At the end of The Diamond Sutra, six metaphors are used to describe this life:
a dream, an illusion, a shadow, a bubble (in a stream), a dewdrop, a flash of lightning.
What are we to make of these? Are they six aspects of something which can’t be named, or are they each different, or all the same?
They don’t seem the same. The last three seem to be real, but instantaneous, and the first three seem to occupy a strange position: experienced, certainly, but not clearly real, neither existing or non existing.
Could we say they are six instances of ungraspability?