In a previous essay space was considered as a factor in “place”, the impermanent now-here. This essay provisionally presents space as the Dharma-gate to another core Zen tenet…emptiness.
Early Buddhism categorized all ‘things’ into two categories: compounded and uncompounded. Compounded things are everything we can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and conceptualize. Compounded things are reducible to other things. A famous Zen question asks, ‘when is a car not a car?’. What do we take away from a car to make it not a car, to remove its ‘car-ness’? The windshield, steering wheel, seats, engine, body…? When seeing this disassembled, reduced, fragmentary pile of stuff, at what point did it lose its car-ness?
The Western world view excels at this kind of existential reductionism, dissecting things into (usually) smaller things. A piece of paper can be dissected into to fibers, to polymers, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles…to whatever the prevailing quantum theory is. The car, the piece of paper, any ‘thing’ we apprehend by the five physical senses or conceptualize with consciousness is compounded from other ‘things’. Our experiential world falls into the category of compounded things. Anything we ‘know’ is reducible to other things.
What about the category of uncompounded things? Things not made up of other things. No-things. Things without thingness. In Early Buddhism there were only two no-things: space and nirvana. Suspending the discussion of nirvana for now, here we are considering space.
Early Indic Buddhist scriptures were written in phonetic syllabaries, Pali and Sanskrit. Symbols represented sounds. Written Chinese does not use a phonetic alphabet, it is written with ideograms, or ‘idea-grams’. Ideograms, ranging from simple to complex, are graphic representations of a spoken word. How to translate words from a phonetic syllabary into words written with ideograms? One method used preexisting ideograms. For example, hridaya (‘heart’ in Sanskrit) became 心 (‘heart’ in Chinese). To translate ‘space’ the ideogram for sky, 空, was chosen. Sky is vast, without boundaries; it is potential, anything can happen; it is immutable, not changed by its contents. Like the light of the moon reflected in a pond, sky is not increased or decreased by the coming and going of clouds, lightening, celestial light, aircraft. In the ancient view sky was not compounded from volume, atmosphere, light, etc. These were not sky, merely the contents of sky. To the ancients, sky and space were indistinguishable, both were uncompounded no-things. They were…empty.
Sky and space are metaphors of a boundless territory called emptiness. But unlike sky and space, emptiness is outside the categories of compounded/uncompounded things. It does not fall into a category, not contained by a category, is empty of categories. Being empty of categories emptiness is unknowable. Notice however, that even saying this is to limit emptiness, to make it knowable by putting it in a category. The mind-bender is that for emptiness to be truly empty, it must be empty of emptiness.
How to be empty of emptiness?
The Heart Sutra says, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”.