The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [35]
Form is not different from emptiness; emptiness is not different from form. Form is precisely emptiness; emptiness is precisely form.6
Once again, this is not to say that awakening will cause the world of form to vanish without trace, for nirvana is not to be sought as “the future annihilation of the senses and their fields.” The sutra is saying that form is void just as it is, in all its prickly uniqueness.
The point of this equation is not to assert a metaphysical proposition but to assist the process of awakening. For awakening will not come to pass when one is trying to escape or change the everyday world of form, or to get away from the particular experience in which one finds oneself at this moment. Every such attempt is a manifestation of grasping. Even the grasping itself is not to be changed by force, for
bodhi [awakening] is the five offenses, and the five offenses are bodhi.… If anyone regards bodhi as something to be attained, to be cultivated by discipline, he is guilty of the pride of self.7
Some of these passages may suggest that the Bodhisattva may just as well be an easygoing, worldly fellow, who-because samsara is nirvana anyhow-can go on living just as he pleases. He may be thoroughly deluded, but since even delusion is bodhi there would be no point in trying to change it. There is often a deceptive resemblance between opposite extremes. Lunatics frequently resemble saints, and the unaffected modesty of the sage often lets him seem to be a very ordinary person. Yet there is no easy way of pointing out the difference, of saying what it is that the ordinary, worldly fellow does or does not do which makes him different from a Bodhisattva, or vice versa. The entire mystery of Zen lies in this problem, and we shall return to it at the proper time. It is enough to say here that the so-called “ordinary person” is only apparently natural, or perhaps that his real naturalness feels unnatural to him. In practice it is simply impossible to decide, intentionally, to stop seeking for nirvana and to lead an ordinary life, for as soon as one’s “ordinary” life is intentional it is not natural.
It is for this reason that the insistence of the Mahayana texts on the unattainability of nirvana and bodhi is not something to be accepted theoretically, as a mere philosophical opinion. One has to know “in one’s bones” that there is nothing to be grasped.
Thereupon the thought came to some of the Gods in that assembly: What the fairies talk and murmur, that we understand though mumbled. What Subhuti has just told us, that we do not understand!
Subhuti read their thoughts and said: There is nothing to understand, there is nothing to understand. For nothing in particular has been indicated, nothing in particular has been explained.… No one will grasp this perfection of wisdom as here explained. For no Dharma (doctrine) at all has been indicated, lit up, or communicated. So there will be no one who can grasp it.8
The point arrives, then, when it is clearly understood that all one’s intentional acts-desires, ideals, stratagems-are in vain. In the whole universe, within and without, there is nothing whereon to lay any hold, and no one to lay any hold on anything. This has been discovered through clear awareness of everything that seemed to offer a solution or to constitute a reliable reality, through the intuitive wisdom called prajna, which sees into the relational character of everything. With the “eye of prajna” the human situation is seen for what it is–a quenching of thirst with salt water, a pursuit of goals which simply require the pursuit of other goals, a clutching of objects which the swift course of time renders as insubstantial as mist. The very one who pursues, who sees and knows and desires, the inner subject, has his existence only in relation to the ephemeral objects of his