected. We are not defining reality by any arising structures in consciousness, the prajnaparamita sutras would say. Awareness is bright. All is known intimately not as something; but as empty of any separative quality, a simple and pure expression of Presence, here and now. And Presence is only another word for the experience. Marvelously, even our mind’s most fundamental concept of “being” as separate from “non-being,” of form as separate from emptiness, relaxes and becomes empty. This does not have to be thought of as a mystical or occult experience. It is simply what is recognized when the conceptualizing mind, for a short or longer period of time, takes a vacation.
Try this. Let your attentive gaze fall upon anything. A pair of glasses. An apple. A pen. A cup. Let your mind relax and simply sit present with it for a while. “Open” to it. You may notice first that the mind is still busy with other things. Your awareness is not simply resting with the object. Even as your mind relaxes further, and rests with the object, you may still hear yourself thinking such basic thoughts as “glasses,” “rim,” “used for seeing,” “lying there.” You are still knowing them as “glasses” in your perception. Let this knowing and naming quality of the mind continue to relax. Let “ignorance” or innocence arise even as you continue to rest your attentive gaze.
Let the presence of this less-and-less-known thing, arising in your awareness, swallow you up, so to speak, in its undefined “being.” To a part of the mind it is a kind of dying—into an awareness in which even self and other, being and not being, and the names of objects cease to be categories in the mind. All is “empty,” but present. You are still able to put your glasses on, or lift the cup, or write your name when the time comes. But your spontaneous interaction with the world is not dependent on the defining activity of your mind.
You may have noticed, if you sat with it for a moment, that the very idea—as well as the perception—of the presence of an object “softens” the edges of our ideas about the object, and softens the literalness or absoluteness of its name and its defining outlines; so that we may shift from the defining mind to the receptive appreciation of “being,” or presence. Paradoxically, this “softness” leaves us more open, more receptive, to the object itself as it now participates in our awareness, less defined but more present; more empty of itself as we would define it, but more completely there as itself. As we exchange a separative and defining capacity of the mind for a more inclusive quality of awareness, the very paradigm of our experience changes. Presence and definition emerge along two different scales of the mind’s activity: the less defined, the more present. And the more present the more truly mysterious and luminous, participating in unqualified being.
Everything in fact is arising and dissolving in our perception, no differently than a dream or an image or a thought arises and dissolves in perception. Perception itself is empty, as are its objects. That is, it has no solid reality, but merely offers itself for interpretation. Even the apparent solid appearance of banging my fist on a table is but the combined interpretation of insubstantial sense perceptions. Interpretation arises from habitual, practical, and conditioned associations of the mind and from private and agreed-upon cultural meanings. In accord with those, it is always reducing emptiness to form. As I attribute solidity, distance, separateness, and fixed definitions, concepts, and meanings to my perceptions, the world arises as solid, distant, alien, and temporal, and is defined by my attachment to concepts. When I relax the concept-making activity of the mind, and allow profound receptivity, the world arises as Presence, which is intimate, spacious, atemporal, and empty of attached meaning or projected form. And yet it may be said to allow for a new dimension of meaning.
The concept of a solid self also arises as a habitual interpretation of perceptions. The self can be experienced simply as a dimension of awareness-participating-in-being; or else the perception can be continually defined and refined in the conceptual mind as a separate and solid entity.
Just as a thought may be said to be insubstantial and occupy no space—yet if we are preoccupied with it, it is as if solid and takes up all space—so does the world of our perceptions, and of the self, arise spacious or unspacious, spontaneous or fixated, according to the nature of our preoccupations. Take as a metaphor the space of a room that is filled with boxes. Relatively speaking, the space of the room is “filled.” The boxes take up all the space. Perhaps there is no room now for anything else. There is not even room for air. But the actual “space” of the room is in no way reduced. If our attention is preoccupied with the boxes, we may see it as “no space.” But if we turn our attention to the space itself, we see it is the same—as spacious as ever.
When we relax our preoccupation and conditioned response, space reappears, and the arising world and the self does not interfere with, but expresses, the empty and awake fullness of being—Buddha nature. The empty fullness of being is the natural play of form and emptiness—mind, emotion, and world—that is free to manifest and disappear without binding effect on our true, original, or non-dwelling mind, as it is variously called. It is only the mind’s activity of preoccupation and fixation that selects, chooses, and creates a substantial and separative drama out of the whole—a drama that appears to have a binding effect upon us. Samsara versus nirvana.
If the objects of perception are empty—if reality is a field of spaciousness and potentiality rather than a field of fixed truth—then our choice and our mature capacity to love are supremely potent, for they can shape the world of our experience. Our essential nature and our ultimate calling is to be the very occasion of love in this universe, from moment to moment, from arising to arising. This is bodhicitta, enlightened heart—the heart of the awakened teaching of Jesus and of the entire Mahayana Buddhist canon.
The question of whether the “world” is “real” or “unreal” is not the true question. “Real,” “unreal,” and “world” are all concepts. The question is whether we relax and radiate within the field of presence and within the field of arising perceptions, expressing and affirming the unqualified nature of being, and caring for its manifestation in all others; or whether we engage in the activity of cognitive and affective contraction within that field—shrink in our awareness and in our feeling life—solidifying in our perception a world of separation, of self and other, of for and against, and of negativity. The question, that is—and the ultimate yogic practice—is whether or not we love.
Consider for a moment that we are the universe, or the one mind, dreaming itself. When we as that one mind become lucid within the dream, releasing the fixation around the play of meanings we consciously and unconsciously assign to experience; when we relax our mental preoccupation with things—including the abiding mental preoccupation with the idea of self—and when we lovingly re-allow the natural spontaneity of the mystery of our lives and of all phenomena, we may experience that all appearance, like all thoughts, takes up no space at all; that all existence remains infinitely spacious or empty—already love! already liberated! already us!—even as it takes on appearance; even as we engage it, even as it is known—arising from one source in the play of consciousness.
This lucidness, this awakening to our essential nature, enables us to truly care for and support all life in all of its manifestations and to cherish the freedom and well-being of others. It enables our own spacious capacity to be here for the spaciousness of all appearance; and it enables a spontaneity of being that is free of the linkage—free of the causal patterns—of reactivity, separation, projection, and fear that qualifies our simple presence. It enables our experience of being at home in “existence,” already having reincorporated and resolved back into our own consciousness the projections of nonexistence, and hence no longer living under the shadow of negation, the shadow of death.
This “being at home” arises in the moment as the simple and ordinary experience of being present for all things and allowing them to be present for us. This is the immediate aspect: all is simply what it is and speaks to us as such. But this presence may also be experienced as a window on an infinite reality that unfolds for us in the state of quiet, intimate receptivity or absorption, and that in the moment enwraps and enrapts the soul, the perceiving attention. In these moments we are shown what the universe looks like “from the inside”; when we are no longer being held “outside” by our projections. Its description in language requires paradox, for it is an emptiness infused with an infinite fullness that is both immediate and universal; a silent, empty expanse of being, a vast unruffled stillness that is at the same time an all-inclusive joyful communion or epiphany—that might even be described as choruses of hosannas unto the highest.
The ancient zen master Keizan captures all of this beautifully when he says: “There is not a speck of dust for ten thousand miles. Where are clever officials and fierce generals now? There is only singing, singing. All is Great Peace from the very beginning.” This naturally expresses as the upwelling of all-encompassing, unconditional love—because that is simply what we are—as well as the absence of normal or conventional human belief, attachment, meaning, reference, or urgency (all of the negations of the Heart Sutra). As for the “indifference” referred to in the poem, it isn’t nihilism or lack of compassion. The compassion is intrinsic; but it is one with the clarity that there is no arising that is subject to death, that can suffer harm or consequence. All is already resting, both totally manifest and totally empty at this moment, undisturbed in “God’s mind”; or, in the fundamental space of being.
Rising in timeless wonderment from my seat as the train stops at 2nd Avenue and Houston, I instinctively check the time on the subway clock: 5:55. Walking a few blocks, and finding a table in the crowded restaurant, I spend forty-five delicious and ecstatic minutes just sitting amidst the music of the surrounding table talk and clatter. When my cousin arrives, she is quick to apologize for being late, and I am equally quick to reassure her: there’s no time like this time.