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Zen is a practice of awakening. 1 Who does one awaken as? What does one awaken to? The answer to both of these questions is, in a word, “emptiness” (Skt śū nyat ā ; Ch. kong ; Jp. kū ). One awakens as one ’ s “true self ” (Jp. shin no jiko ), and yet the true self is selfl ess, not only in the sense of compassionate, but also in the sense of empty of a determinate and substantial ego. The true self is thus a “non-self ” (Skt anā tman ; Jp. muga ) that awakens to its “formlessness” (Jp. mus ō ), its “self-nature which is no-nature” (Jp. jishōsunawachi mush ō ), as Hakuin puts it in his Praise of Zazen (Hakuin 1998 , 101). At the same time, one awakens to the nature of reality – that is, one becomes capable of “seeing things as they really are” (Skt yathā bh ū tadar ś ana ). How are things? They are “empty of own-being” (Skt svabh ā va- śū nya ) – that is, they do not have their being on their own but exist rather as impermanent events of dependent origination (Skt prat ī tya-samutp ā da ; Jp. engi ). One thus awakens as the “formless self ” underlying the formations of the ego, and one awakens to the emptiness of all the phenomenal forms that one encounters in the world. And these are not separate matters since, according to Zen, one also awakens to the non-duality of self and world.

Moreover, one awakens to the non-duality of form and emptiness. On the one hand, the formless true self creatively and compassionately expresses itself in personal form, and, on the other hand, the emptiness of things does not deny but rather characterizes the existence of things with concrete form. As is refl ected in such adages as “true empti-ness, wondrous being” (Jp. shinkū my ō u ) (Tagami and Ishii 2008 , 291–2), East Asian Mahā y ā na Buddhism speaks of emptiness, not only as what negates a falsely attributed substantiality to things, but also as what enables the forms of reality to be such as they really are, to be in their “suchness” (Skt tathatā ; Jp. shinnyo ). 2

The pivotal line of the Heart S ū tra is well known: “Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form” (Nakamura and Kino 1960 , 8). According to the Madhyamaka school, which philosophically develops the insights of the Prajñ ā p ā ramit ā S ū tras such as the HeartSū tra , this means that, once we see that things are empty of own-being or independent

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Forms of Emptiness in Zen

BRET W. DAVIS

A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy, First Edition. Edited by Steven M. Emmanuel.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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substantiality, we can see them such as they are in their interrelational existence. Nā g ā rjuna even equates emptiness with dependent origination. 3 All beings are thus at once form and emptiness; indeed they are “forms of emptiness” in that it is their lack of independence and substantiality that allows them to be the interrelated processes that they are. Hence the fi rst meaning of the title of this chapter – but only the fi rst.

However signifi cant Madhyamaka philosophy is for Zen, there are other forms that the teaching of emptiness takes in Zen besides the mere lack of own-being. 4 The Prajñ ā p ā ramit ā S ū tras themselves make reference to 18 or 20 types of emptiness (Naka-mura 2001 , 778; Komazawa Daigaku 1985 , 240). Indeed, frustrated readers of texts on Zen that seem to use the term “emptiness” in a bewildering variety of senses and contexts may not be surprised to hear D ō gen ’ s claim that there are at least 84,000 kinds of emptiness (D ō gen 1990 , 3: 406)! How can we begin to approach the great many forms the teaching of emptiness takes in the Zen tradition? Based on my own under-standing of the texts and practice of Zen, rather than strictly following any traditional schema, I think we can schematize this manifold into six rubrics, six basic ways in which the notion of emptiness is used in the Zen tradition. These are: (1) lack of own-being; (2) formlessness of ultimate reality; (3) distinctionless state of meditative con-sciousness; (4) no-mind in the action of non-action; (5) emptiness (or emptying) of emptiness; and (6) emptiness of words.

Let me begin with a preliminary sketch of these six forms or rubrics of emptiness. First of all there are two ontological – or, better, “meontological” (from the Greek word for “non-being, mē on ) or, best, “kenological” (from the Greek word for “emptiness,” kenot ē s ) – senses of emptiness: (1) phenomenal beings’ lack of own-being – i.e., absence of independent substantiality (which also, as we shall see, implies the fullness of “inter-being”); and (2) the formlessness of ultimate reality – i.e., the purity and essential indeterminacy of the “water” underlying the “waves” of the discriminations of phe-nomenal form. Next, there are two psychological senses of emptiness: (3) samā dhi (Jp. zenjō ) as a state of meditative concentration which reaches a deep level of consciousness beyond or beneath the waves of mental activity, a state which is empty in the sense of being pure or free from delusory discriminations; and (4) no-mind (Jp. mushin ) as a radical openness of mind and heart which is not withdrawn from the world but rather non-dually involved in it by means of the “action of non-action” (Ch. wei-wu-wei ; Jp. mu-i no i ), a non-willful, spontaneously natural engagement with persons and things. The last two rubrics involve the self-negating nature of emptiness: (5) the emptiness (or emptying) of emptiness (Skt śū nyat ā - śū nyat ā ; Jp. kū -k ū ) is an antidote to one or another type of “emptiness sickness” (Jp. kū -by ō ). 5 While emptiness negates our delu-sory reifi cations of reality, it is not itself an alternative reality in which we should dwell. Its thoroughly negating activity applies also to itself. This is understood either in onto-logical or, rather, kenological terms, as the constant self-emptying of emptiness into form, or in semantically deconstructive terms, as the emptiness (i.e., lack of independ-ent existence) of the notion of emptiness itself. Finally, (6) the longstanding critique in Buddhism of the dualistically reifying effects of language, a critique which reaches an apex in Zen ’ s claim that awakening is “not founded on words and letters,” is refl ected in the teaching of the emptiness of words, a teaching that points beyond all teachings, including itself, to a practice that issues in direct realization. As we shall see, each of the six rubrics contains a cluster of closely related teachings. Moreover, there are

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certainly many interconnections, and arguably some tensions, among the rubrics. For the sake of clarity, however, each of the six sections of this chapter will focus in turn on each of the six rubrics.

Before beginning to examine these six forms that the teaching of emptiness takes in Zen, let me comment briefl y on Zen ’ s relation to the doctrinal sources upon which it critically and creatively draws. The Zen tradition understands itself to be based on Śā kyamuni Buddha ’ s profoundest teaching, which has been passed down not through texts and doctrines but by way of face-to-face acknowledgment of awakening. Insofar as this is a “special transmission outside the scriptures,” Zen cannot ultimately be understood in terms of doctrinal or philosophical teachings, but must be directly expe-rienced by way of meditative practice, in stillness and in action, with one ’ s “whole body and spirit” (Jp. zenshin-zenrei ). Nevertheless, on the way to and from the meditation cushion, and indeed as an integral part of its holistic practice of realization, Zen fre-quently employs various teachings and texts of the Mah ā y ā na Buddhist tradition. The concept of emptiness, we shall see, is used in different ways in different sū tras and philo-sophical schools of the Mah ā y ā na tradition, and these differences are refl ected in the forms in which emptiness appears directly or indirectly in Zen teachings. As is well known, the Zen tradition is also strongly infl uenced by Daoism, from which it inherits the key term “nothingness” (Ch. wu ; Jp. mu ). This Daoist term was initially used by early Buddhists in China to translate śū nyat ā , before being replaced by the character meaning “sky” as well as “emptiness” (Ch. kong ; Jp. kū ). While most other Buddhist schools ceased to use wu in this sense, the Zen tradition has continued to use wu / mu , often synonymously with kong / kū . One can detect some Daoist infl uence in particular in our rubrics 2, 4, and 6. Let us, however, begin our exploration of the forms of empti-ness in Zen with rubric 1, a foundational teaching of Mah ā y ā na Buddhism.

Lack of Own-Being

If one looks up “emptiness” in a Buddhist or a Zen dictionary, the main defi nition given is generally the lack of own-being or independent substantiality (Nakamura 2001 , 312; Komazawa Daigaku 1985 , 240). This teaching can be traced back to the early Buddhist teaching of non-self (P. anattā ) as one of the three marks of existence, the other two being impermanence (P. anicca ) and suffering or unsatifactoriness (P. dukkha ). While suffering applies only to sentient beings, non-self applies to all existents, in the sense that everything is without permanent and independent substantiality. Nothing exists forever or on its own. Rather, the temporary existence of everything is due to causes and conditions, and, as is stressed in East Asian Mah ā y ā na, everything exists in a web of interconnectedness with all other things. Hence, the teaching of non-self is the other side of the teaching of dependent origination. It is in accord with these oldest of Buddhist teachings that N ā g ā rjuna identifi es emptiness with dependent origination.

However, N ā g ā rjuna also criticizes earlier interpretations of these foundational Bud-dhist teachings, namely the Abhidharma doctrines of the so-called H ī nay ā na schools, which sought to explain the self ’ s lack of independent substantiality by means of break-ing the self down into its components. The second century BCE Buddhist monk N ā gasena


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famously argued that, just as a chariot can be broken down into the wheels, axles, chassis, etc., a person can be broken down into its constituent parts (Dumoulin 1994 , 32–3). The Abhidharma philosophers understood themselves to be taking up where the Buddha left off when he analyzed the self into fi ve “heaps” (P. khandha ; Skt skandha ), namely: material form, feeling, perception, volitional mental formations, and con-sciousness. They broke each of these down further until they reached what they considered to be the ultimate physical and mental constituents of reality, which they called dharmas . Whether these dharmas were understood to be permanent (as in the S ā rvastiv ā da Abhidharma) or momentary (as in the Sautr ā ntika Abhidharma), they were taken to be real existents, the atomistic building blocks of the universe, so to speak. The emptiness of the self was thus explained on the basis of its being analyzable as an ever changing conglomeration of these dharmas .

When the Heart S ū tra says that “form is emptiness,” it is taking the non-self doctrine one revolutionary step further: even “the fi ve skandhas are empty,” indeed, “all dharmasare characterized by emptiness” (Nakamura and Kino 1960 , 8). (It should be noted that “form” [Skt rū pa ; Jp. shiki ] in such phrases as “form is emptiness” is subsequently often used in the Mah ā y ā na tradition to refer not just to the fi rst skandha of material form, but, as shorthand for all dharmas , to all material and mental phenomena with delimited form.) The critical point being made is that not only is the self empty of sub-stantial selfhood (Skt pudgala-nairā tmya ; Jp. ninkū ), dharmas , too, are empty of substan-tial selfhood (Skt dharma-nair ā tmya ; Jp. hokkū ). There are no substantial building blocks of the universe; nothing has independent existence; everything depends for its existence on causes and conditions; and everything is essentially interconnected. This radical teaching of the emptiness of own-being lies at the core of the Prajñ ā p ā ramit ā S ū tras and Nā g ā rjuna ’ s Madhyamaka school of thought, which established the initial philosophi-cal basis of the Mah ā y ā na tradition.

Crucially, this radical negation enables an equally radical reaffi rmation. Whereas the Abhidharma ’ s analytical reductionism saw only that the self is empty , this new Mahā y ā na teaching could also turn the coin over to see that emptiness is the self . Not only is form emptiness, but emptiness is also form . In China, Tiantai (Jp. Tendai) philoso-pher Zhiyi developed the Madhyamaka notion of the Two Truths (i.e., the conventional truth of provisionally designated forms and the ultimate truth of emptiness) into the Three Truths of “the provisional, the empty, and the middle” (Swanson 1995 ). The “middle” truth entails a reaffi rmation of provisional forms as provisional – that is, as empty of independent substantiality but fully real as provisionally designated events of dependent origination.

The contemporary Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh beautifully expresses the sense in which, paradoxically, emptiness entails fullness. To begin with, he points out that to be “empty” is always to be empty of something . In this case, to be empty means to be “empty of a separate self.” So, when we say for example that a sheet of paper is empty, this means that

it is empty of a separate, independent existence. It cannot just be by itself. It has to inter-be with the sunshine, the cloud, the forest, the logger, the mind, and everything else. It is empty of a separate self. But empty of a separate self means to be full of everything.

(Thich Nhat Hanh 2009 , 6–7)

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Emptiness of own-being thus implies fullness of interbeing. The school of Buddhism that developed this teaching of interconnectedness fur-

thest is the Huayan school, which has strongly infl uenced Zen. Huayan draws upon the Avata ṃ saka S ū tra ’ s image of the “jewel net of Indra,” a massive net representing the universe, in each knot of which lies a jewel refl ecting all the others (Cook 1977 , 2; Chang 1992 , 165). In this sense, each phenomenon of the universe contains, and is contained in, all the others. No phenomenon could be what it is without the support of every other, and the universe could not be what it is without the support of each phenomenon. Fazang demonstrates much the same point with a hall of mirrors, where each mirror refl ects an image of the Buddha as it is refl ected in all the others (Chang 1992 , 24).

Thich Nhat Hanh also stresses, as did N ā g ā rjuna, that emptiness implies openness to change. Indeed, in her interpretation of N ā g ā rjuna ’ s philosophy, Nancy McCagney makes a good case for translating śū nyat ā as “openness” rather than “emptiness,” since it implies “the open-endedness of events, their openness to change, their nonfi xedness, their impermanence” (McCagney 1997 , 62). After all, if things had unchanging essences there would essentially be no growth and development, and thus no possibility for liberation from delusion and suffering. (Later we will see that, psychologically speak-ing, emptiness in Buddhism also implies open-mindedness and open-heartedness.)

Formlessness of Ultimate Reality

In the course of his explanation of the relation between emptiness and form in his commentary on the Heart S ū tra , Thich Nhat Hanh also employs a famous analogy: “Form is the wave and emptiness is the water. . . . So ‘form is emptiness, and emptiness is form’ is like wave is water, water is wave” (2009, 13). While used in Huayan (Tu Shun 1992 , 214–18) as well as in Zen, this simile of water and waves does not in fact derive from the Heart S ū tra or indeed from any of the Prajñ ā p ā ramit ā S ū tras , but rather from the Laṅ k ā vat ā ra S ū tra (Suzuki 1932 , 42) and the Awakening of Faith in Mah ā y ā na(Hakeda 1990 [1967] , 41, 55).

In his treatise on “Oriental Nothingness,” the twentieth-century philosopher and Zen teacher Hisamatsu Shin’ichi uses this image of water and waves to explain the relation between the “nothingness” of the “one mind” and the multiple forms of the phenomenal world. He writes:

In Buddhism there is the expression, “All is created by alone-mind.” . . . Buddhism fre-quently employs the analogy of water and waves in order to illustrate . . . the creative nature of this mind. . . . Waves are produced by the water but are never separated from the water. . . . While the water in the wave is one with the wave and not two, the water does not come into being and disappear, increase or decrease, according to the coming into being and disappearing of the wave. . . . The mind of “all things are created by the mind alone” is like this water. The assertions of the Sixth Patriarch [of Zen], Huineng, that “self-nature, in its origin constant and without commotion, produces the ten thousand things” and that “all things are never separated from self-nature” . . . express just this creative feature of the mind.

(Hisamatsu 2011 , 225-6)


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Other related analogies used in Mah ā y ā na Buddhist texts include the Śū ra ṅ gama Sū tra ’ s one handkerchief with many knots (Low 2000 , 137–40), and the Huayan thinker Fazang ’ s statue of a golden lion, where the fi gure of the lion represents phe-nomenal forms or “aspects” (Ch. xiang ; Jp. sō ) and the gold represents the underlying essence or “body” (Ch. ti ; Jp. tai ) (See Fa Tsang 1992 ).

Such analogies have invited severe criticism lately from the proponents of so-called Critical Buddhism, who accuse Zen – along with most schools of East Asian Bud-dhism – of failing to uphold the most fundamental Buddhist teaching of emptiness understood as synonymous with dependent origination. Speaking of emptiness in terms of an innate “buddha-nature” (Jp. busshō ) is said to confl ate emptiness with precisely what it negates, namely an underlying substratum, and thereby to fall back into the “ Ā tman = Brahman” metaphysics that the Buddha rejected (Matsumoto 1994 ; Hakamaya 1990 ). As we shall see in the following section of this chapter, this criticism is in fact nothing new, but rather echoes longstanding debates within the Buddhist tradition between Madhyamaka thought, on the one hand, and Yog ā c ā ra and Tath ā gatagarbha thought, on the other. Critical responses to the Critical Bud-dhists have ranged from accusations of promoting an exclusionary sectarian funda-mentalism that does not take into account the evolving plurality of interwoven strands of the Buddhist tradition(s) (Gregory 1997 ) to pointing out that the doctrines they deem problematic should be read as “skillful means” (Skt upā ya ) (King 1997 ; see also Ogawa 1982 ). Of course, for Zen, all doctrinal teachings are, at best, skillful means. Yet, even on a doctrinal level, Zen thinkers would certainly deny that they understand emptiness or the buddha-nature in terms of an independent substantial-ity that is incompatible with other central Buddhist teachings such as dependent origination.

Hisamatsu does indeed claim that the nothingness (Jp. mu ) of buddha-nature is “deeper than dependent origination,” since it is the absolute One – or, as Nishitani Keiji puts it, “the None beyond the One” (Nishitani 1987a , 243) – whereas dependent origi-nation is a relation between two or more things (Hisamatsu and Yagi 1980 , 68). 6 As Hisamatsu ’ s student Abe Masao puts the point, when we say there is “nothing” behind this world of thoroughgoing dependent origination, this “nothing” should not be understood merely as a “relative nothingness” or privation of being, but rather as an “absolute nothingness.” The latter is a radical formlessness which is free even of the “form of formlessness,” and so, “being formless in itself, true śū nyat ā does not exclude forms, but freely and unrestrictedly takes any form as its own expression.” According to Abe, this “formless śū nyat ā , in Mah ā y ā na Buddhism, best describes the nature of ultimate reality” (Abe 2011 , 752, 755–6).

Insofar as Zen thinkers understand emptiness in this manner as a formless, “non-objectifi able, ultimate reality,” they can be said to have been infl uenced not only by such Buddhist texts as the Awakening of Faith but also by Daoist writings, which suggest that the multiplicity of phenomenal beings arise out of and return to an aboriginal nothing-ness.7 Yet it is important to bear in mind that the Zen tradition has always understood this to be compatible with the principle of dependent origination and so with the idea that individual beings lack own-being – in other words, that they are empty in the sense of our fi rst rubric.

Fazang in fact lists as the fi rst reason for using the analogy of the golden lion:

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To understand the principle of dependent-arising . That is to say that gold has no inherent nature of its own [i.e., no svabh ā va ]. It is owing to the artistry of the craftsman that the form of the lion arises. This arising is the result solely of the cause-conditioning; therefore is called the arising through dependent-arising.

(Fa Tsang 1992 , 225)

He goes on to say, “Emptiness does not have any mark of its own; it is through forms that [Emptiness] is revealed.” The “gold” is thus not some thing independent of the interdependent aspects of its form; it is the emptiness which allows those forms to be what they are. Insofar as we understand “emptiness” in what Hakeda Yoshito refers to as the two senses in which it is usually used in Buddhism, namely: in the sense of “empty or devoid of a distinct, absolute, independent, permanent, individual entity or being as an irreducible component in a pluralistic world,” and in the sense of “empty of all predications” (Hakeda 1990 [1967] , 36), then what the “gold” is meant to sym-bolize is indeed empty.

If emptiness in Zen is a metaphysical substratum, it is a peculiar one indeed, for it is essentially indeterminate and non-dually inseparable from phenomenal forms, which arise by means of its self-emptying – that is, by means of its self-negation as self-determination or self-delimitation. The modern Zen master Yamada K ō un speaks of emptiness in mathematical terms as an “empty-limitlessness” which is the “denomina-tor” of all things of the phenomenal world, which are its “numerators” (Yamada 2004 , 46). Moreover, since the zero of this empty-infi nite is none other than one ’ s true self, or, as Linji puts it, “the true person of no rank who goes in and out of the gates of your senses” (Iriya 1989 , 20), Yamada states:

We cannot locate our essential nature because it is a zero, yet it has infi nite capabilities. It can see with eyes, walk with legs, think with a brain, and digest food with a stomach. It weeps when it is sad and laughs when it is happy. Though it is zero, no one can deny its existence. It is one with phenomena. The essential nature and phenomena are one from the very beginning. That is why the [ Heart S ū tra ] can say, “Form is nothing but emptiness; emptiness is nothing but form.”

(Yamada 2004 , 28–9)

In Sanskrit śū nya means not only “empty” but also “zero” (Tachikawa 2003 , 51), which here implies not just ultimate privation but also infi nite potential.

Since the beginning of Mah ā y ā na thought, śū nyat ā has also been closely related to the unlimitedness of space and the open sky. The translation of śū nyat ā with the Chinese character that literally means “sky” as well as “emptiness” (Ch. kong ; Jp. kū ) is thus quite apposite, as is the link with “space” (Skt ā k āś a ) that is further reinforced by the translation of this term as “vacant sky” (Ch. xukong ; Jp. kok ū ). In the earliest of the Prajñ ā p ā ramit ā S ū tras , the sky and space were used as metaphors for emptiness and purity, as well as for the bodhisattva ’ s unattached and unobstructed freedom and limitless depth of wisdom (Conze 1973 , 11, 14, 25, 46, 57, 60). McCagney writes the following regarding sky and space as primal metaphors in the earliest Mah ā y ā na sources.

The symbols in the early Prajñ ā p ā ramit ā texts show that the Mah ā y ā na notion of ā k āś a[i.e., “space” understood as “a luminous ether, fi lled with light”] derives from meditation


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(dhy ā na ) on the sky, which is experienced as vast, luminous and without boundaries. This use is consistent with early Buddhist dhy ā nas on the arū padh ā tus (formless realms) as well as the close connection drawn between ā k āś a and nirvāṇ a as asaṃ sk ṛ ta (unconditioned) events ( dharmas ) by six of the early schools.

(McCagney 1997 , xx)

We will take up the issue of meditative states in a moment, but here let us note that, alongside nirvāṇ a , space was considered by most early Buddhist schools to be an “unconditioned dharma ,” unaffected by the conditioned events of dependent origina-tion that took place within it.

The Zen philosopher Nishitani Keiji writes that the “sky is an eternally constant empty space with unlimited depth and endless width. It is the only ‘eternal thing’ we can see with our eyes,” and so the “sky of the visible world has been used in scriptures as an image ( Bild ) to indicate . . . [this] eternal limitlessness” (Nishitani 2011 , 728). Elsewhere Nishitani speaks of “a void of infi nite space” and an infi nite sphere with “its circumference nowhere and its center everywhere” (Nishitani 1982 , 146). In many Mahā y ā na texts, including those of Zen, space or the open expanse of a clear sky sym-bolizes the ultimate Dharma realm of non-obstruction which makes room for all, letting everything within it coexist in harmonious interaction (Komazawa Daigaku 1985 , 332; Tagami and Ishii 2008 , 199). 8 In the Ten Oxherding Pictures , after both the ox and the ox herder disappear in the eighth picture, leaving only an empty circle, a river and a tree and then an interpersonal encounter are depicted in the ninth and tenth pictures. The emptiness of the eighth picture is thus not an end state, but rather can be under-stood, at least in part, as an awakening to the open place in which the events of all the other pictures have always already been taking place (Ueda 2003 , 175).

And yet, the sky or empty space analogy, however useful it is for understanding how emptiness lets things be without interference, does not work as well for explaining how emptiness is somehow the source of forms, unless, that is, we understand “space” as dynamically self-delimiting itself into the shapes and colors of things (Akizuki 1990 , 55–6; 2002 , 34). As Brook Ziporyn points out, in the Platform S ū tra , “Huineng is made to compare the ‘self-nature’ of all beings to empty space, which here both contains and produces all the particular objects within it” (Ziporyn 2011 , 78). Ikky ū speaks of empti-ness as a formless “original fi eld” from which everything arises and to which everything returns. “All the forms, of plants and grasses, states and lands, issue invariably from emptiness, so we use a metaphorical fi gure and speak of the original fi eld” (Ikky ū 2011 , 172, 176–7). Nishitani also speaks of “the fi eld of emptiness,” and of this – in a manner that resonates well with contemporary physics – as a “fi eld of force.” He writes: “If we call nature a force that gathers all things into one and arranges them into an order to bring about a ‘world,’ then this force belongs to the fi eld of emptiness, which renders possible a circulating interpenetration among all things” (Nishitani 1982 , 163, translation modifi ed). Drawing deeply on Huayan philosophy while also alluding to Heidegger ’ s later thought, Nishitani says that, on this fi eld of emptiness, all things are in the process of refl ecting and being refl ected in, supporting and being supported by one another, such that “when a thing is , the world worlds ” (ibid., 150, 159). In his later period, Nishida Kitar ō – Nishitani ’ s teacher and the founder of the Kyoto school – understood the “self-determination of the place of absolute nothingness” in terms of

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the dialectically mutual determination of individual persons, things, and concrete uni-versals such as languages and cultures (Nishida 1987–9 , 7: 163). The self-emptying of emptiness occurs as the interdependent origination of all things.

In line with this self-determining fi eld-like understanding of śū nyat ā , the modern Zen master Yasutani Hakuun ( 1966 , 74) has said, “[ Kū ] is not mere emptiness. It is that which is living, dynamic, devoid of mass, unfi xed, beyond individuality or person-ality – the matrix of all phenomena.” Albert Low comments, “The closest we can come to this in modern thought is the notion of a magnetic fi eld. Even so, the fi eld is an abstraction from life, Buddha nature is life itself ” (Low 2000 , 124). While the quantum electromagnetic fi eld may indeed approximate the “objective” aspect of what Nishitani calls the “fi eld of emptiness” (Jp. kū no ba ), Low is right to point out the need to stress the “subjective” aspect of this fi eld. Nishitani calls this the “radical subjectivity” (Jp. kongen-teki shutaisei ) which, having transcended or, rather, “trans-descended” both the fi eld of reifi ed being and the fi eld of vacuous nihility, realizes – i.e., awakens to and actualizes – the fi eld of emptiness as the “standpoint of emptiness” (Jp. kū no tachiba ) (Davis 2004b ). As Nishida puts it, the true self is aware of itself as a “focal point” of the expressive self-determination of the place of absolute nothingness (Nishida 1987–9 , 10: 437, 441; 11: 378). Or as D ō gen, in the “Empty Space” (Jp. Kok ū ) fascicle of the Shō b ō genz ō , quotes his teacher Rujing as saying, “My entire embodied self is like the mouth [of a bell] hanging in empty space” (D ō gen 1990 , 3: 411).

Distinctionless State of Meditative Consciousness

Thich Nhat Hanh tells us that, if we learn to identify ourselves with the ubiquitous emptiness of the “water” rather than with the fi nite form of a particular “wave,” we will no longer fear death and will be able to live life to the fullest (2009, 24). Yet how can we do this? The Zen tradition has always stressed the effi cacy of meditation; indeed the very word Zen derives from the Sanskrit word dhy ā na , signifying a state of medita-tive concentration.

The association of emptiness with meditation in fact goes back to the beginnings of Buddhism. Indeed the earliest references to emptiness are the Buddha ’ s instructions on meditation, such as verse 373 in the Dhammapada , which speaks of “entering the empty room [P. suññā g ā ra ṃ ] and quieting one ’ s mind.” In addition to referring to a vacant place for meditation, the “empty room” is presumably a reference to a meditative state of consciousness that is free of distractions and attachments. This psychological sense of emptiness is explicitly developed in such texts as the Smaller Emptiness S ū traand the Larger Emptiness S ū tra , a development which culminates in what are called the three states of samā dhi (meditative concentration): emptiness samā dhi (Skt śū nyat ā -samā dhi ), signless samā dhi , and wishless samā dhi (Tachikawa 2003 , 87–97; Tagami and Ishii 2008 , 225; Harvey 1990 , 256). Also related here is the so-called formless realm, which is experienced in the meditative states of “the sphere of infi nite space, the sphere of infi nite consciousness, the sphere of nothingness, and the sphere of neither-cogni-tion-nor-non-cognition” (Tagami and Ishii 2008 , 247, 464; Harvey 1990 , 251).

To be sure, these rarifi ed states of meditative concentration are still considered to be but the highest abodes in saṃ s ā ra , even if it was generally maintained that one passes


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through them on the way to nirvāṇ a . 9 The Therav ā da tradition has maintained that such states of meditative concentration (P. samatha ) are merely preparatory to the more analytical forms of insight meditation (P. vipassanā ) which lead to liberating wisdom (P. paññā ). The Zen tradition, by contrast, holds there to be a more direct relation between non-discursive meditative concentration and enlightenment. Huineng in fact explicitly links – even identifi es – meditative concentration (Skt dhy ā na ; Ch. ding ; Jp. jō ) with liberating wisdom (Skt prajñ ā ; Ch. hui ; Jp. e ) (Yampolsky 1967 , V, 135).

We will turn to Huineng ’ s dynamic understanding of meditation in the next section of this chapter. Here, to begin with, we could apply the water/wave analogy to say that by quieting the mind one can experience the stillness of the water beneath the turbu-lence of the waves. This formless quietude discovered through meditation as the deepest layer of consciousness was frequently understood in the Yog ā c ā ra and Tath ā gatagarbha traditions – especially as these were synthesized in the Laṅ k ā vat ā ra S ū tra and the Awak-ening of Faith – as “the original purity of the mind” (Jp. honrai-sh ō j ō -shin ). Whereas the Madhyamaka school has maintained the notion of “intrinsic emptiness” (Tb. rang stong ; Jp. jishō -k ū sh ō ), meaning that something is in and of itself empty, these texts and tradi-tions have frequently advanced the idea of “extrinsic emptiness” (Tb. gzhan stong ; Jp. tashō k ū sh ō ), meaning that something is empty of something else. For example, it is thought that the phenomenal fl ow of experience is empty of subject–object duality but nevertheless real, or that the tathā gatagarbha or buddha-nature is empty of defi lementsbut full of positive virtues (Williams 1989 , 85, 101, 105–8; Harvey 1990 , 111, 113, 116–17). Paul Williams writes that

the tension between the two approaches to [emptiness] can be traced to an opposition between the Madhyamaka view of emptiness as an absence of inherent existence in the object under investigation, and the tathā gatagarbha perspective on emptiness, so infl uential in Chinese Buddhism including Chan, which sees emptiness as radiant pure mind empty of its conceptual accretions.

(Williams 1989 , 195)

The Ś r ī m ā l ā S ū tra and the Awakening of Faith suggest that, by means of “cutting discur-sive activity, the mind is ‘returned’ to the state it was already really in, that of a pure, mirror-like, radiant stillness” (ibid., 111).

There have been centuries of debates, which continue among scholars today, over the extent to which, and the sense in which, Madhyamaka and Yog ā c ā ra ’ s Cittam ā tra or “mind only” philosophy are compatible. One solution, that of the Yog ā c ā ra-Svā tantrika Madhyamaka school, was to see Cittam ā tra as a provisional teaching which enables one to see objects as empty, insofar as they are dependent on the mind, but which in the end gives way to the Madhyamaka insight that the mind, too, is inher-ently empty (Williams 1989 , 59, 280; Tachikawa 2003 , 177–89). Despite the differ-ences between sudden and gradual approaches to enlightenment foregrounded in the legendary debate in Tibet between a proponent of this school (Kamala śī la) and a pro-ponent of Zen (Moheyan), something similar might be said of the provisional treatment of Cittam ā tra in the Zen tradition. 10

To be sure, the analogy of the enlightened mind as a “mirror” that is pure – i.e., empty of defi lements – so that it refl ects things as they are without imposing on them

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egocentric prejudices – in other words, what the Cittam ā tra tradition calls the “great perfect mirror wisdom” – has been widely used in the Zen tradition, especially in its early stages of development. The famous episode in The Platform S ū tra of the Sixth Patri-arch , where Huineng trumps Shenxiu in a competition of verses, revolves around this analogy. Shenxiu had written, “The body is the Bodhi tree. / The mind is like the stand of a clear mirror. / At all times we must strive to polish it, / And must not let the dust collect” (Yampolsky 1967 , III, 130, translation slightly modifi ed). Shenxiu ’ s view cor-responds to that of Yog ā c ā ra insofar as he understands meditation as a means of “emptying” the mind in the sense of “purifying” it of defi lements (Yokoyama 1982 , 562–4). According to the earliest version of the text, Huineng responds, “Bodhi origi-nally has no tree, / The mirror also has no stand. / Buddha nature is always clean and pure; / Where is there room for dust?” (Yampolsky 1967 , IV, 132). Note that here Huineng does not directly question the aptness of the analogy of the mind as a mirror, only that its essential purity could ever be defi led. In a later version of the text, however, which became the standard in the tradition, the third line of Huineng ’ s verse is changed to the famous phrase “Originally there is not a single thing” (Ch. benlai wu yi wu ; Jp. honrai mu ichi motsu ). This canonical line can be understood to entail that even the remnant of an ontological duality between a pure and unchanging mirror and the impure and changing images refl ected in it needs to be let go of; even the empty mirror needs to be emptied out into the world.

As Yanagida Seizan explains, after Huineng the teaching of the mirror mind increas-ingly gave way to the teaching that the mind – or rather the “no-mind,” as will be discussed in the following section of this chapter – is inseparable from the things and events of the world (Yanagida 1975 , 81–106). Indeed, Xuedou (Jp. Setch ō ) strikingly says, in The Blue Cliff Records (Ch. Biyanlu ; Jp. Hekiganroku ), “mountains and rivers do not exist within the vision of a mirror.” Yuanwu (Jp. Engo) adds the comment, “Don ’ t view mountains and rivers . . . with a mirror. To do so produces a dualism. It ’ s just that mountains are mountains, waters are waters, each dharma abides in its dharma posi-tion, and the features of the mundane world constantly abide as they are” (Iriya et al. 1994 , 2: 104–5).

Later in life Huineng is said to have come across two monks arguing about whether a fl ag or the wind was moving, to which he remarked, “It is neither . . . It is your mind that is moving.” And yet, in case we are tempted to think that Huineng ’ s Cittam ā tra-like response is the ultimate truth rather than a skillful means, Wumen comments: “It is neither the wind nor the fl ag nor the mind that is moving. . . . All of them missed it” (Nishimura 1994 , 122; Shibayama 2000 , 209). What is the “it” that they missed? Two mondō11 involving Mazu are also pertinent here. In the fi rst one, in response to the question “What is Buddha?” Mazu replies, “This very mind is Buddha.” However, in the second one, in response to the same question, Mazu now answers, “No mind, no Buddha” (Nishimura 1994 , 125, 135; Shibayama 2000 , 214, 235, translation modi-fi ed). What then is “it”? This is where our demand for a philosophical theory is overrid-den by Zen ’ s insistence on direct realization through holistic practice.

Zen practice is fi rst and foremost zazen , seated meditation. D ō gen bluntly states, “The practice of Zen ( sanzen ) is zazen,” which he describes as “the Dharma gate of great repose and bliss” (D ō gen 2002 , 109–10). On the one hand, he says that this requires a “total commitment to immovable sitting,” and yet, on the other hand, he also says


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that “the practice of Zen has nothing whatsoever to do with the four bodily attitudes of moving, standing, sitting, or lying down.” “As you proceed along the Way,” he tells us, “you will attain a state of everydayness” in all of these postures (ibid., 3, 5). Follow-ing D ō gen ’ s lead, the S ō t ō school has stressed the practice of bringing the meditative mindfulness cultivated in zazen into one ’ s daily activities.

By comparison, the Rinzai school, with its use of kō ans , teaches a more dramatic route through an intense state of meditative concentration back to the “everyday mind.” Hakuin urges practitioners initially to use kō ans such as “the sound of one hand” or the Mu k ō an in order to cultivate the “great ball of doubt.” He writes:

When a person faces the great doubt, before him there is in all directions only a vast and empty land without birth and without death, like a huge plain of ice extending ten thou-sand miles. As though seated within a vase of lapis lazuli surrounded by absolute purity, without his senses he sits and forgets to stand, stands and forgets to sit. Within his heart there is not the slightest thought or emotion, only the single word mu (no!). It is as though he were standing in complete emptiness.

(Hakuin 2011 , 208)

When one “advances single-mindedly” into this state of frozen emptiness, Hakuin goes on to say, one will eventually achieve a breakthrough: “suddenly it will be as though a sheet of ice were broken or a jade tower had fallen,” and one will “experience a great joy.”

An entrance to the world of Hakuin ’ s Rinzai Zen requires one fi rst to break through all dualistic oppositions, of subject/object, inner/outer, pure/defi led, being/nothing-ness, speech/silence, etc. The entire world of relativities in which we live must be tran-scended, or rather trans-descended, before it can be reaffi rmed (Hirata 1982 , 2: 213). The sacred/secular duality must also be transcended, which means that even the tran-scendence/immanence duality must be relinquished. As the opening kō an in the BlueCliff Records relates, when Bodhidharma was asked for “the fi rst principle of the holy truth,” he responded, “vast emptiness, nothing holy” (Ch. kuoran wusheng ; Jp. kakunenmush ō ) (Iriya et al. 1994 , 1: 36). The relation between emptiness and form must itself be understood non-dually. Zen affi rms the Vimalak ī rti S ū tra ’ s teaching that the relation of emptiness and form can be understood only by way of passing through the ultimate Dharma gate of non-duality (Watson 1997 , 26, 29–30). Even the duality between duality and non-duality must be let go of. To attempt to do this by means of analytical reason, however, only produces yet further dualities. This Gordian knot cannot be teased apart with the fi ngers of the intellect; it must be cut directly and holistically with the sword of intuitive wisdom. The practice of meditation and kō an training is meant to unsheathe this sword.

“Not thinking of good or evil, what is your original face?” or “What is your original face before your father and mother were born?” is sometimes used as a fi rst kō an in Zen training. Most often, however, the “initial barrier” through which Zen practitioners in the Rinzai tradition are required to pass is the fi rst kō an in The Gateless Barrier (Ch. Wumenguan ; Jp. Mumonkan ), which could also be translated as The Barrier (or Check-point) with the Gate of Mu . This is the so-called Mu or “the one letter Mu ” (Jp. mu no ichiji ) kō an , in which Zhaozhou (Jp. J ō sh ū ) answers “no!” (Ch. wu ; Jp. mu ) to a monk ’ s

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question regarding whether or not a dog has buddha-nature. 12 Wumen instructs us not to “attempt nihilistic or dualistic interpretations”; in other words, Mu is neither a sheer vacuity nor is it the mere opposite of being; it is neither a “no” as opposed to a “yes” nor a “has” as opposed to a “has not.” Rather than attempt to understand Mu intel-lectually from a distance, you must wholeheartedly “rouse the word Mu ” by “concen-trating yourself into this Mu with your 360 bones and 84,000 pores, making your whole body one great ball of doubt.” Yet Wumen does not simply tell us to become Muon the meditation cushion and stay there. This would be a form of emptiness sickness. Rather, like Hakuin, he says that, after “inside and outside have naturally become welded into a single block . . . all of a sudden it will break open, and you will astonish heaven and shake the earth” (Nishimura 1994 , 21–3; Shibayama 2000 , 19–20, trans-lation modifi ed).

No-Mind in the Action of Non-Action

Huineng tells us that only “the deluded man” thinks “that straightforward mind is sitting without moving and casting aside delusions without letting things arise in the mind”; in truth, “the samā dhi of oneness is a straightforward mind at all times, walking, staying, sitting, and lying” (Yampolsky 1967 , VI, 136). The true samā dhi of oneness does not exclude an engagement with the plurality of things in the world, but entails a non-duality of equality and differentiation and a stillness in the midst of movement. What Huineng calls “no-thought” (Ch. wunian ; Jp. munen ), and what later is often referred to as “no-mind” (Ch. wuxin ; Jp. mushin ), does not exclude thinking; rather, “No-thought is not to think even when involved in thought” (ibid., VII, 138). The prob-lematic kind of thought involves “the dualism that produces the passions” – in other words, we separate ourselves from things and reify them, and then we react to these illusory reifi cations with attachment or revulsion. However, Huineng says, “If you give rise to thoughts from your self-nature, then, although you see, hear, perceive, and know, you are not stained by the manifold environments, and are always free” (ibid., VII, 139).

This capacity of the formless self to engage freely with things, precisely because it does not attach itself to or rigidly identify itself with – i.e., “linger in” – any of their forms, is what is meant by no-mind. As Bankei puts it, “The unborn Buddha-mind deals freely and spontaneously with anything that presents itself to it” (Bankei 2011 , 195). Peter Harvey depicts this as follows.

When a person is in such a state he is aware of his surroundings in a total, all-round way, without getting caught up and fi xed on any particular. The mind does not pick and choose or refl ect on itself, but is serenely free-fl owing, innocent and direct, not encumbered by thought-forms. When the need arises, the “mind of no-mind” can instantly react in an appropriate way.

(Harvey 1990 , 272)

The fact that the no-mind is “non-lingering” or “non-abiding” (Ch. wuzhu ; Jp. muj ū ) does indeed mean that it does not get stuck on anything; but it does not mean that it cannot be intensely focused on something. Quite to the contrary, no-mind is akin to


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what athletes or musicians experience when they are “in the zone,” utterly absorbed in an activity of the here and now (including when the “here and now” involves remem-bering, planning, or otherwise thinking of the “there and then”). A Zen master, however, would live all of life in the zone, whether listening or laughing, crying or dying, and would be able to shift effortlessly between different activities, at once absorbed in and yet unattached to any of them.

In his book on the subject, D. T. Suzuki unfortunately translates no-mind as “the Unconscious.” What he meant by this, in any case, was not a coma-like state of uncon-sciousness or what psychoanalysts mean by the subconscious, but rather non-dualistic-consciousness or unselfconsciousness. In this sense he speaks of “everyday acts . . . done naturally, instinctively, effortlessly, and unconsciously” (Suzuki 1958 , 106–7). Thomas Kasulis points out that no-mind or no-thought is “not an unconscious state at all” but rather a heightened state of non-dualistic awareness “in which the dichotomy between subject and object . . . is overcome” (Kasulis 1981 , 47–8). As he goes on to say, it is “an active responsive awareness of the contents of experience as directly expe-rienced,” and, although he adds the phrase, “before the intervention of complex intel-lectual activity,” I see no reason why it could not take place, as we have seen Huineng suggest, and as Nishida says of “pure experience” (Nishida 1990 , 13), in the midst of complex intellectual activity. Not only when one is absorbed in a train of thought, but also when one effortlessly switches one ’ s focus from one train of thought to another, this too is an instance of no-mind. No-mind is thus not thoughtlessness or unconscious-ness but rather a purifi ed consciousness; it is pure not in the sense that it is without content or oblivious to the complexity of interrelated distinctions, but rather in the sense that it is free from the distortions of this manifold by egocentric discrimination and dualistic reifi cation.

To think and act in a state of no-mind is to be at once free and natural; it is to exist in a state of natural freedom (Davis 2011 ). In Zen, as in Daoism, such naturally free action is referred to as “non-action” or as “the action of non-action” (Ch. wei-wu-wei ; Jp. mu-i no i ), which indicates not a lack of action but rather pure activity, in other words, activity that is empty of willfulness and artifi ciality (see chapters 2, 3, 43, 48, and 64 of the Daodejing ; Nakajima 1982 ; and Davis 2004a , 99–101). Suzuki cites several classical texts where Zen masters describe their state of awakening as follows: “When I feel sleepy, I sleep; when I want to sit, I sit”; or: “In summer we seek a cool place; when it is cold we sit by a fi re.” When a monk asks, “That is what other people do; is their way the same as yours?” the master replies that it is not the same, for “when they eat, they do not just eat, they conjure up all kinds of imagination; when they sleep, they do not just sleep, they are given up to varieties of idle thoughts” (Suzuki 1996 , 207). Linji (Jp. Rinzai) says that “the Buddha Dharma is without artifi ce: just act naturally in your ordinary life, as you defecate and urinate, wear clothes and eat food” (Iriya 1989 , 50; Cleary 1999 , 20, translation modifi ed). The term translated as “naturally” could be rendered more literally as “without ado” (Ch. wushi ; Jp. buji ), and, as with the term translated “without artifi ce” (Ch. wuyonggong ; Jp. muy ō k ō ), it begins with the character wu / mu , which means no, not, non, nothing, or does not have.

As we have seen, Zen often employs terms that begin with wu / mu : no-mind, no-thought, no-form, non-abiding, non-action, and so on. Along with “emptiness” and “nothingness,” such terms may strike our ears as negative. Indeed they should, insofar

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as they do imply a radical negation of all the subtle and gross forms of our egocentric impulses, such as greed and hate, as well as delusions, such as the idea of own-being, all of which shapes our habitual manners of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and acting. However, these terms ultimately also indicate, as the other side of this radical negation, the affi rmation of a liberated and liberating way of life. Perhaps we can begin to under-stand the affi rmative aspect of such expressions as “emptiness” and “no-mind” if on occasion we substitute for them nearly synonymous words to which we are more attracted – words such as “freedom” and “openness.”

We are not sure if we want to be “empty,” but everyone wants to be “free.” We are not sure if we want to be in a state of “no-mind,” but everyone wants to be open-minded and open-hearted. 13 In German, “the open,” in the sense of “outdoors,” is called dasFreie . In English we speak of “going out into the open to get some fresh air” and “the freedom of the outdoors.” Also in English, “Is this seat free?” means “Is this seat empty?” which in turn means “May I potentially sit in it?” Emptiness thus implies the freedom not just of vacancy, but of potentiality, just as impermanence implies the ability to change. Change can of course be for the better or for the worse, depending on how we respond to an open-ended situation. We can respond with a closed mind, attaching ourselves to an illusory sense of permanent possession, or we can respond “freely,” with an open mind attuned to its ever changing circumstances. Emptiness implies, then, freedom from attachment, from fi xating on one place, and in this sense non-lingering or non-abiding. This term was employed by Huineng, who was initially enlightened upon hearing the Diamond S ū tra ’ s teaching to “arouse the mind that does not abide anywhere” (Tagami and Ishii 2008 , 139; Nakamura and Kino 1960 , 80). Not abiding or lingering anywhere, the open mind is able to take in and respond freely to the ever changing world, and the open heart is able to acknowledge and respond – i.e., is response-able – to the needs of others. In short, the realization of emptiness opens the door to wisdom and compassion, insofar as “emptiness is the ‘nonduality of self and other’ (Jp. ji-ta funi )” and the “oneness of thing and self ” (Jp. motsu-ga ichinyo ) realized by the “formless self ” (Akizuki 1990 , 48, 51). 14

Emptiness (or Emptying) of Emptiness

Just as emptiness implies non-attachment to things, be they falsely apprehended sub-stances or dogmatic “views,” it also implies a non-attachment to emptiness itself. Empti-ness too is empty, or must be emptied, or constantly empties itself. Among the 20 types of emptiness listed in traditional accounts, along with “the emptiness of ulti-mate reality” and “the absolute emptiness,” we fi nd “the emptiness of emptiness” (Skt śū nyat ā - śū nyat ā ; Jp. kū -k ū ) (Nakamura 2001 , 778; Komazawa Daigaku 1985 , 240; Chang 1992 , 119).

Garma Chang suggests that this teaching marks the difference between Mah ā y ā na Buddhism ’ s emptiness and the absolute Being of the Upanishads. “The Upanishads affi rm the ultimate substratum , the Great One ; whereas Buddhism stresses the Thorough Emptiness without attachment to any Self-being or Sva-bh ā va.” The distinctive feature of absolute emptiness in Buddhism is thus said to be its “self-negating or thorough-transcending aspect” (Chang 1992 , 93, 90). Also writing from a Huayan perspective,


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Kaginushi Ry ō kei explains that there are two interrelated meanings of the “emptiness of emptiness.” On the one hand, along with the negation of the own-being of every-thing else, emptiness is itself emptied; emptiness itself is no-thing. On the other hand, “true emptiness . . . constantly negates its own emptiness and necessarily takes concrete form as the beings of dependent origination” (Kaginushi 1982 , 743, 750).

The contemporary Zen philosopher Ueda Shizuteru writes of this twofold emptying of emptiness, or self-negation absolute nothingness, as follows:

Now absolute nothingness, the nothingness that dissolves substance-thinking, must not be clung to as nothingness. It must not be taken as a substance, or even as the nihilum of a kind of “minus substance.” The important thing is the de-substantializating dynamic of nothingness, the nothingness of nothingness. Put in philosophical terms, it refers to the negation of negation, which entails a pure movement in two directions at the same time: (1) the negation of negation in the sense of a further denial of negation that does not come back around to affi rmation but opens up into an endlessly open nothingness; and (2) the negation of negation in the sense of a return to affi rmation without any trace of mediation. Absolute nothingness, which fi rst of all functions as radical negation, is maintained as this dynamic coincidence of infi nite negation and straightforward affi rmation.

(Ueda 1982 , 161–2)

Ueda warns that we must not confuse the fi rst direction with a negative theology that would employ the via negativa in order to approach the ineffable “being” of an absolutely transcendent God. “Emptiness” or “nothingness” is not a negative theological fi nger pointing at an otherworldly moon. Furthermore, the second direction is said to distin-guish the this-worldly orientation of Zen from a mysticism that would leave the every-day world of plurality behind in a unio mystica with the transcendent divine (Davis 2008 ). Emptiness constantly empties itself into form; absolute nothingness ceaselessly delimits itself as relative beings. While Ueda thus distinguishes Zen from negative theol-ogy and mysticism, other Kyoto school thinkers have drawn parallels between the second direction of the self-negation of absolute nothingness (or emptying of empti-ness) and a radical interpretation – or a radicalization – of the Christian notion of kenosis as the “self-emptying” of God into the world (Nishida 1987–9 , 11: 398–9; Nishitani 1982 , 26, 58–9; Abe 1990 ; Davis 2005 ).

The following mondō from The Book of Equanimity (Ch. Congronglu ; Jp. Shō y ō roku ) can be understood to convey both senses or directions of the emptying of emptiness.

Yanyang (Jp. Gony ō ) asked Zhaozhou (Jp. J ō sh ū ): How about when one arrives carrying not a single thing? Zhaozhou responded: Cast that down! The monk then asked: Since there is nothing at all to carry, what should I cast down? Zhaozhou responded: In that case, pick it up and go!

(Yasutani 1973 , 321)

Chang comments, “cast that down” means “lay down your so-called Emptiness” (Chang 1992 , 99). Elsewhere Wumen drives this point home: “Even vast emptiness does not yet accord with my principal teaching. Why don ’ t you completely cast down empti-ness too?” (Nishimura 1994 , 109). Zhaozhou ’ s “In that case, pick it up and go!” is generally understood to be an ironic reprimand to Yanyang which points out his

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contradictory attachment to emptiness; he is captive to his sense of liberation. Yet Chang suggests that it can also be understood to imply that, “by freeing oneself from clinging to the dead-emptiness, one can participate in every activity in life without losing the śū nyat ā insight” (Chang 1992 , 99). Only with empty hands, after all, is one free to pick things up.

Nishitani writes that the “absolute negativity” of emptiness does not entail a nihil-istic annihilation of beings, but is rather the “force” or “place” that lets them be as they are in their interrelatedness (Nishitani 1987b , 92–3). It is ultimately a force not just of “nullifi cation” (Jp. muka ) but of “beifi cation” (Jp. uka ) (Nishitani 1982 , 124, 146). The Zen philosophers of the Kyoto school have thus understood the self-emptying of emptiness in terms of what we might call a topological kenology or even a kenotic panentheism (Nishida 1987–9 , 11: 399).

Other philosophers of Zen may prefer to restrict their understanding of the empti-ness of emptiness to a deconstruction of any hypostatizing “view” of emptiness as a self-suffi cient entity or state of being. As Candrak ī rti puts it, the teaching of the empti-ness of emptiness is “for the purpose of controverting any understanding of emptiness as an [ontological reference to] ‘being’” (Candrak ī rti 1989 , 180). Candrak ī rti is echo-ing his Madhyamaka predecessor N ā g ā rjuna, for whom the “emptiness of emptiness” means that we should not reify emptiness, turning the means of freeing us from con-ceptualized objects of attachment into another conceptualized object of attachment. On the one hand, if we were to misunderstand emptiness as an ultimate reality beyond the fray of this world of plurality and change, N ā g ā rjuna would say that we would fall back into the extreme of eternalism. On the other hand, if we were to misunderstand emptiness as sheer non-existence or as a nihilistic void, we would fall into the opposite extreme of annihilationism (Williams 1989 , 62–3; Garfi eld 1995 , 280–1, 299–321). Rather, N ā g ā rjuna ’ s “middle way” understands emptiness as empty in the sense that, as the negation of own-being, it has itself no own-being. And so N ā g ā rjuna writes, “Emptiness is proclaimed by the victorious ones (Buddhas) as the refutation of all views; but those who hold ‘emptiness’ as a view are called incurable” ( Mū lamadhyamakak ā rik ā , chapter 13, verse 8; Harvey 1990 , 102). In other words, the teaching of emptiness does not exist on its own, but rather originates in relation to – i.e., as a negation of – the false idea of own-being. Once we have seen into the falsehood of the idea of own-being, we should also discard the idea of emptiness, like a thorn that has been used to remove another thorn.

Emptiness of Words

N ā g ā rjuna himself claims to have no view (Skt dṛṣṭ i ), but rather merely to refute – today we might say deconstruct – the inherently self-contradictory views of others. Language inevitably entails the proliferation of discriminatory conceptual fabrication (Skt pra-pañca ). Specifi cally, words artifi cially separate what is interconnected and solidify what is ever in fl ux; language re-presents interrelated events and fl uid processes as discrete independent substances. Seeing the world through language in this way leads us to mistake the map for the territory (McCagney 1997 , xx, 29–30, 80, 99; Kasulis 1981 , 21–8; Kajiyama 1992 , 90–9). Here again we see connections with the Daoist tradition,


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especially with Zhuangzi ’ s claim that language, with its dualistic reifi cations, imposes rigid boundaries (Ch. zhen ) on an originally fl uid world of interrelated processes (Ziporyn 2009 , 9–20, esp. 16). Zhuangzi not only speaks of a practice of “sitting and forgetting” and of a “fasting of the mind” that makes way for a “vital energy that is an emptiness” (ibid., 49, 26–7), he also playfully uses humor, irony, paradox, and metaphor in ways that loosen up the logical rigidity of language. N ā g ā rjuna, on the other hand, through his more terse and sober deconstructive argumentation, aims to lead us to liberation by way of a “quieting of the proliferation of discriminatory conceptual fabrication” (Skt prapañcopasama ḥ ) ( Mū lamadhyamakak ā rik ā , dedication and chapter 25, verse 24).

Harvey takes N ā g ā rjuna to be saying that “the ultimate truth, then, is that reality is inconceivable and inexpressible.” Hence the fi nal fi nger that can be used to point to the moon of reality is tathatā , “thusness” or “suchness,” tautologically indicating that things are such as they are. “The thusness of something, equivalent to its emptiness, is its very as-it-is-ness . . . without adding anything to it or taking anything away fromit” (Harvey 1990 , 102). As the Awakening of Faith puts it, “all things are incapable of being verbally explained or thought of; hence, the name Suchness.” The term “such-ness” itself is “the limit of verbalization wherein a word is used to put an end to words.” Regarding the emptiness of emptiness, the text goes on to say that, since unenlightened persons are alienated from suchness through our deluded use of words and concepts, “the defi nition ‘empty’ is used” to free them from these; “but once they are free from their deluded minds, they will fi nd that there is nothing to be negated” (Hakeda 1990 [1967] , 33, 35). Through realizing the emptiness of words, we are awakened to the suchness of reality.

When we see things as they really are, we realize that they are “empty of all the [egocentric and reifying] concepts by which we grasp them and fi t them into our world, empty of all we project upon them” (Bercholz and Kohn 2003 , 153). That this ulti-mately applies even to the doctrines of Buddhism themselves is impressed upon us in the Heart S ū tra , which not only proclaims the emptiness of all dharmas but also negates such fundamental doctrines as the Four Noble Truths when it says that there is “no suffering, no cause [of suffering], no end [of suffering], and no path [leading to the end of suffering]” (Nakamura and Kino 1960 , 10). After all, Śā kyamuni himself said that his teachings are like a raft used to get to the other shore, not a set of dogmas to be clung to (Rahula 1974 , 11–12).

Zen stands out even among Buddhist traditions in its stress on the emptiness of words, especially words purporting to indicate ultimate truth. Wumen admonishes the pious adherent: “Don ’ t you know that one has to rinse out his mouth for three days if he has uttered the word ‘Buddha’?” (Nishimura 1994 , 125; Shibayama 2000 , 214). According to the motto attributed to Bodhidharma, Zen is “not founded on words and letters” (Ch. buli wenzi ; Jp. furyū monji ), but involves rather “directly pointing at the human heart-mind, seeing into one ’ s nature and becoming a Buddha” (Ch. zhizhirenxin jianxing chengfo ; Jp. jikishi ninshin kensh ō j ō butsu ). The direct (i.e., linguistically unmediated) “mind to mind” transmission that forms the core of the Zen tradition is said to have begun with Śā kyamuni Buddha ’ s Flower Sermon, when Mah ā k āś yapa smiled in response to the Buddha ’ s holding up a fl ower in silence (Nishimura 1994 , 43; Shibayama 2000 , 58). This “special transmission outside the scriptures” (Ch. jiaowai biezhuan ; Jp. ky ō ge betsuden ) is said to have been subsequently passed down from one

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patriarch to the next, such as when Bodhidharma recognized his successor in Huike (Jp. Eka), who demonstrated his understanding by means of bowing and standing in silence. Other canonical references to the transcendence of language include the Vimalak ī rti Sū tra , a much revered sū tra in the Zen tradition, the climax of which is generally held to be the layman Vimalak ī rti ’ s “thunderous silence,” which is presented as the “entrance into nonduality” where “there is no use for syllables, sounds, and ideas” (Thurman 1976 , 77).

And yet, as the modern Zen master Shibayama Zenkei warns, Vimalak ī rti ’ s silence should not be misunderstood as silence in opposition to speech (Shibayama 2000 , 230–1, 255–6), a point made by a number of kō ans (e.g., cases 24, 25, 32, and 36 of the Gateless Barrier and cases 70 to 73 of The Blue Cliff Records ). Victor S ō gen Hori points out that elsewhere in the Vimalak ī rti S ū tra itself we are told: “do not point to liberation by abandoning speech!” (Thurman 1976 , 59; quoted in Hori 2000 , 299). Furthermore, D ō gen suggests that other responses to Bodhidharma besides Huike ’ s silence were also appropriate, such as that of Daofu, who said: “I neither cling to nor abandon words and letters; I use them as a means of the Way” (D ō gen 1990 , 2: 359). While D ō gen affi rms the potential of speech as well as silence to express an understand-ing of the matter of Zen, Wumen warns against the pitfalls of both: “If you open your mouth, you will lose ‘it’. If you shut your mouth, you will also miss ‘it’. Even if you neither open nor shut your mouth, you are a hundred and eight thousand miles away” (Nishimura 1994 , 106; Shibayama 2000 , 182). For Zen, silence can be just as prob-lematic as speech, and speech just as effective as silence.

Recalling the emptying of emptiness, we could say, with Ueda, that the point is not to abide in silence any more than it is to get stuck in language. Rather, the point is to participate in a circulating movement between the emptying of language into silence and the emptying of silence back into language, an incessant dynamic of “exiting language and then exiting into language” (Davis 2013 ). The fi lters of language, after all, not only distort reality, they also render it intelligible and thus livable. The point is to see into the emptiness of words, not merely to annihilate them; the point is not to be free from the use of language, but rather to be free in one ’ s use of language. After all, Huineng is not just depicted as tearing up the sū tras ; he is also said to have dictated a new one. There can be words of silence, just as there are forms of emptiness. And there can be words of silence about the forms of emptiness.

Notes

1 Zen is pronounced Chan in Chinese. For the sake of consistency and to avoid confusion, the transliteration of terms in quoted passages will occasionally be silently modifi ed. Chinese and Japanese names are written in the traditional order of family name fi rst. Unless other-wise noted, translations from Chinese and Japanese are my own.

2 Tachikawa Musashi ( 2003 , esp. 6, 324–9) traces how, during the course of the development of Mah ā y ā na Buddhism in India and then in East Asia, the positive, world-reaffi rming aspects of the teaching of emptiness became ever more pronounced. According to Tachikawa, whereas the notion that “form is emptiness” was initially understood mainly as a warning not to cling to impermanent phenomena, later, and especially in East Asia, it


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came to be understood to mean that phenomenal forms are as such the true face of reality (Jp. shohō -jiss ō ).

3 N ā g ā rjuna, Mū lamadhyamakak ā rik ā , chapter 24, verse 18. Translations of this infl uential text include Inada ( 1970 ) and McCagney ( 1997 ) (from the Sanskrit) and Garfi eld (from the Tibetan). The last includes an illuminating chapter-by-chapter philosophical commentary.

4 Paul Williams writes: “There is a tendency among modern scholars to reduce all Mah ā y ā na philosophy to a series of footnotes to N ā g ā rjuna. This tendency should, I think, be fi rmly resisted. Mah ā y ā na thought is not so monolithic” (Williams 1989 , 132). As we shall see, Zen draws not only on Madhyamaka but also on the Cittam ā tra and Tath ā gatagarbha strands of Indian Mah ā y ā na thought, as well as the way these get taken up and synthesized in China, especially in the Huayan school.

5 In his essay on “emptiness sickness,” Yanagida Seizan writes, “Zen has developed thorough repeatedly criticizing false views of emptiness and purifying the thought of emptiness” (Yanagida 1982 , 778).

6 Compare this with a passage from an early Prajñ ā p ā ramit ā S ū tra , which says that emptiness is a synonym for “depth,” and that, “Where there is no form, etc., that is the depth of form, etc.” (Conze 1973 , 209).

7 See the Daodejing , chapters 16, 25, 40, 42 (translations include Ivanhoe 2003 ). For a lucid interpretation of Zen as a synthesis and practical development of N ā g ā rjuna ’ s emptiness and Daoist nothingness, see Kasulis ( 1981 ).

8 Garma Chang cites a traditional Chinese list of similes of emptiness, the fi rst seven of which compare emptiness to “space or the Void,” which “embraces everything everywhere” and yet “never hinders or obstructs anything” (Chang 1992 , 100–1). Incidentally, the last two entries on the list, “the negation of negation” and “ungraspability,” correspond to our last two rubrics of emptiness. For a recent philosophy of Zen that develops the metaphor of “empty space” as a “hollow expanse” that envelops the delimited horizons of our worlds of meaning, see Ueda ( 2002 ) and Ueda ( 2011 ).

9 In early Buddhism, nirvāṇ a itself is at times described positively, as for example “the highest bliss” and “permanent and eternal,” but is more often indicated via negativa with terms that include “emptiness” (P. suññatā ), in the “extrinsic emptiness” (see below) senses of “empty of attachment, hatred and delusion” and “empty of a substantial self ” (Harvey 1990 , 62–3).

10 See Nishitani ( 2009 ) for an illuminating discussion of Fayan (Jp. H ō gen) and his decisive conversion from Cittam ā tra to Zen.

11 Mondō are recorded dialogues, generally between a master and a disciple, which are often used as kō ans – that is, “cases” assigned to a Zen practitioner in order to trigger and cultivate enlightenment.

12 For a collection of teachings on Zen practice using this kō an , see Ford and Blacker ( 2011 ). 13 It is worthwhile noting that, in Chinese and Japanese, “heart” and “mind” are written with

the same character (Ch. xin ; Jp. shin or kokoro ). In other words, these languages do not sepa-rate the seat of the intellect and the seat of the emotions, suggesting that a truly open mind entails an open heart, and vice versa.

14 Yamada Mumon R ō shi thus teaches that the realization of emptiness is a means to the ultimate goal of Buddhism, namely the wisdom and compassion entailed in the realization of one ’ s non-duality with the world and with others (Yamada and Takahashi 1999 , 49–50). See also Tamaki ( 1982 ), who argues that the teaching of emptiness is a means to wisdom and compassion, not vice versa; and Hirata Seik ō R ō shi, who teaches that “emptiness” is a metaphor which works well to convey the open-space-like quality of the Buddha-nature, but not as well for conveying its content of wisdom and compassion (Hirata 1982 , 2: 133–6).

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