Post six of ten, in section Buddhism
The heart sutra is one of the most commonly cited Buddhist sutras. These lines get recited very frequently in Buddhist practice environments and are understood as one of the most profound realisations of traditional Buddhism:
“Form is no other than emptiness,
Emptiness no other than form.
Form is only emptiness,
Emptiness only form.”
Depending on how you define the word form, this statement can be super insightful or wildly inaccurate. The simple reason why it is not true in the way that most people assume it to be is depicted in the diagram below.
Emptiness is a combination of three things:
- Non-duality: i.e., space can’t exist without solid, solid can’t exist without space, which manifests as the felt sense and realisation that we aren’t separate from the rest of the Universe.
- Spaciousness: i.e., the space that makes up most of an atom, which manifests as a felt sense of stillness, spaciousness or lightness that permeates everything
- Nebulosity: i.e., everything is transitory and ephemeral, which manifests as the felt sense that everything is constantly arising and passing away
Non-duality and spaciousness do apply to everything and all aspects of experience, including physical matter.
Nebulosity only applies to perceptions and meaning, i.e., our subjective experience. It does not apply to physical reality. A physical object cannot morph into another physical object unless it is taken through a physical process.
You can turn a piece of bread into a piece of toast by heating it up, but that physical process needs to happen in the physical world. It doesn’t just merge and shift on its own in the same way that perception and meaning can suddenly change from one moment to the next.
In the diagram above, the non-duality circle, the spaciousness circle, and the overlap between the two can be applied to physical matter. But nebulosity cannot be applied to physical matter; it only applies to subjective experience.
Emptiness is the crossover between all three of these things; therefore, it exists within the nebulosity circle, so it can’t be applied to physical matter.
An example of this is an allegory that people use to describe emptiness. You have a cart. Nowhere in the cart’s parts does its status as a ‘cart’ exist, and if you dismantle it by taking the wheels off, it stops being a cart. Therefore, the cart has no inherent independent existence.
This may be true, but those parts don’t disappear – the wheels, for example, are still there in the world; they just aren’t part of a cart anymore. It is their meaning that has changed, not their physical presence.
One of the key misunderstandings of this perspective is whether you are focusing on ‘parts’ or ‘wholes’. The rational mind tends to focus on parts and can strip everything down in a way where nothing is anything anymore. A more embodied, inclusive, heartful way of being sees the essential nature of things and wholes.
A way of understanding this is that a tree isn’t just a collection of different parts – roots, trunk, branches – that have been randomly assembled together; a tree is a whole that happens to include those parts.
You can look at it either way, but neither is the ultimate truth. (But also no way of looking would make the physical tree disappear.)
Definition of Form
Form is another word that is not very specific. There are many ways to define and understand it, and this one word ends up including a huge range of ideas in people’s minds.
There is one specific way of defining form, where the heart sutra does make sense:
Form: the outline of a thing as opposed to its substance
This clearly distinguishes that it is the concept or subjective experience of the thing rather than the physical thing itself that is the form.
In this understanding, emptiness, in ’emptiness is none other than form’, is equated with the conceptual idea of things rather than the physical substance of things.
This distinction may sound esoteric, but if you are using this as the basis for your worldview, then it creates very different understandings of the world.
A world where substance is empty is a dream world, where everything can dissolve and transform completely at any moment. Gravity wouldn’t be a reliable force for a start; you wouldn’t be able to rely on waking up in the same body every morning; everything and everyone you know and love would be able to completely transmute into something completely different in any moment.
In comparison, a world where substance is somewhat substantial but concepts are empty is a mysterious, complex, and yet also simple embodied reality that we all share, but no one can pin down exactly what it is. With this worldview, as you deepen into the depths of immersive embodied reality, you can get closer to the essence of things and less entrapped in the unsubstantiated idea of things.
Some impermanence is like when you’re walking down the street and the sun comes out and suddenly everything is different.
And some impermanence is like the two millimetres that Mt Everest grows every year.
I would summarise my understanding as, “Emptiness and form are both inextricable aspects of experience.”
One aspect of this is that objective experience and subjective experience are non-dual with each other. There’s no ultimate place to pin down experience and say this is exactly what the Universe is, but there also is still an objective aspect of experience that can be measured and defined. Both are true aspects of experience.
This understanding creates the foundation for practicing in a way that can cultivate a lot of liberation and freedom. While the physicality of yourself, others, and the world holds an important essence that it can be deeply meaningful to get more intimately in touch with, the way that you perceive what those things are can be malleable beyond what you can currently imagine. Opening up this amount of flexibility in your way of looking can be incredibly liberating.
The way in which you think of yourself, others, and the world is a concept. You can play with this by looking at things in radically different ways than you normally look at things.
For example, adopting a frame where everyone is an expression of divine life force is a very different frame from seeing everyone as a competitor to you. It’s the same physical beings, but a very different world.
Why Does This Matter?
Climate change, trauma, suffering, emotions, and many other deeply important things in life are grounded in physical bodies and reality. Your experience is built on a physical presence, which is one of the fundamental building blocks that shapes how reality manifests for you.
In order to show up to be present with what is really present in experience, you need to validate the truth of what you find rather than undermine your reality with clever-sounding ideas.
The embodied reality of the present moment is probably vastly different from your current ideas of it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an underlying essence or that there is no such thing as an objective reality that exists in combination with a subjective reality.
Through practice, you can get more intimately in touch with this embodied reality.
“What you think your body is and what it actually is are often two very different things.
If you want to wake up you have to go through this process of rediscovery a thousand times and a thousand times again.
Embodied experience is weirder, subtler, more intense, more surprising, more obvious, more mundane, more psychedelic, more spiritual, more of than anything you could possibly imagine.”
A spirituality that does not include the embodied can come to the conclusion that checking out from society and detaching from your body is one of the most meaningful and deep things that you can do.
It creates a skewed perspective on reality where the things that seem to have substance are just an illusion and it’s better not to engage with them.
To me, this is bullshit. If people want to be awake, they need to show up and be present with what is in reality, which includes listening to the signals that their bodies and the planet are giving.
Creating change that supports wellness and reduces suffering in the world takes energy, time, money, and resources to make happen. It’s not just people’s individual mind states that need to change; reducing suffering is a difficult global undertaking that needs mature and awake people to deliver physical solutions to.
Another reason it’s important to me that this aspect of emptiness and form is understood is because mistruths muddy the waters, which makes it easier for unhelpful power structures to be upheld in spiritual practice.
When vague terms and platitudes are accepted as truth, it is the people who are best at bullshitting that become the most powerful. If things are specific and clear, it empowers people to feel and speak the truth in their own experience.
“Emptiness is form, form is emptiness” suggests that the substance of life and the Universe is empty, which can be used to dismiss or undermine your felt experience and can encourage you to check out from engaging with it.
“Emptiness and form are both inextricable aspects of experience,” encourages you to show up for your experience and to embrace and embody both the mystery and the essence of what is present in the full spectrum of experience.