Shunyata cuts to the Zen chase: the great Void, emptiness, the absolute. The Zen lineage has a profound reverence for non-attachment to anything, including and especially the void, so much so that in one Zen story an enlightened teacher tells another to throw his enlightenment out. It seems essential in Zen practice to be cautious about deifying anything, especially shunyata. That said...
Phenomena and nuomena dance ceaselessly with each other. The relative and absolute worlds, the matrix of form and emptiness, make up the heart and soul of reality and are the major subject of inquiry into the nature of our life and existence. What are we, where do we come from, how do we manifest, what is it to be, who is it that exists, ad existential nauseum? Classic Zen literature such as the Mumonkan, Blue Cliff Records, and Book of Serenity are filled with dialogues that challenge our conceptualization of reality, and which ask us to view the world with the clarity and the penetrating insight of an open mind. As Zen students can we cultivate the same mind that Buddha had when he saw the morning star and declared 'I am awake!'? What did he see that changed his view of life, that awakened his intimate and compassionate mind? Can we cultivate intuitive wisdom and insight into the dance of form and emptiness, of things that arise, durate, and cease to be? The Prajna Paramita sutra is common to all Zen schools because it is a treatise/pondering on form and emptiness, on the fundamental essence of Reality.
When you look at a flower what do you see? Suzuki Roshi was fond of saying 'form and color'. He reduced the phenomenal world to that, to just form and color. Just seeing the form and color is a daunting task for many of us with distracted minds, but perhaps for the visual artist this is home base, the shape and hue of things, the way the are in form. But to really see them as 'no thing' we must see beyond or through the form and color, beyond the label, name, and familiarity of an object and into the 'no form' or 'emptiness' of it. We need to go beyond objectifying anything, but then what is left? Pure subjectivity, the world before form and color, or you could say the arising of form and color from emptiness, or the void or nothingness or vastness or infinity or the absolute or the dynamic matrix of arising interconnected reality or no-thing. This is seeing the mark of existence 'there is no self nature', nothing exist as a separate entity.
So, let me be the first to encourage you to forget these few paragraphs. You can't figure out form and emptiness any more than you can think your way out of a paper bag, as the saying goes. Zazen is the front gate of Zen, the path to awakening, and as we sharpen and widen the mind, the world awakens. The most welcoming words I know are 'Let's sit!'.
The sky embraces the mountain,
the mountain penetrates the sky,
Endless play of Spring.
No Thing and Nothing
