The Erotic Life of
Emptiness
John Tarrant SPRING
2010 tricycle
We are the world unfolding.
“Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no
other than form. There are no walls in the mind.”
—The Heart Sutra
“‘What is not given is lost.’ These words were
spoken by Father Ceyrac, a French Jesuit missionary who has devoted
himself to the wellbeing of children in South India for over sixty
years. A similar thought is found in Buddhist teaching: ‘What is
not done for the benefit of others is not worth doing.’ Seeking
happiness just for yourself is the best way there is to make
yourself, and everyone else, unhappy.”
—Matthieu Ricard
Whenever you think about generosity, one of
its opposites appears along with it—greed, or stinginess or
acquisitiveness. A well-known Thai abbot, Achaan Jumnien, invented
a long-running spiritual practice organized around these opposing
themes. Perhaps ten years ago, he had a canvas harness made for
himself—something like a fisherman’s vest. Whenever anyone gave him
anything—a watch, money, a bottle of water, a radio, a cup, healing
medicines, an amulet or two—he would fix it on the harness. He
bristled with objects; it was the kind of thing that would have
made him a career in the art world. He accumulated things and from
time to time passed them on, but first he wore them. He said the
whole apparatus weighed about sixty pounds. He took it off to
sleep, but otherwise he walked around in it, carrying the burden of
everything he received.
He had come to Spirit Rock, in Northern
California, where we talked together through translators. In one of
those conversations, he mentioned a friend of his who was an even
more successful abbot than he, and very wealthy. That wealth was
good, Achaan Jumnien said, because it allowed his friend to help
people. “Perhaps,” he said, amused, “he is wealthy because he is
more generous than me.” But the abbot with the harness was also
generous in many ways—with his teaching, with his smile, with his
unsolicited advice, and with his homemade healing medicines. He was
generous with appreciation, too. When Jack Kornfield introduced us,
he explained that I, too, was an abbot, which was a generous
estimate of my importance. Achaan Jumnien immediately commiserated,
saying what a rotten job it was. He was so enthusiastic about how
dreadful it was that I took the message that it was an excellent
rotten job and not to be given up.
Achaan Jumnien had his own origin myth about
how he took up the Buddha way, and it went like this: as a child he
once sat in meditation all day without moving, just to prove that
he could. He fell into a deep inward place, and after that his mind
changed completely. He did seem to have a tremendous feel for the
emptiness shining inside things.
When I saw him a year later, he had ended the
experiment with objects and taken off the harness. His performance
left me with an image of someone exploring the theater of
ownership, gifts, and generosity—how we love to receive things and
how they begin to own us, and also how we can be free of them and
in some way step into emptiness by passing them on. It was an
example of the way art can be more instructive than a
sermon.
The discovery of emptiness is a kind of
falling in love. There is a vertigo in it: we step off the cliff of
what we know and are certain about. During a retreat, for example,
when I’m doing interviews, someone will bring in a common object—an
oak leaf, a rusty pipe wrench found on a path—and put it on the
altar. That objects then becomes the thing that contains all the
trees and the stars and belongs with the Buddha statues and other
representations of eternity. We can allow objects to act on us so
profoundly that afterward we are not the selves we thought we
were.
When I first started to notice emptiness, it
went like this: “Oh, I thought I was a man, but actually I’m like
that branch,” or “Oh, I’m like the checkout girl with the nose
piercings and the graffiti tattoo around her bicep. I’m not one
tiny bit different from her.” This is an appreciation of the varied
ways of life—that the dog has buddhanature and so do I. Next the
understanding of emptiness becomes “Oh, I’m not like that tree; I
am that tree. I’m not like that girl; I am that girl.” The erotic
falling-in-love quality comes from noticing that I’m not outside
the world any more, watching—instead I am the world unfolding—the
eager dog, the drought in Australia, the homeless person in Santa
Monica who offers me some excellent chocolate cake. Vertigo is a
natural reaction: “I thought I knew who I was, but I’m not sure
anymore.”
The earth is generous, giving me tomatoes and
basil and lemon verbena and marjoram and chardonnay grapes, all now
withering in the autumn. And the generosity comes out of a
relationship: I planted the tomatoes in spring, gambling on whether
or not there would be another frost. The fact that there might be a
frost that would ruin all the work is part of the game.
“The Heart Sutra” records the discovery of
emptiness, and I like to imagine that the template for this
discovery is a naked meeting with the world. The lover takes off
her clothes, and stretches alongside you, and you both become lost.
It’s not so hard to see that the lover becomes you. This is such a
fundamental act that perhaps it is the model for all
giving.
Suffering might be the absence of such a
meeting. Suffering is what happens when we are lonely and forget
that we participate in the world. People often complain about love,
or at least about its consequences, but welcoming the consequences
is part of the game of generosity too. The earth gives a Yes
without regard to what is given back, and being a human is also a
gift, not a purchase. Even the No’s we get are gates to the
generosity of the world.
Those gifts that are precious to the giver are
especially interesting. A friend told me a story on this theme:
“When I was in kindergarten, a little boy had a White Stag jacket.
He took off the zipper pull, which had a little deer on it, and
gave it to me. It was a lovely thing to him, and I still remember
it.” When someone gives you something precious it means that,
beyond the usefulness of the gift, you are precious. The gift marks
a moment when you are welcomed into the other person’s
heart.
Inside the teaching of Zen there is an
understanding that gifts are like that zipper pull: They drag us
into a world in which dogs and deer and even we have buddhanature.
Generosity trusts the emptiness that runs through things, even
ungenerous or ungainly things—it links to the clarity that
underlies all our madness. Whenever my thoughts turn toward greed,
acquisitiveness, or stinginess, my shoulders tense up, and it feels
as if I’m holding my breath. To find a remedy, I don’t have to
improve my thoughts, though—just be generous with them. Then
freedom seems to appear automatically.
In the end, generosity doesn’t have reasons.
Generosity might be strategically effective or virtuous, but that’s
not important. The point is that there is no good reason to love
life or each other, yet we do. Generosity keeps faith with our
appreciation of each other, it stems from a natural empathy with
everything that, like us, has the courage to take a shape in the
world.