Form and Emptiness both have two-fold natures. Space and Time we have found, for example, to be two dimensions of the same metric. Space-Time is the fundamental underlying unit. It is only our limited human sense of time and space which makes them seem to be different. The Heart Sutra tells us that Form and Emptiness are two ways of talking about the same thing. It is like looking at the front of the building and the side of the building. You can have different names for each entrance, but you understand it is the same place.
Form refers to all the many forms of the world. All of the forms of the world including those which we can see, those which we can imagine and even those which we cannot imagine. Combination of forms are distinct forms, physically and logically. Creation of categories for forms are also new forms. They are all just as much forms as planets, stars, galaxies. Just as much forms as food, houses, or caves. Forms are the things, and forms are our unconscious model of the world we understand the things to be within. Forms are even the feelings we feel about the objects we recognize from our conscious and unconscious model of the world.
Form then exhibits a two-fold nature itself. A form is an object which may be observed, but it is also the idea of that object. The object is real, if only in the mind of a being, but this is still an existent reality. It may have no weight, no mass, but the thought has a non-zero amount of energy. Though it’s form may be characterized as very different, the “formedness” of the thought about an object is equal to the formedness of the object itself.
“Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form” is our guiding principle. The form of the idea of the object and the form of the object itself is fluid. And each operates in a noun form, speaking of the object and the idea of the object as a thing. It also has a verb nature. A forming. Never completely being simply done, the idea of the object changes as we encounter changes in the world, and the object itself is ever changing as it physically interacts with the world. It is like a raindrop observed on the way down in a typhoon. Like all forms, the raindrop will exhibit different characteristics depending both on the nature of the raindrop, and the manner in which the raindrop is observed. Let’s suppose we are able to observe one raindrop, and transform our observation time such that a second for the raindrop is a million years for us. In this way, the shape of the raindrop, a bouncy liquid swirl of water and surface tension just barely holding together, would look more like a solid crystal chandelier. Whatever crazy shape it is in, it would take years in our time frame to see even small changes. Now reverse the time relationship. A second of our time is a million years to the raindrop. What would we see the raindrop as? Hmmm… Something of a trick question, since there could be no raindrop that exists for a million years. If we could possibly know about raindrops, it would be as an abstract concept based on chemical principles of precipitation. We could observe water in the oceans, but there would be a fuzzy boundary, since the tides would be rising and falling millions of times during our one-second observation. We may be able to observe gross patterns of stable vegetation, observing the earth as a whole from orbit. If we happened to be looking during the right million year period, we would see in a flash the many new changes which human beings have unleashed on the planet. But the idea of the raindrop would be a very different from the idea of a raindrop observed from the opposite time sense, without the physical form of the raindrop being in any way different.
What about Emptiness? Emptiness also has a dual nature. Emptiness as a concept is an ideal we can observe in our minds, if not in the world. The objects in the world we see are understood to be physical objects, which implies they take up a finite amount of space, and are observed and recognized in a finite amount of time. The Emptiness of the Heart Sutra is of an absolute nature. Buddhism is very specific and stingy about where it will assign absolutes. No scripture, in the writing, is absolute, since there will always be relative ways of interpreting language, even the most divinely inspired writing. No statue or image or media recording could be absolute. No sense impression can be absolute. All absolutes come from within. Emptiness is the ultimate paradox, the unobservable form which makes all forms possible. The unexistable which makes existence possible.
Imagine a landscape. It could be a fantastical imaginary moonscape, where there are triple-ringed banded planets hanging close overhead, comets and asteroids close enough to see their shapes hanging over a coal-black sky dotted with stars like glowing diamonds. It could also be a flat plain rolling out forever like the panhandle of texas, a gas station here, a barn there, and mile after mile after mile of grassy fields, tractor lanes rolling into infinity. Or perhaps rolling hills. Some pasture, some forest. Blue sky with the occasional white puffy cloud.
The landscape is a place. It is what you are seeing, but it is also defining where you are. You are imagining yourself seeing a place, with various attributes. A place which is not empty. Now start taking away things that you see in this imaginary place. Remove the stars. Remove the clouds. Take away the forest, take away the tractor lanes, and the corn. Take away the gas station sign. Remove the rings from the planet, now the whole planet. Take away any animals, any people. Any vehicles. Note in your mind anything else you still see, and remove it. Do you see any light sources? Remove them. Do you see a place that is now completely dark? Remove that dark. Is there any space? Any opening into which you could put something? Remove it. Is there any boundary between anything which exists, and this place which now has nothing in it? Now, in your mind, you may have an imaginary model of Emptiness. This is one aspect, one nature of Emptiness. This is a model of what an empty universe might be like, but this is only half the story.
The removing of things, removing of your imaginary things in this case, is what allowed the idea of emptiness to be modeled in your mind. That removing, whether in imagination or physically, is the verb sense of Emptiness. The Emptying.
The emptying takes anything which is, and removes it. Taken another way, the emptying is a canceling, and a transcending. The emptying allows for a new beginning, and is the genesis of a new moment.
Emptying is balancing. It is freeing. It is annihilation which makes construction possible. It is death that leads to new life. It is the end of time, that time may begin again. Think of a scene you see with your eyes. Now turn and look in a different place. The old image which was in your eye is removed. Your mind knows to cleanse the minds image of the world, so that the eyes can send a new, updated image.
That is the sense of emptying. In the subatomic world, modern physicists have coined the term “Zero Point Energy” to describe a bubbling quantum soup, which exists within the smallest interval of space and time. Within it, they found that energy really doesn’t go to zero, but there is always an uncertain amount of energy, that frequently manifests as a pair of particles which within a short time cancel each other out again. These are called virtual particles, and are examples of the energy inherent in emptiness.
The attributes of emptiness, starting right at the very threshold of perception, manifest in all attributes of all forms.
