God's Own Eye

                 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 

Zen Master Raven

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

The Daodejing by Laozi

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

Or

Doctor, My Eyes

"Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand

I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding
You must help me if you can

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long

'Cause I have wandered through this world
And as each moment has unfurled
I've been waiting to awaken from these dreams

People go just where they will
I never noticed them until I got this feeling
That it's later than it seems

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what you see
I hear their cries
Just say if it's too late for me

Doctor, my eyes
Cannot see the sky
Is this the prize
For having learned how not to cry."

Doctor, My Eyes, 1972
By Jackson Browne

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
By Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Published in 1954

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.  Vintage, 2015, 592 pages.

Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Library of America, 1997, 1030 pages.