Expert: Joe McSorley - 6/15/2004

Question
What is your understanding of "form is emptiness, emptiness is form.  form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form" in the Heart Sutra?

Bowing deeply

Jim J

Answer
Dear Jim,
   This question can be answered on so many levels that it would take a book to do it.  Immediately, you who asks this question is form as emptiness and emptiness as form, but does that help you?  In Buddhism there is no substance to self yet there is self, so what is the foundation of self?  It's difficult to talk about and ultimately any understanding of it misses the point though no understanding of it misses it too.  I am not trying to be arcane or cryptic here but this is a difficult topic.  If you were to ask me what something tastes like, to give you an understanding of it, could any understanding of it really give you an idea?  
  We are, in essence, the formless expressed as form and trying to define ourselves.  Part of this is expressed in this famous Buddhist story that goes like this: a man comes to study with the historical Buddha and is having a difficult time understanding its ideas.  The Buddha welcomes him but does not face his questions rather he asks him about his journey to meet him.  The Buddha asks ‘how did you get here' and the man replies ‘ on a chariot', the Buddha then says ‘I'm sorry but I don't know what a chariot is, can you describe it to me?' The fellow proceeds to tell him how a chariot is constructed and its layout from axel, wheels, buckboard, shroud to harness and horses.  The Buddha takes this in and says ‘ so all of these things together make a chariot?  When is it no longer a chariot?  When you take away the wheels is it no longer a chariot or the buckboard or the axel?  At what point does it become or not become a chariot?  This is a conglomeration of things you call a chariot but what really is the chariot?'  The man is puzzled by this and ponders it but the Buddha says ‘who are you?  Your thoughts, desires, senses, memories?  Remove what and you are no longer you?  When do you become you or not you by this composite of aggregates?'  Now this plunges the man into a deep inquiry of who the self really is.
    So what is the form of self, what is born and dies?  From what standpoint to we judge what being born and dying is?  We are separate, standing apart and making these judgments but where do our thoughts perch, what is the abode of the mind?  Along with this what is the true form of anything?  All is transient and changing, a coming together of things to be defined as something and then the disintegration of it all into something else.  Constantly coming into being and falling into non-being.  The form becoming formless and the formless becoming form, two yet not two, distinct though the same.
   
  D.T. Suzuki has the analogy of a wave on the ocean as symbolic of man's sense of self.  A wave arises on the ocean and looks down and sees the ocean all around.  It says, “ I am know that I am because I am not the ocean nor am I all the other individual waves, I exist separate from them” or “ I have form”.  It has separated itself from the ocean to know itself as an individual wave.  This separation actually creates the ‘self', it is both an act and a fact of this separation.  Now it makes all its judgments as a separated self.  In this act it is also separated from itself, it knows that it is but not who it really is.  Now it tries to go outward to find itself but it cannot.  When it goes inward it is also problematic, why? Because the act of going inward is still the act of separating from the ocean to be able to go inward.  So this wave is alienated from itself, it's surroundings and the ocean.  But the fact of the matter is, who is the wave fundamentally?  Is it the individual wave?  No, there's really no such thing, it is an expression of the formless ocean.  So who is looking for this awakening?  The fact is that the wave is really just a manifestation of the ocean, it never was separated in reality but only knew itself as separated.  It is one hundred percent wave and one hundred percent ocean, not at any point ever separated.  The wave seeking the ocean/enlightenment/nirvana is the ocean seeking the wave.  When the breakthrough occurs it is not new or just starting but a realization of what always really was.  It is the formless expressed in form but still formless. This is a non-dual duality.  Both itself as wave and ocean.  The wave was always empty of self and the ocean was always the form of  the wave thus: emptiness as form and form as emptiness.
  I hope this helps you. Take care,
              Joe