Nonduality II: A Fertile Emptiness
About halfway through my first theology degree, I started saying, “Theology is great as long as we don’t start to think we know what we’re talking about.” A bit of hyperbole perhaps, it nonetheless became a motto for me, holding the delicate tension between the mystery that cannot be captured by concepts and our innate hunger to understand it. But nowhere was that personal proverb more salutary than when I encountered the cardinal formulation of nonduality in Buddhism: Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
The Hindu representation of nondual Reality is arguably more accessible to the Western mind. While similarly propounding a fundamental Reality that transcends a duality of Creator and created, I and Thou, it yet offers Brahman as the name of that nondual Reality, the “Ground” that is at least analogous to the view of God in the West. An authentic exploration of Brahman will stretch that analogy, to be sure, but it is an encouraging starting point. But a consciousness molded to the legacy of Greek categories and distinctions will have great difficulty in finding a foothold from which to enter the mystery of emptiness and form. Perhaps more than most paradoxes in a spiritual field strewn with paradoxes, this one seems more like plain old contradiction.
Even so, the last century is peppered with notable figures who have taken up the challenge from the East. A few have carried their deep Christian formation into the very heart of the human experience of God, to discover and embrace an engaging and enlivening integration with this perplexing Buddhist teaching.
Pioneer Merton
Much of the credit for breaking ground for Christianity’s engagement with Buddhism must go to the well-known Catholic monk, Thomas Merton. Though inklings of its wisdom were not discernable in his work until the last decade of his writing career, Merton’s interest in Eastern spiritual traditions predated even his conversion to Catholicism. Sparked by the juxtaposition of acquaintance with a Hindu monk and reading Aldous Huxley during his college years, his curiosity was not left behind when the monastery doors closed behind him. In the silence within cloister walls, Merton’s reading of Eastern texts alongside
the writings of Christian mystics convinced him that these culturally disparate voices were talking about the very same experience of union or identity with ultimate Being – God, Brahman, Tathata.
After a striking unitive mystical experience of his own as he stood on a street corner in downtown Louisville in the middle of the day – it is a truly wonderful story – Merton’s exploration seems to have intensified. In the late 1950s, Merton began a regular correspondence with respected Japanese Buddhist philosopher D.T. Suzuki, a pioneer in the introduction of Zen Buddhism to the West. This dialogue, maintained until Suzuki’sdeath in 1966, met Merton at the center of his own contemplative experience, and paved the way for more intensive engagement, both in his writing and in meetings with notable figures of various Eastern traditions toward the end of his life.
The most focused and accessible of Merton’s work on nondual Reality is presented in a collection of essays, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, published shortly after his untimely death in 1968. In it he is careful to distinguish between the normative concepts of Zen and Christianity, while opening wide the door to recognizing a single experience of nondual consciousness underlying both. The power of his writing of the nondual is remarkable; it is almost impossible to imagine that it does not come from his own intimate experience of it. His sentences throb with the consciousness of being that he discerned in both Jesus and the Christian mystics, in contrast to the consciousness of thinking that shaped doctrine. Here is consciousness not “of” anything, but pure consciousness itself, in which Subject and object, God and human, existence and non-existence disappear into the “center” which T.S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world.”
He pulls no punches. This still point, says Merton, is the Void or Emptiness of Buddhism, a “ground of openness,” “an infinite generosity which communicates itself to everything that is.” To experience that generous ground, to know oneself as the suchness of life, is to find the Christ, the nondual God-consciousness, that is and has been from eternity. This is no static or vacant nothingness. This is the wellspring of Love and Life which the Christian mystics describe in the wealth of metaphors that reach out to enfold it. Jesus’s own surrender to this generative emptiness, says Merton, was “an explosion of the power of Love’s evidence” in which all sense of self and other dissolves into “the transcendent clarity of Love itself.”
Absolute Emptiness, Absolute Compassion
But if Merton’s embrace of Buddhist nonduality is unflinching, his touchstone is uncompromisingly Christian. Merton’s invitation into this realization begins in the nature of God as known in the Christ of Jesus. And its crafting invokes a segment of Christian scripture that has perhaps done more to shape Christian theology than any other single passage.
If you’re a church-goer, you’ve certainly heard it. If you aren’t and you haven’t, I have typed it out below. Writing to a church he had founded in Greece, the apostle Paul quotes a hymn, often sung in their small gatherings, to exhort them to take on the mind – the consciousness – of Jesus Christ. And believe it or not, right here in this text is a single word that is normative for both Buddhist and Christian, a word that holds the challenge for both. See if you can spot it.
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place,
And gave him the name that is above every name . . .”
Philippians 2:5-9
Yes, emptiness. But if this formulation of emptying yet sounds like the traditional hierarchy of divine and human, Merton translates it into a union with emptiness at its core. Merton points to this dynamic emptying and consequent transcendence as the very definition of “the transformation of the Christian consciousness in Christ.” Paul exhorts his readers to have the same mind, the same consciousness that flowed through Jesus, the self-emptying being of Christ that is God manifest in the world. This is not our common experience of gazing upon something outside ourselves, but pure awareness, total awakening, full realization “of love . . . as the wide openness of Being itself, the realization that Pure Being is Infinite Giving, or that Absolute Emptiness is Absolute Compassion.” Framed within contemporary psychology, Merton invites us into a transformation born in the “emptying of all the contents of the ego-consciousness to become a void in which the light of God or the glory of God, the full radiation of the infinite reality of God’s Being and Love are manifested.”
Merton’s invitation is evocative, casting images not of substance but of flow, a flow of perpetual emptying that thereby finds its transcendence in ceaseless becoming. The emptying that is the supreme dynamic of Life is the Reality that Merton ultimately found at the heart of his faith. He discovered that Life is known not in holding on to a few pieces of its manifestation or even to a handful of ideas about its generation, but that only in placing oneself in the flow of emptying may one find the fullness of Life as it truly is.
Yet emptiness is not Merton’s first language, and he has more to say in his pages about the human experience of standing in the cascade of emptying than of the God who empties. How well will the emptying and transcendence outlined by Paul speak to the Buddhist Reality of emptiness and form? For at least one contemporary Zen philosopher, it speaks remarkably well.
Emptying Jesus, Emptying God
Masao Abe was a voice of grace in 20 th -century interreligious dialogue. Praise issued from all quarters for his ability to enter the core teaching of each religion to find evidence of the shared experience of Ultimate Reality. It was his deeply held belief that dialogue must go beyond the discovery of common ground, to the transformation of all religions so that the light of truth might shine more clearly through each culturally and historically colored lens. When I first read his seminal essay, “Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata,” I was deeply moved by the respect he brought to the very text that was so central to Merton’s intimations of nonduality. And I was blown away by his insight into it.
Abe deftly joins the language of Sunyata – Buddhist emptiness – and kenosis – Christian emptying – to enter the text of the Philippians hymn. In the very identity of the Son with the Father, says Abe, we are given the definitive vision of God. If it was the self- emptying of Jesus Christ that showed him to be God, then in that emptying we come to know the nature of God. And if the self-emptying of Jesus was total, “even to death on a cross,” then God’s self-emptying too must be total. And we are left with God as the dynamic emptiness that can be nothing less than the true nature of all Being. Born from God’s emptying, the nature of that which is manifest then too must empty in order to be what it is, into the emptiness of Sunyata from which the forms of the universe eternally arise. From within the nondual experience of Sunyata, kenosis is not a choice of God, or even an attribute of God, says Abe, but is the fundamental nature of God. In total self-sacrifice – in emptiness – is God’s fulfillment.
“The kenotic God is the ground of the kenotic Christ.” Abe will take one step further to ask: “If this total identity of God with the crucified Christ on the cross is a necessary premise for Christian faith, why is this total identity of God with Christ through God’s kenosis not applicable to everything in the universe beyond Christ?” Why, indeed. The fullness of the human person is to be Christ, and Christ is the emptying God. For if Jesus will bid his disciples die in order to have new life, if Paul will exhort his readers to take on the consciousness of Christ who emptied himself, then the God who emptied into Jesus who emptied himself out of love for the world, will not have failed to love everything in the universe in exactly the same way. In each act of emptying of oneself as Love into the world of forms that are God’s own emptying, emptiness is given new life, new form. In the endless process of living-dying, says Abe, in death transcended into new being in each moment, we realize Sunyata as “the pure activity of absolute emptying.”
The language will always be cumbersome, but the experience will always be clear. Jesus knew it, the mystics of all traditions knew it, Merton knew it. The old empties into the new. In the words of St. Francis, “It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” In each and every moment.
Form is emptiness and emptiness is form, on and on.
A Tale of Two Traditions
As I worked with the texts for this reflection – Merton, Abe, Paul – I was struck by a resonance with the creation story in the book of Genesis, creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing. Had those ancient peoples also emerged from their experience of God with a sense of their origins in emptiness? That story certainly launched a flood of stories within a very concrete history. And in truth, Buddhism does not claim that this world or anything that happens in it is, in the end, unreal. Rather, it simply sees all forms, all expressions of Reality, as having no substance, no being, apart from the eternal flow from which they and every other living thing arise. Nor does it mean that what we do does not matter, for how else shall we human forms empty but by the action of Love? Our emptying matters; our emptying fulfills the fertile field of emptiness that is God.
We matter. History matters. In each dying to the belief in separateness, in each surrender of that which we would own, the world that denies the “interbeing” of its existence is redeemed – redeemed today, redeemed tomorrow, redeemed in as many moments as it takes for all beings to know who they are. Yet redemption comes not in the surrender of unique personhood, but in a celebration of the ever-changing kaleidoscope of eternal light shining itself into cosmic manifestation. That we are light is given; how we are light is our choice within the infinite potential held in emptiness, ready to become. Ready to empty. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.
Neither Merton nor Abe were seeking a synthesis of the two traditions; both respected the integrity and authority of Christianity and Buddhism respectively. But each recognized that in the end they were not so far apart as the language that had grown up around them would indicate. Both were able and willing, from within both a compelling existential awareness and a commitment to his own path, to move within the imagination of the other to discover new language that may more faithfully carry truth. To have not just his own experience confirmed nor his language simply augmented, but to welcome the transformation of both, and to be a more faithful representative of truth. May we follow them!
We’d love to hear from you, please share your comments with Kaira below.