The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

All the kids were tired these days. They stayed up late, texting and posting on social media and watching videos on YouTube. They stayed indoors playing games online, inhabiting multiple roles in massive multiplayer virtual realities, moving up and down levels, hunting zombies, killing terrorists, mining natural resources, forging tools, accumulating goods, building towns, cities and empires, defending planets, hearts pounding, adrenaline pumping, narrowly avoiding permadeath as they tried simply to survive, and this was on top of their afterschool activities, their music lessons and soccer practice. No wonder they were tired. They led exhausting lives.

Okay, but just so you know, Benny, people do want to read about boys who think shitty thoughts about their mothers. Many important books have been written on the subject, and many readers have read them. But if you’re not comfortable with that, let’s move on.

People are born from the womb of the world with different sensitivities, and the world needs every single one of you to experience it fully, so that it might be fully experienced. If even one person were left out, the world would be diminished. And he said you don’t have to worry about being creative. The world is creative, endlessly so, and its generative nature is part of who you are. The world has given you the eyes to see the beauty of its mountains and rivers, and the ears to hear the music of its wind and sea, and the voice you need to tell it. We books are evidence that this is so. We are here to help you.

What is a story before it becomes words? Bare experience, a Buddhist monk might answer. Pure presence. The sensation, fleeting and ungraspable, of being a boy, of losing a father. Being a book, we wouldn’t know. All we know are the thoughts that arise in the wake of bare experience, like shadows, or echoes, giving voice to what no longer is. And after these thoughts become words, and words become stories, what is left of bare experience, itself? Nothing, the monk might say. All that remains is story, like a molted exoskeleton or an emptied shell. But is that really all? We books would say no, that story is more than just a discarded by-product of your bare experience. Story is its own bare experience. Fish swim in water, unaware that it is water. Birds fly in air, unaware that it is air. Story is the air that you people breathe, the ocean you swim in, and we books are the rocks along the shoreline that channel your currents and contain your tides. Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.

I loved that spoon. It was old and made of silver—maybe not pure silver, maybe mixed with some alloy or something—but it didn’t matter, because whoever made it really knew what they were doing. They knew how to make a spoon that was exactly the right shape to hold in your hand and put into your mouth, even if your hands were still small and your mouth was little. And I was positive that someone beautiful once ate something delicious with that spoon, because I could feel the memory of beautiful lips, and I could taste the deliciousness every time I put the spoon in my mouth and heard it humming with pleasure. Whoever made that spoon made it for that purpose, and the spoon was happy. It would always be happy, as long as it was helping someone eat. That’s why I always ate with it, and why I carried it around with me all the time, and why I was afraid it would get stolen. The rhyme said the dish would run away with the spoon, and I used to believe that could happen. I pictured it as a kind of kidnapping scenario, and I got in the habit of never leaving the spoon alone when my back was turned, especially if there was a dish around. Instead, I’d lick it clean and put it in my pocket.

When he walked home from the bus stop, and the sidewalk started talking to him, he asked, Are you real?, and if the sidewalk answered, he would contemplate its concrete nature, and appreciate how much work it did to bear his weight.

“Because that’s not what the B-man is, either. You think he’s this crazy old hobo, but he’s not. He’s a poet. And a philosopher. And a teacher. And it’s not him that’s crazy, Benny Oh. It’s the fucking world we live in. It’s capitalism that’s crazy. It’s neoliberalism, and materialism, and our fucked-up consumer culture that’s crazy. It’s the fucking meritocracy that tells you that feeling sad is wrong and it’s your fault if you’re broken, but hey, capitalism can fix you! Just take these miracle pills and go shopping and buy yourself some new shit! It’s the doctors and shrinks and corporate medicine and Big Pharma, making billions of dollars telling us we’re crazy and then peddling us their so-called cures. That’s fucking crazy. .

“But Hojo-san! The teacup isn’t broken!” He looked up, surprised. “To me, it is,” he said. “It is the nature of a teacup to be broken. That is why it is so beautiful now, and why I appreciate it when I can still drink from it.” He looked at it fondly, took a last sip, and then placed the empty cup carefully back on the tray. “When it is gone, it is gone.” That day, my teacher gave me a priceless lesson in the impermanence of form, and the empty nature of all things.

The earthquake lasted for six long minutes, and when it was over and I cleaned up the kitchen, I found Rengetsu’s teacup in pieces on the floor. I gathered the shards and brought them into my study and laid them on the altar in front of my teacher’s portrait. “You were right,” I said. “Already broken.”

This was another important lesson in the impermanence of all things. Japan lies in a seismically active zone, so earthquakes are not uncommon. Disaster can strike at any moment, but we forget this, distracted by the bright, shiny comforts of our everyday lives. Wrapped in a false sense of security, we fall asleep, and in this dream, our life passes. The earthquake shook us awake, and the tsunami washed away our delusions. It caused us to question our values and our attachment to material possessions. When everything I think of as mine—my belongings, my family, my life—can be swept away in an instant, I have to ask myself, What is real? The wave reminded us that impermanence is real. This is waking up to our true nature. Already broken.

A lot of people have asked your question, Benny. It’s probably the oldest question in the book, but that doesn’t mean it’s not special to you. Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it’s every person’s task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

American homes were big and generous, like the countryside and the people, too, with all their big, generous hopes and dreams. It was very beautiful, but there was a dark side to this hopefulness, which was apparent in the abandoned juicers, ab crunchers, outgrown clothes and broken toys that were crammed into garages, and closets, and under their beds. All that hope and remorse and disappointment. It was too much for the poor objects to bear. Of course, the solution was quite simple: people just had to stop buying so much stuff, but when she mentioned this on a recent call with the American producers, their response was less than enthusiastic, and later they followed up with a memo, asking her not to talk about topics like that on the pilot. When Kimi inquired what they meant by “topics like that,” they sent her a list: consumerism, capitalism, materialism, commodity fetishism, online shopping, and credit card debt. Speaking critically of such topics was un-American, they explained. American viewers wanted proactive solutions. Not buying was not proactive.

Why was it that women could never work hard enough to quiet their nagging fear that they were not enough? That they were falling behind? That they could and should be better? No wonder they wanted simple rules to govern the way T-shirts should be folded, children raised, careers managed, lives lived. They needed to believe there was a right way and a wrong way—there had to be! Because if there was a right way, then perhaps they could find it, and if they found it and learned the rules, then all the pieces of their lives would fall into place and they would be happy. Such delusion.

The problem was systemic, the book seemed to be saying. A person’s clutter wasn’t the result of laziness, procrastination, psychological disorders, or character flaws. It was a socioeconomic and even philosophical problem, one of Marxian alienation and commodity fetishism, which required nothing less than a spiritual revolution in a person’s world view, and a radical reevaluation of what was real and important.

Because the reader is not a passive receptacle for a book’s contents. Not at all. You are our collaborators, our conspirators, breathing new life into us. And because every reader is unique, each of you makes each of us mean differently, regardless of what’s written on our pages. Thus, one book, when read by different readers, becomes different books, becomes an ever-changing array of books that flows through human consciousness like a wave. Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli. According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their own destinies.

In Zen, we call this interconnectedness, or interbeing, or dependent co-arising. Sometimes we call it “emptiness,” which is written with the Chinese character for “sky.” One of the astronauts who walked on the moon, Mr. Edgar Mitchell, had a deep realization of emptiness when he was floating in the sky. He looked back at the Earth and suddenly understood that the molecules of his body, and the bodies of his partners, and even the spacecraft itself all came from some ancient generation of stars, and at that moment, he experienced a feeling of oneness with the universe. He said, “It wasn’t them and us, it was—that’s me, that’s all of it, it’s one thing.” In Zen, we call this enlightenment.