Last night I was the featured presenter at the congregation’s Second Friday potluck and lecture. It’s quite the event, draws, I don’t know, something pushing two hundred folk. Part of the reason for the draw is how they get illustrious people to present ranging from authors to philosophers and scientists to politicians. (It doesn’t appear to hurt that the church is nearly surrounded by Brown University campus.)
They also feel obligated to let the minister in on the deal once in a while. So, there I was, presenting a bit of my spiritual philosophy, some biography, and then trying to expand on my vision for the congregation. This was followed by questions and answers.
All in all it was fun.
I used that delightful outline for a sermon Tom provided as a comment to my recent posting about the difficulty of coming up with a sermon for Sunday. At the beginning I read Tom’s advice aloud. Then I took up most of the points and expanded upon them. Now, in his outline Tom cited two texts, 1 Corinthians 13 and the Heart Sutra. So, I read those texts in full aloud, as well.
In doing so I tried a novelty in adapting a translation of the sutra substituting “boundless” and “boundlessness” for sunyata.
And then this morning at that same blog post, another of my favorite readers, Weed expressed how boundless didn’t particularly work for him. He wrote “I personally find all that talk of boundlessness rather sterile. The Universe blows my mind, and summons, stirs, and calls up my spirit not because it is boundless but because it’s bounds are so utterly staggering.”
Now I barely know Weed and I have no particular sense of his spiritual insight, how much his comment is an intellectual exercise and how much he’s simply reporting his interior life. Whatever the truth of those deeper matters might be, I find he does immediately point to the problem in the term. If also introducing another difficulty in apparently emphasizing the boundaries. More on that anon…
The preferred English for sunyata is usually “empty” or “emptiness.”
Sunyata is the term of art used by the Buddha to stand for the insubstantiality of things, that is he taught nothing has an enduring identity, everything is contingent.
But that just begins the exploration of sunyata. (By the bye, in this text, which I highly recommend as a deeper exposition of the term and what it means in the forms of Buddhism within which I practice, sunyata is usually rendered as “nothingness” and “absolute nothingness.”)
At least since Nagarjuna the understanding that sunyata and things (read in addition to everything else in the cosmos, very much you and me…) are identical has been a soteriological assertion. It is not about the boundaries, which allow me to assert, both exist and do not. And that we need to see both of those truths, exist and does not, as they present, we have bounds, and the bounds are contingent, as is everything…
Sadly, the words immediately begin to crumble and fail the heart’s knowing. As several Zen teachers have pointed out, open your mouth and you have made your first mistake…
But back to that soteriological thing. The purpose here is not really to describe sunyata, something doomed to failure from the beginning, but rather to help people discover the saving truth of their own true nature.
The enterprise that calls me is that of identifying the ways to healing the broken heart of our existence.
And this is a significant part of that enterprise.
There are any number of paths, but mine falls into that way of wisdom, to which the Zen schools, and I repeatedly assert, Unitarian Universalism all belong. (With greater and lesser degrees of success and differing difficulties – to be unpacked over the many years, no doubt…)
A major point is how as we walk this way of wisdom, at some point all the words fall short, all are barren at some point. Boundless, empty, nothing, or their emotional corollaries like pleroma and fullness, these also fail…
And what happens when we achieve the salvific vision is fascinating. Using the same terms of emptiness, a philosopher might find these negative expressions nihilistic, but the reality as a describer of one’s spiritual experience is quite the opposite.
As we read the Heart Sutra we encounter a call to the creative expression of the universe that we will find as our own when we let go of all our ideas about what and can and should…
Only don’t know.
And then all is revealed.
And that’s the point: not to entangle us in a word, but to allow us to spring forth into the universe as the fully interdependent beings we really are.
And at that moment to find our freedom.
And joy.
And possibility.
In short if boundless or empty or pleroma or fullness, becomes a philosophical assertion, we’re tangled in the web of words.
If boundless or empty or plemora or fullness is an invitation to our own experience of what and who we truly are then all is well…
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