The Dharma Bum's Guide to Western Literature by Dean Sluyter

Author:Dean Sluyter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 2022-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

The Heart Sutra, one of the key texts of Mahayana Buddhism, states the principle in even more shocking terms.

Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form.

Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.

That is, everything that looks solid and real, including our so-called selves, turns out to be nothing in particular, while that nothing somehow keeps arising as all our somethings. The tidy, discrete “things” that we drew with our crayons in kindergarten (“This is the sun, and this is the flower, and this is the dirt …”) turn out to have no solid, continuous, separate, permanent identity, no distinct “thingness.” We live in a world not of things but of process. Dirt matter joins water matter and sun energy to become flower matter, which then decays once more into dirt matter. Or flower matter is eaten by animal matter that burns calories in complex patterns of behavior energy, then decays into dirt matter … and the beat goes on.

This process of perpetual transformation happens in time. In any given moment, we may mistake an empty, temporary form for something permanent, a partial truth for the whole truth, as in the old parable of the blind men and the elephant, each saying it’s like a snake or a palm frond, a wall, a tree trunk, and so forth. Each gets a snapshot but misses the movie. If we took cross sections of the elephant, we would see it first in snakelike form, then in frond-like form, and so on — like the Sphere passing through Flatland — but it’s really none of those forms in particular and all of them at once, beyond time.

“Fair is foul,” then, implies that everything is everything else — even if, depending on the degree of our blindness, we have to wait awhile to see all its forms. That’s fine, as long as we let these comings and goings take their time. Otherwise we pit ourselves against the process called universe, in a battle we can’t win: the elephant will stomp us, guaranteed. Enter Macbeth.

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Enter Macbeth, in fact, fresh from battle, victorious, having tasted the possibility of shaping the world to his will, of ruling. Crossing the wild, open heath with his brother-in-arms Banquo, he meets the Witches, who greet him with fateful words.

All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!

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