Form and Emptiness Are One
If the phrase “form and emptiness are one” is even making a vague sense to you, you are very close to something. Keep going.
All true scripture is ultimately concerned with also voiding itself. It attempts to continually suggest or hint at the unsayable, without ever arriving at a conclusion that allows the mind to rest satisfied.
The truth is transcendent.
The non-reflective among us say, the form is all, and rest satisfied.
The seeker, meditating, senses emptiness and thinks, ah, emptiness is the real, and rests satisfied.
When they begin to merge into a totality, the sense of expansive, unrestrained openness — that is form and emptiness as one.
Form is like the shape or impression of emptiness.
Emptiness is eternal. But form is also eternal in its transience!
The real is not circumscribable by what exists.
Tsongkhapa said “admiring profound emptiness and fixing on it without conceptualization.”
Direct experience is necessary, “without conceptualization.”
Or, we could say, without being enthralled by concepts. Concepts may move within emptiness-realization.
The unreal never exists, and so we can say it never tricks us into believing in it. Our confusion is also unreal, as it arises as a result of the unreal.
There is no divide between what you experience and the unexperienced setting. You are free to move between the created and the uncreated. Or, there is no movement between them. You naturally, without effort span the two.
Form and emptiness are one, and that is your nature.
