Metphorically, it is like the fact that there is a plurality of reflections of the moon but no plurality in the real moon. There is a plurality of water sources but not a plurality in the essence of water. There is plurality in myriad forms, but there is no plurality in space. There is plurality in principles expounded but no plurality in uninhibited intelligence.
*Ma-tsu (709-788). In Thomas Cleary, Ed. Teachings of Zen.
Sent to Ch’ao, the Palace Reviser
by Meng Hao-jan (China, 689-740)
You polish words in rue-scented libraries, and I live in bamboo-leaf gardens,
a recluse wandering every day the same winding path home to rest in the quiet, no noise anywhere.
A bird soaring the heights can choose a tree, but the hedge soon tangles impetuous goats.
Today, things seen becoming thoughts felt: this is where you start forgetting the words.
*David Hinton, Trans. Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China.
* * *
Meng was an early hermit poet of the rivers-and-mountains genre. Unlike some such poets, he was born in the mountains and remained there his entire life. The openness and generative nature of the landscape were a reflection of the fruitful source from which all life forms arise and to which each returns.
This genre of poetry is rooted in the principle of tzu-jan, arising out of culture producing Daoism and Ch'an [Zen] Buddhism. David Hinton refers to the literal meaning of tzu-jan: "self-ablaze." All nature is Life ablaze. Hence, he speaks of a "dynamic cosmology." Cosmology is not things here or there, being located apart in time-and-space, but located everywhere.
So, Christian Scripture speaks of the generative source in this manner: that creation is evolving to God being God in all. God - however you speak of that - already is, but the realization of that is not - not yet. The famed Christian mystic John of the Cross speaks of our spiritual growth from seeing God being within to all within God. It goes both ways or no, for the scripture and John point to a nondual reality with words framed in duality: in or out. How limiting our words!
What is it that is before the blaze, making space and generating the blaze, but does not cease when the blaze is ablaze? What is blazing? When you trace back all causes and conditions of the blaze, where is there? Each aspect of nature is an intangible manifesting in a particular form. You see the fire, you infer the source. Even in its spiritualized forms, materialism denies depth and worships the blaze as though what floats on the surface is the only ocean. Hence, the Heart Sutra wisdom, cutting through the duality of spirit and matter: "Form is Formlessness, Formlessness is Form." The self of anything, be it you are a speck of dust, is not a separate self: we live in depths, and depths live in us.
* * *
David Hinton translates this Fount of Life life-ing as the "generative void." However, "void" can be misleading, for this void is not a mere absence, it is a presence - a seductive, alluring one. Like a black hole, it pulls us toward and into itself. "Void" indicates its intangibility, inscrutability, subtleness, and formlessness. Some traditions personalize this in pointers, like Allah, God, Lord, Creator, Mother, Father, Vishu, Brahma, and Shiva.
We could say "void" signifies "obscurity" or "impenetrability." Yet, "generative" connotes a something - if we accept this something is not something. Tzu-Zan, or the Way, manifests as things, but it is not a thing. Hence, to return to the Way, spiritual paths rely on negations and paradox to disengage us from reliance on conventional thought.
God, or the Way, was never what we thought, for it could not be. And saying so but acting in attachment otherwise to our prized and protected images is disingenuous. Again, this is never what we say it is. We cannot speak this anymore than we can speak ourselves. A rock is never a rock, but so much more.
* * *
To encounter - always within - this thinglessness-yet-presence confounds the mind. The void is not, nevertheless, obscure or impenetrable in itself. To say "obscure" or "impenetrable" speaks of what happens to the mind when meeting this unutterable intimacy and bright unveiling - "bright" for beyond conceptualization. In this sense, the mind roams in darkness. Yet, even the darkness manifests the Light - one pointing us to the Light. The ineptness of our beliefs and images helps awaken us to what they palely point to. The contrast is integral to spiritual life. Still, the shadow is the shadow.
When Truth arises, the mind, like the eyes looking into the sun, is blinded and confronts its limitations. The mind seeks to scurry back into the darkness, where it sees and thinks Truth to be a factual fact, and Truth has been presented as a closed system of truths, or beliefs. Hence, ideas, beliefs, doctrines, and he-or-she-or-they-said-or-say becomes a hideout. This hiding is alright in itself. We hide until we are prepared not to hide. We adjust to increasing degrees of Light manifesting. As we do, we experience the ten-thousand-things differently: with greater clarity, growing appreciation, and increasing intimacy.
* * *
Meng writes -
Today, things seen becoming thoughts felt:
Roaming about among the ten-thousand-things, the openness of the outer landscape opens Meng's inner world. He becomes an open vessel, as the openness of nature allows the rising of mountains, rivers, streams, plants, sky, and every other creature that finds home there. Landscape becomes his temple without walls, reflecting his - and our - wallless selves. His - and our - true nature is mirrored back by relaxed, expansive landscape. Could this be why many people experience spiritual elevation outside in the natural and grown world instead of the manufactured and constructed world of closed-off, cramped, and contrived places? Does anyone want to look at an artificial rose when an organic rose, ground-sky-grown, is nearby?
Meng is seeing things. Things become sacramental. Each suchness can open to the pervasive Suchness - what unites everything. Every something points to an inwardness that is, at the same time, a boundlessness. When Jesus, in the Gospel of John says, "Come to me, all you...," he is embodying and speaking forth this boundlessness, which is openness. Hence, for Buddhists, "emptiness" is this boundlessness, not a vacant void. The void welcomes: that is an aspect of the dynamic cosmology - we are living within welcoming.
The Gospel implies this wisdom through Jesus' words, in which he says in the Gospel of John that the only way to receive Life - not life as duration, but quality - is through eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Much of the Church interprets this literally, obscuring the symbolic intent and power of the teaching. Jesus was saying we cannot bypass form to experience spiritual Life; our life, and the lives around us, is the way of Life. Each form is a fleeting expression of and openness to Life. Life opens and welcomes itself in all formed welcomes. Welcome is always taking shape, appearing before us to be welcomed or ignored. We cannot avoid or escape this innate reciprocity. Not to see is response as much as to see. Yes and no to the call interare.
The cannibalistic metaphor speaks of intimacy, even a union or oneness, with form. This wisdom is also implied in all tantric teachings. The stable-yet-generative Ground is experienced by jumping into the mandala of the fleeting ten-thousand-things, and it can be known through such closeness with one thing. And your mind-and-body is one of those things, yet you are more than a thing or anything, while not apart from all things. Otherness is the means towards union, then oneness. And spirit can manifest as separation, union, and oneness without losing itself as That-that-is. Duality is itself a way oneness - whatever that is - leads us home to itself, so to ourselves.
* * *
Within the walls of self, we are cut off by individuality - a limited consciousness - from the ten-thousand-things seen to be outside us, other than us. Still, suppose we do not honor the suchness of each thing. In that case, it resists opening to us, and it remains merely an object closed off from us, regardless of how we like, adore, or worship it. Thus, Meng is not denying the place and nature of each thing. A rock is a rock. A cloud is a cloud. A fart is a fart. Vomit is vomit. A minnow is a minnow. He is seeing through them an underlying, for before, intimacy and likeness. He sees this as the underlying seeps, so to speak, out of the form.
* * *
Thoughts become felt, Meng says. There is something we can only feel, but this feeling is not emotion, as we mean emotion. Or we could call it a nonegoic, spontaneous emotion. Meng does not deny the role of thought. Thought aligns with a more-subtle-than-thought in some sensation felt in the body. Spiritual practice is sensitizing ourselves to reconnect with the body as this transmitter of subtle energies, what the Eastern Church terms "grace."
Hence, in union with this generative source, we understand more what Buddhists mean by dropping mind-and-body. Mind-and-body drops in the sense of losing dominance; it does not cease to exist but takes its natural place as serving subtle intelligence. It becomes a receptacle and conveyor of Truth rather than decision-maker of what is and is not Truth or a truth. The mind-and-body is, we could say, sacralized to be a conduit of an unseen: compare sacramentality in Christian traditions. This transition from mind-and-body to heart-of-hearts can be challenging, as the mind-and-body seeks to regain its footing, grounding itself in itself (Egocentricity is self grounding itself in itself). The openness of the Way works to dissolve that cramped fashion, unfurling it like a flower bud opening into a blossom. The self is not lost but opened up. The self is seen to be the Self.
* * *
And... "this is where you start forgetting the words." Your intimacy with what is the subtleness of all things blows the mind, so to speak. But, actually, the process is more nuanced. With repeated encounters and continued Way-engaging, including a wisdom path of daily spiritual practice, the mind-and-body slowly releases its grip on experience, for it has no other choice. The body complex remains but is no longer the final decision-maker, and it feels the futility of explaining or clarifying the Truth to anyone, including oneself.
Words, articulating formless thoughts, cannot get their usual oxygen supply while exposed to the Light. Limitations of belief, which are agreed-upon ideas, the body complex begins to feel strongly as somehow way off-course. Thus, the limitation of opaque belief and the clarity of Truth and truths becomes bodily-felt intimacy. The body complex mirrors back to us when the void manifests in some form, and we have been receptive to direct contact. Direct contact is entering the welcome spaciousness of the form.
So, we learn to accept the limitations of thought - indeed, the conditioning of all our senses. We learn to honor the frustration at discussing what cannot be talked. We, however, speak. We simply seek to honor and convey that talk is talk. We learn that our principal means of transmission of the generative void is how it manifests in and through us rather than our - or anyone's - talk about it. All things left to their nature manifest as their nature.
As I often say, "To know the rain, walk out into the rain." You cannot inherit the sense of rain, and you cannot know it through an explanation. Yet, words can hint of it, as can other forms. And people can embody something of it, for it is not separate from them. Just no one can give it to anyone. Hence, spiritual teaching is principally hinting, so one decides to know it for oneself, not as supposedly given to them. A menu entices us, but eating a menu will leave us disappointed and possibly ill.
* * *
There is an essential seduction in all spiritual teaching and experience. Life itself is seductive. Life is the great Lover. We are not forced into Life, we are attracted into it. Love does not arise with command. The void lures the self-sense principally through the forms arising with us, reminding us of our native kinship with the void. Consent arises. So, how about a walk in the rain? Or, how about falling into the love-making embrace of Life? What is this Life? - no one says.
