Wednesday, August 15, 2001


while it's true i promised you all a week of coffee and chocolate, yoga teacher frank jude sent me a very nice recapitulation of our little talk on the diamond sutra. he does discuss the importance and reality of chocolate chip cookies! i think you'll enjoy it, and then it's back to fudge tomorrow, ok?

If you don't mind, a brief follow-up to our Diamond Sutra exchange. A point I had wanted to make about "emptiness" and "non-existence" is that we need to ask what is really being talked about.

In one of my favorite teachings by Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) from his commentary on The Prajnaparamita Hridaya Sutra (The Heart Sutra), he writes:

"If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; without trees, we cannot make paper."

He goes on to say that if we really look deeply we will also see the sunshine, the earth, the loggers, the paper mill, the food that the logger and paper processors have eaten, their ancestors, etc. etc. They all "inter-are." ("To be or not to be, that is not the question. To be is to inter-be. You cannot be by yourself.")

He says, looking still more deeply, we see that we are in the paper too. "When we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception." Our mind (as reader) and Thay's mind (as writer) are also in the paper.

"Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible?.... The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of "non-paper elements." And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all."

This is the non-existence that is meant in The Diamond Sutra: that no separtely existing entiy exists.

To be expicit, Thay says, "According to Avalokitesvara, this sheet of paper is empty; but according to our analysis, it is full of everything. There seems to be a contradiction. We must ask Mr Avalokita, 'empty of what?'"

And of course, the answer is, "When Avalokita says that our sheet of paper is empty, he means it is empty of a separate, independent existence."

Empty of a separate self means full of everything. And so we can enjoy our chocolate, the sunsets, the moonlight on the water, and we can respond with compassion to the pain of a cat or any other (unique, but non-existent as a separate entity) being, or the caress of a lover, and still not get lost or imprisioned in a false sense of separateness. In the paradoxical dialectics of the Diamond Sutra, when we see that the chocolate cookie is empty, then we can truly eat (and enjoy) the cookie; because we know that it is empty it is real for us. When we do not see this, we cannot truly eat the cookie because fundamentally we are eating a misperception!

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