There are many translations of Buddhism’s Heart Sutra with slightly different versions of these words: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is also form.” This is a distillation of the basic teaching of Buddha that there is no abiding self. Each of us in this moment is an absolutely unique person, and, depending on the strength of our egos and understanding of the dharma, we grasp that person as if life itself depends on it. Such grasping of form is driven by fear and dualistic thinking. That is, viewing the world in the dualistic terms of me/you, us/them, mine/yours, mine mine mine me me me, the abiding me, is delusion, the antithesis of life. But there is nothing to grasp. We are not the same from one moment to the next.
Nothing abides and everything is insubstantial. There is no fixed self and there is no fixed universe and there is no fixed form. Form is emptiness and emptiness is also form, but we are habitually attached to form and to the concept of the duality of good/evil, better/worse, right/wrong. We seek something substantial to hang onto.
But everything, life itself, is fundamentally insubstantial. Nothing is our own. We are composed of and depend on a continually changing array of other people, animals, plants, soil, water, the earth, the sun, the moon and stars. Our very genes came from our parents, grandparents and ancestors going back in evolution to whatever creature first came out of the sea and even beyond that. Each of us is in some way affected by and in turn affects each other. We are continuously changed by the aging process, by the last book we read, the last film we saw, the food we eat and the malicious gossip we hear (and pass on), the most recent political debacle, the birdsong we listen to on a walk, a painting we see in a gallery, the laughter of a friend, the tears of a relative, a misunderstanding with a mate, the danger of environmental collapse, the death of someone we know, the smile of an infant. Each second we each are in some significant or subtle way different than the second past, as each of us and the multitudinous things of the universe continuously flow around and through each other in harmony.
The realization and experience that nothing abides and that everything is fundamentally insubstantial is a glimpse into the harmony that underlies and constantly flows through and between all beings. Everything is in harmony when we understand that nothing abides. Misuse of harmony through grasping is easily perceived in our daily lives on several scales of destructive behavior—-environmental degradation, nations threatened and destroyed, children and spouses abused, friends slandered and happiness exiled.
When sitting, we experience emptiness as the present awareness of the absence of thought and we experience form as the thought that arises from the condition of non-thought. Form and emptiness are polarities, but they are not dualities. They are aspects of each other, as we are each and all aspects of each other, none of them abiding.
The great Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman has written, “Our involvement with others does not begin with just our speech and physical movements. Each of us individually has an effect on the lives of beings around us through the quiet processes going on in our minds. If they are full of good feelings, they radiate around us and people want to be near. If we are full of bad feelings, others tend to stay away. So, if we would be activists for good, for the positive, we must assume responsibility for our minds as well as our speech and our physical activities, otherwise our negative mental habits will drag down the entire community of beings.”
Among those negative mental habits is the attempt to grasp a fixed self and to seek something substantial to hang onto. In our daily practice of sitting and what we take from that practice into our daily lives—our words, thoughts, actions and intentions—we gradually replace habit with practice. And a recent definition of ‘practice’ by Gary Snyder rings as true as the sound of the bell that begins and ends our sitting periods—“a deliberate, sustained and conscious effort to be more finely tuned to ourselves and the way the world actually is.”
And in the world as it actually is there is no abiding self.