“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Emptiness is not separate from form,
form is not separate from emptiness.
Whatever is form is emptiness,
whatever is emptiness is form.”
The Heart Sutra
A Buddhist Text
A cargo ship arrives in port,
laden with goods from the East.
It is not a ship,
it is a religion professor at his lectern,
speaking on the Buddhist concept of *sunyata.
It is not a Buddhist concept,
it is the ghost of an irrefutable truth
haunting the West since *Heraclitus .
It is not a ghost,
it is the digit flicking face of a clock,
a new month requiring the flip of a calendar page,
ice melting in a glass of Scotch,
the drinker standing from his chair in a calmer mood,
a husband promising never to do something again.
What gets us through each sunup-sundown day
is an illusion we conceive of as reality.
Mornings we place our bets on form.
It is a convenient illusion,
in reality, the world is not as solid as it seems.
Emptiness is not separate from form,
form is not separate from emptiness.
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*sunyata = (Sanskrit) The Buddhist notion of the fundamental emptiness of reality
as everything shifts in and out of many forms. This emptiness is not a negation of
existence but an recognition of the undifferentiated openness that makes everything
possible.
*Heraclitus (4th c. BCE) a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who first is credited with
saying ‘everything flows’ and ‘you can’t step into the same river twice’ meaning
that all matter is in constant flux and change is the fundamental property of reality.