Provisionally speaking, Zen is all about contents and context.
21 century physicists, examining the fabric of our universe, pose the question “does anything really exist?” One school of quantum theorists state explicitly that nothing, or rather no thing, exists. This school is trying to prove, mathematically and experimentally, that what ‘really’ exists, exists only as relationship. Not only can no thing be defined without reference to other things, but that no thing actually exists. That what exists in the quantum realm (of the infinitesimally small and inconceivably brief) is not things, not even the relationship of things, it is just relationship. Existence is relationship, not thingness. Buddhism has been exploring this view of existence for over 2,500 years.
One of Zen’s ancestral teachings uses the metaphor of weaving; the whole of ‘creation’ created by the continuous motion of shuttle through warp and weft. All that (apparently) is, is not pre-existent, but is being continuously constructed. Unlike the Three Fates of ancient Greece, whose ‘weaving’ was concerned only with the destiny of humans, the weaving in Zen is all inclusive…and it is not a done deal.
This is a radically different world view than that of the West, a view shaped by the Abrahamic faiths. A view in which the world in toto is a finite creation of a creator God. Sort of one and done. Even different from later Christianity where creation had motion, the motion of a clockwork like mechanism. Once created and set in motion the mechanism assured predetermined outcomes. A zero-sum game.
The Zen world view is without a creator, without a preset/predetermined, course or direction. ‘Things’ are described as having four particulars, “four marks”; they appear, persist, change, and disappear, all as a function of causes and conditions. A continuous patterning of appearance/disappearance, birth/death. The particulars of any thing completely defined by relationship, by context. Akin to the quantum view, but on the macro level of our experience.
The word context comes from the Latin word contexere: con = with or together, texere = to weave. To weave together. In Zen what is woven together does and does not exist prior to the weaving. Creation is not done, it is doing. The Tathatagarbha school of later Buddhism described this as something like the womb-embryo of existence. The simultaneity of the creator and the created. No chicken, no egg, chicken-egg/egg-chicken.
Zen describes every-thing as contextual. Every thing is appearing/disappearing in the context of all-at-onceness. All (apparent) things coming and going in the context of other (apparent) things coming and going. Context is the loom on which the fabric of the four marks are woven. What is woven are the contents of the context. The complexity of this is so vast and unknowable that Early Buddhist scriptures said, “who can untangle this tangled knot?”.
In Buddhism this simultaneity of contents and context is expressed as “co-dependent origination” and “interdependence and interpenetration”, both of which are woven into Buddha’s robe of Zen.