The single best known phrase in Zen is probably from the Heart Sutra: “Form is emptiness, Emptiness is form”.
The Heart Sutra was almost certainly written in China and then translated back into Sanskrit to create the appearance of authenticity.
Its fame is ironic, as the Chinese had considerable difficulty with the idea of emptiness. When Buddhism first came to China with its form/emptiness pairing, the inclination the Chinese had was to equate it – wrongly – with their own categories of Li and Shi.
Li means principle. Shi means phenomena. We’re familiar with it in Zen because it’s in the Sandokai, a doctrinal poem written by Master Sekito in the 8th century.
It’s two different ways of seeing. Li is looking at things on a kind of systems basis and Shi is looking at particular phenomena. So for instance, the weather system would be Li and the raindrops would be Shi. Gravity would be Li and the planets would be Shi, and so on.
The reception of Buddhism was against a background of pre-existing Taoist thinking, which had, for example, the concept of the void, and which sounded quite like emptiness, but wasn’t.
What’s interesting is that out of this apparent misunderstanding of emptiness, a tremendously rich and unique tradition evolved. The Indian perspective is very much centred on the individual practitioner or group of practitioners, and the world is seen as either neutral or obstructive.
The transformation which the Chinese created was of a completely alive practitioner within a completely alive world. The world is aiding, not obstructing the practitioner.
This brilliant ‘error’ illuminates something very important.
The way in which we should encounter the sutras, the stories, the sayings shouldn’t be as a fixed and certain body of knowledge we require to learn. It’s more like meeting a person.
A person who can change us. And also, critically, a person that we can change. Not change in the way that we could just integrate that person within our own systems and perspectives (“oh, he’s just like X”) but at a deep level, underneath thought and choice.
There’s a perennial temptation for us to often have an ideal of what our practice should be like, and to judge whether or not we’re achieving that. But it’s much better to regard our practice not as a conforming action, squeezing ourselves within what we imagine previous generations of Buddhists to have experienced, but as a creative and an expressive action of the whole of us, which the mind can’t see but which we can accept through faith.
We can understand Buddhism as being, in a sense, a history of evolving metaphors. Those metaphors, like a person, are not closed in meaning.
For instance, Dogen used the metaphor of darkness, which habitually referred to ignorance, in a novel way as non-differentiation and of intimacy. Because in the dark we cannot see anything as separate from ourselves. Similarly for us, very well worn metaphors that the Chinese used, like the mirror, can live and change within us. New meanings can always come forward.
That is one of our roles in a culture which is at the starting point of receiving Buddhism.
We stand against the natural tendency to assimilate Buddhism within our pre-existing categories. We stand against the seemingly opposite tendency to replicate the cultural forms of the civilizations from which we’ve acquired Buddhism. We are like a blind person painting. Or a deaf person singing.
By no means useless.