The Fireplace Records, Chapter 31
God's Own Eye
Master Seung Sahn liked to write short enigmatic mystical poems. He once wrote:
"Who sees the All as nothingness,
as nothing all that is,
sees everything through God's own eye.
Enlightenment is this." (WWSF #63)
"The God who is pure emptiness
is created as form,
becoming substance, light and darkness
the stillness and the storm." (WWSF #64)
It is quite unusual, also rare, for a Zen Buddhist to refer to the Christian God to support his own mystical theological-philosophical views. Although, belief in and references to supernatural beings of various kinds is quite common in popular-folk Buddhism.
Emptiness, nothingness, or the void are common themes, concepts, tropes or cliches in Zen Buddhist Koans and discussions.
Maybe Master Seung Sahn was playing on the sentences from the German Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, who once wrote: "To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me."
Avalokiteshavara, a supernatural being, has a thousand hands with one eye in each hand. Lin-Chi asked, "Which is the real eye?" (IF 95)
The "Eye that grasps the Universe" is for Zhaozhou an Eye that is empty of defilement, free of attachments, untainted by conceptualizing, and beyond being and non-being. A clear-eyed neutral realistic objectivity--- seeing things as they are? (DSMS #291)
Yunyan contended that the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion had eyes and hands all over its' (his/her) body. Yes, we can "see" (understand/feel) our world with our hands, even with our eyes closed. (BOS #54)
Eyes, seeing, watching, observing, viewing, and overall vision are essential for surviving, learning, moving, and being-in-the-world.
We love to use sight as a metaphor in poetry about spirituality. Soren Kierkegaard wrote "All human speech about the spiritual is essentially metaphorical speech." Nietzsche said, "Truth is a mobile army of metaphors."
The same Eye between God and a Person?
Is it the same God between two million persons seeing in a spiritual way; or, are there two million Gods? How many eyes does God have? Is God blind in one eye like Sartre. Is God blind in two eyes like Ray Charles or Helen Keller? Does God have a Third Eye like yogi adepts? Is God nearsighted or far sighted and needs spiritual glasses? Are these two Transcendental Eyes looking through each other a pleasant fiction, a distorted double vision, an empty darkness, a blurred visual hallucination, an unfocused metaphor?
Now, really, does even a postulated God of Emptiness (God = Pure Emptiness) give birth to Substance, to Forms, to the realities of sunlight and darkness, man and woman, toads and ravens? I am doubtful, even if obviously charmed.
Maybe all this emptiness talk is just about negation. God was lonely, wanted to be creative, wanted to watch something, rejected being alone, and negated his present to create a future. So, It/He/She created ex nihilo the ordinary world. But, in this view, God is not emptiness; It/He/She is Something that rejected the emptiness of aloneness, negated his unpleasant solitude, and projected Somethings into existence. The Ten Thousand Things of Taoist ontology were born from the Dao embracing Change, rejecting and negating undifferentiated Nothingness.
Ah ... the mysteries of ontology keep us wondering. I need a long walk!
Comments, Sources, Observations
Emptiness has little creative potency.
Somethings give birth to somethings.
Emptiness is not a metaphor for something.
Emptiness may make room for somethings to play.
"God" is maybe another metaphor, analogy, or acronym.
Emptiness is a lonely affair.
Emptiness is the subject of over 50 Zen Koans.
Meetings with Master Chang San-Feng
Sunyata, Emptiness, Void, Nothingness
Refer to my Cloud Hands Blog Posts on the topic of Koans/Stories.
Subject Index to 1,975 Zen Buddhist Koans
Zen Buddhist Koans: Indexes, Bibliography, Commentary, Information
Pulling Onions Over 1,043 One-line Sayings by Mike Garofalo
Chinese Chan Buddhist and Taoist Stories and Koans
The Fireplace Records By Michael P. Garofalo
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