Commentary: “Nothing Knows”

Well, what to say of this nursery rhyme? It was written as a playful response to the words of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche that head the poem: that fundamentally it is empty essence (or essencelessness, nothing) that is cognizant, or knowing. The poem is actually a response to the humorous paradox of language and its capacity either to get stuck on itself or to point beyond itself, according to how our minds receive it. Hence the paradox of the word “nothing,” which, as soon as it is said, becomes “something.” Or, it is as if the Rinpoche is making the absurd statement: “There isn’t anything, and it’s really smart.” And we naturally tend to take “isn’t anything” and turn that into something called “Nothing,” and then tell a story about it as a way of explaining everything. Whew!

As long as we take language as literal representation with a literal reference, we will miss the boat on one side or the other. Emptiness, nothingness, shunyata will always be imagined as a special kind of thing or condition; and prajnaparamita—“the wisdom that goes beyond”—will always be imagined as “something” that goes beyond something to “somewhere.” In truth, “emptiness” signifies “empty of our projections of concrete or fixed reality or separate existence.” And “gone beyond” signifies “gone beyond our linguistic creations and mental structures”—even the structure of “something” or “nothing.” That is why, as we are told over and over again, our own mental processes keep us from seeing what is right before our eyes.

The great ninth-century zen master Huang Po says simply, “There is nothing which can be said or made evident. There is just the omnipresent voidness of the real self-existent nature of everything, and no more.” Huh? In the same spirit four centuries later the Tibetan dzogchen master Longchenpa confirms, “Everything is the adornment of basic space and nothing else.” The mind naturally wonders whether such words refer to a mundane experience or to a cosmic experience. Do not imagine it to be either.

The Buddha, wandering in the forest one day, was approached by a man who was struck by his countenance, and who asked, “What are you? Are you a saint, a yogi, a savior?” And the Buddha replied: “I am awake.” This simple original wakefulness is empty of all fixed qualities other than its own nature, which is intrinsically aware and conscious. This is “omnipresent voidness” or “basic space,” awake by nature. This awakeness, this union of knowing and empty being, the original and only knower, is the all-pervasive joyful reality unhindered or unstained by any apparent phenomena, yet manifesting freely in all of it, subject to no politics, no philosophy, no religion, and no personal drama.

Inconceivable reality is empty of the mental categories of “liberation” or “non-liberation.” It is empty of “truth” or “illusion.” Hence, it is potentially either, and may manifest as either in consciousness: self-aware of its own transparency or provisionally identified with its creative forms and expression. In fact, no experience, nothing, strays from, but is simply a display of what Longchenpa calls the basic space of phenomena. Basic space, or the underlying Nothing—which is timeless awareness itself—is either (or simultaneously) recognizing itself directly or lost in its own dualistic display. This means that within the basic space of aware loving being—from which nothing ever strays, is “less than,” or is “other”—there is simply realization or its lack. That’s all! Nothing either knows or it doesn’t! And that is us now! That’s this!

Our cognizance, or awareness, which is none other than this transparent reality, can identify with the apparent solidity of our experience, the apparent concreteness of things, and the apparent solidity of our own thought forms and emotions—including the thought of an “I” who is the doer and the knower. Or we may, at any moment, relax that identification and allow our awareness to resume its transparency, its essential and existential freedom, simply shining and illuminating our absolute nature as well as illuminating and effacing any conditionally arising forms and thoughts.

To bring this down to earth, let me quote here a self-described “low-key” experience recently reported to me by a participant in one of our retreats. She is an experienced contemplative, but her experience is not that singular or inaccessible to us: “On Friday I seemed so easily able to fall into a deep contemplation and I found myself opening wider and wider until I knew I was the mother of all mothers, that what the Buddha knew I now knew too—we are here from the beginning and perfect. How does this knowing differ from knowing intellectually? Because it is embodied in my being. Shortly after that, what I cannot describe came into me as the sea mists scudding before the wind, enfolding me, wrapping me into itself, every nook and cranny and cell of my body. My stuff, my story, fell away and there I was, Being with a capital B. And so was everyone else in the room. And the room itself, the trees, the Kleenex boxes in all their splendor. At the same time that the experience was low-key it was absolute. Being is what it is.”

If we look back again at the Rinpoche’s words, which express the essence of Mahayana insight, we may also see that something else very playful and universal is reflected here. Leaving aside for a moment our various scientific or religious pantheons, whenever we try to reduce reality to one principle, whenever we try to capture the absolute essence of things, what we actually end up with is a dance; a dance not of one, but of three inseparable aspects—whether in the phenomenological language of Buddhist thought: empty essence, awake nature, and responsive capacity—or in the theological language of Christian thought. It is the same trinity referred to in the Hindu name for the Divine—Satchitananda. Sat is empty being; chit is consciousness; and ananda is the abundant and generous and unconfined nature of being—the willingness to get involved—overflowing into expression, evolution, and realization as its all-pervasive capacity. Its energy is joy. Its actuality is love.

Buddhism speaks of the dance of reality as the three bodies (kaya) of the Buddha. Sound familiar? Empty essence is the dharmakaya; consciousness or illumination is the sambhogakaya; and their inherent unity is also their endless all-pervading capacity, or responsiveness, to manifest as everything, especially as the compassionate incarnate activity of the nirmanakaya, the Buddhas, awake “individuals”—or, fundamentally: me and you. These three qualities are the Divine Ground, the Divine Person, or even the Divine Imperson, if you will. They are not separate and they are not objective. They are Nothing. They are infinite expression. They are both inside and outside of time. They are the body of reality. They are trinity.

These three kayas are our own mind, our own nature. So although these terms can remain abstract or abstruse philosophy, they reflect and record a direct experience of reality that is accessible to our own investigation. We are not merely able to speculate about metaphysical truth, but also to actually inhabit, or to embody, the most profound truth as not separate from what we are. When we relax the mind and resume our natural spaciousness, empty presence, awareness, and compassion is our own fundamental experience.

There is a several-thousand-year rumor that says that monotheism was the great theological advance of mankind, and we seem to have a love affair with the “One.” This “One” became the totalitarian basis for early institutional Christianity: One God, One Savior, One Truth, One Bishop—and the laity better listen up. But you have to be a bit heavy-handed to keep “One” from getting away from you. It is always wanting to morph into many, into male and female, into diversity, into nothing at all or into interpenetrating ecstasy. Even in the most developed theologies of One, we see it keep slipping into three. Even among the most patriarchal of ones and threes we see the suppressed feminine being projected and elevated. “One” can be a cosmic stick-in-the-mud, Miss Grundy calling us to button our blouse when everyone else is dancing naked in the street.

Actually the great “theological” advance of humankind is the capacity to see into the nature of things; to see patterns of experience at ever more underlying and integrative levels, and to allow that seeing to serve ever more humane and compassionate ends. This ever-awakening capacity has been with us for a long time. It is opened to in each moment that we rest in empty presence. It is not a rational faculty, although it may inform our rationality. And it shines through our attention in all cultures and historical times. Attentive to the fire, attentive to the stars, attentive to one’s camels, attentive to the loom, attentive to the sick and the dying, attentive to ritual offering, when there is no self-involved thought to cloud the simple manifestation of being, that moment may already be the embodiment of open-eyed realization prior to our ideas of any philosophy or practice. And this maturing capacity, varying among individuals, may be as present in polytheistic, shamanic, and indigenous responses to reality that celebrate and engage the diversity of the manifest dance, as it may or may not be in our monotheistic systems.

When we recognize the fact that this is simply God, we can celebrate the universal self-realization of being with fewer ideas about what realization looks like. The circle is always complete. Who mends the fishnet is also the fish. Who hears the bird is what is calling as the bird. Who feeds the gods, feeds with the gods’ own hands. Original empty awakeness is always dancing with itself. This is the moment to notice. We bring our own realization, our own empty presence, to the fore over and over again. Beyond that, what do we know? Our spiritual genius lies not in theology—not in our various paradigms of one god, many gods, no god, or quantum physics. It lies in the depth and quality of our relationship to the mysterious and reciprocal reality in which we find ourselves, whose proof is in the subjective pudding of our lives, not in our illusion of cultural or theological superiority.

The genius to be found in much indigenous spirituality is the round and personal engagement with life in all of its cycles and aspects of natural and divine manifestation, honoring and feeding both light and shadow within the realm of divinity. This does not preclude that same human wisdom that allows any individual an intuitive or intrinsic grasp of “essence”—not as a category but as a wholeness of being—underlying the relationship to many. That essence is also what gets projected as the great “One” of monotheism. As an intimate experience it is free, wonderful, and profound. As a projection, however, underlying essence becomes ultimate overweening authority. The imperial sun god banishes diversity to the shadows, only to fight never-ending skirmishes or scorched-earth campaigns against self-nature. This is inevitable when fundamental experience gets distanced into language in service of the egoic mind, and then further distanced into ecclesiastical doctrine, and then further into competing doctrines, and then further into systems of domination and control—the terminal end of that degenerative condition known as “hardening of the categories.” This is the unfortunate history of much of Christian theology, including the theology of trinity, as its original diverse and gnostic quality was suppressed. And Buddhism doesn’t have its hands clean either. It’s plenty capable of distancing intimate reality into literalist doctrine. That’s what we do.

But essence is fluid, not exclusive. It is not One, but All including One. God is not sovereign but vulnerable. Trinity is not doctrine but tango. Prajnaparamita is not only the mother of the Buddhas but the mother of poetry. The medicine is to drop our attachment to the concept-forming activities of the mind, to the literalism of language, and to the love of doctrine, and always to return to simple presence. To intimacy. To vulnerability. To dance. Which is what trinity—what reality—is really about.

What all these gnostic trinitarian teachings—Buddhist, Hindu, Christian—are telling us is that reducing anything to one—including God—is just an arbitrary principle of the mind. The mind can conceive “one,” but where do we see “one” anywhere? It can serve as inherited or a priori doctrine, but it doesn’t stand up to investigation. Certainly particle physics and quantum physics have not brought us closer to one, but closer to mutuality and paradox. One is an imaginary number. But no more imaginary than all the other possibilities. They represent an infinite potential beyond the mind’s dualisms and beyond the mind’s ability to conceive.

God, fundamental reality or ultimate ground, is not a monolith, but a seed; not a “thing” but an intimate potential. We can, for example, superficially refer to the form of a seed as “one”; but the seed is actually a dynamic potential, a mutual play of inherent forces or relationships, an ancient and intimate mystery that transmits and births an infinite progression of life and form beyond itself. The dynamic mystery of the seed manifests beyond itself in future seeds, and in the whole expression of the plant, which in itself and in all its relations is more intimate mystery. Where, then, is there “one”? There is no “thing,” only intimacy, which is the womb of creation; only interbeing; only the dharmadatu of interpenetrating totality. It is the primary and eternal mystery of intimacy, or mutuality—and we are its expression. That intimacy is what arises for us in our own experience of contemplation. We allow ourselves to become vacant and fertile ground in which that seed, that plant—the expression of primordial intimacy—can arise.

Thus, I have become endeared to the essential poetry of trinity, apart from any doctrine, because it simply describes how intimacy is built into the nature of being. (Perhaps the exquisitely intimate poetry of St. John of the Cross rings in my mind here.) The principle of trinity, whether expressed as Father, Son, Holy Spirit or expressed as Empty (Infinite), Awake, and Responsive (or as conscious, loving, and present), is reflecting the subtle intimacies of our own experience; and it needn’t be mere doctrine or an instrument of control. Our essential reality, both beyond and within time and space, births its own dance, the dance of relationship. And the mystery of our lives is the embodiment of it all. The essential knowing spaciousness that we are, the continuous apparition of ourselves in so many diverse aspects, and the creative love play that informs such a magical display as our own existence and turns it in love back upon itself—these are not separate, but one; and they are a trinity.

If we could for a moment reclaim the dance of trinity as our own intimate story, disguised and distanced as it may be in our Christian culture, we could take some space to befriend (forgive) even those patriarchal words like Father and Son that may understandably have alienating power for some. We could see through them, and their tortured history, to that same life-giving stream out of which they, like all things, have arisen; that reveals the underlying poetry of Satchitananda. The Father, our ground of being, is nothing in itself (empty essence), in eternal process of expressing its cognizance and love—Holy Spirit—which in its infinite potentiality and joy arises as its own loving and beloved manifestation, the apparent form, the nirmanakaya, the Son; which in turn rises in fullness as the Teacher, and who, in turn, demonstrates or embodies the identity of apparent form with the Whole. These three aspects of ourselves are in eternal love tryst. It is our love tryst, our nature, and our evolutionary work. The whole play of our lives and the whole story of creation is, in truth, the transparent manifestation of an intimate reality, this dancing union of “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit”; or, as Tibetan Buddhists put it less patriarchically, as the loving gaze of recognition between the Mother Light and the Child Light.

Indeed, we are the gaze that goes both ways: now lover, now beloved; now “father,” now “son.” There is a time to be a child of the awesome immensity of Being, and also a time to take responsibility, to maturely embody and to express that same life-giving power. There is a time to rest ourselves in the lap of the “Father” and there is a time to hold God’s head in our laps. Doesn’t life (doesn’t Jesus) also ask this of us? “Those who have fed the hungry have fed me.” This absolute occasion of intimacy and responsibility (or avoidance) is true of every moment of our lives—as parents, lovers, friends, and citizens. It is the true reciprocity and dance of all our relations. It is the intimacy of our capacity to choose conscious loving presence. It is the revelation of our Christ-nature and of the three kayas.

All this may be known as living reality in the surrender of deep meditation or prayer, in the joyful communion of mystical experience; or, simply, as Life—in our direct, surrendered, and intimate experience here and now, manifest in how we live. This playful intimate reality is nothing at all but our own capacity to know and to appear. To arise as a smile. To wriggle the toes. To gaze outwardly with open eyes, or inwardly with eyes closed. To reflect the pure radiance of being when awareness remains unruffled by the winds of the mind. To celebrate, to praise, and to feed all manifestation in infinitely creative ways. To take the continual risk of intimacy and vulnerability as the unique occasion of this existence. There is no separate one who is born, no separate one who dies, no separate one who is clever or wise. There is “nothing”—other than that same undefined and unconfined aware capacity flowing into existence, singing out through all things, true of everything, playfully “supposing” every kind of self-limitation, speaking itself through all our language, inviting us to “believe,” or simply: to sing.