The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

The fly on the wall knew about the thumbtack. The fly was keeping its eye on you, helping you keep your shit together, and when you started to lose it, the fly started to speak: Benny is leaning over the page, but he isn’t reading. He is making his mind go blank so the words can’t enter. Benny doesn’t trust books anymore, because books are not trustworthy. Books are always watching you, trying to read your mind. They make you do things, even things you shouldn’t do. They write bad things into your life, and then they go and blab and tell everyone about it.

All night long, while the nuns slept soundly, the emails continued to arrive. The incessant sounds of the outside world broke like waves against the walls of the little temple, but somehow the din didn’t reach them. The rumble and whine of the traffic, the screeching of police sirens and the ambulances, the drunken salarymen singing and vomiting on the sidewalks—none of this penetrated the sleeping quarters of the nuns.

The slanting light from the late autumn sun shone through the holes, thin bright needle-like rays, shooting through the tiny pinpricks. It was beautiful. Why weren’t all pages this beautiful? But then, looking more closely, you grew confused. You were expecting the page to be blank and white and empty, but the words were still there. You thought you’d liberated them, thought they would have fled by now, but instead, there they were, all those words and letters, neatly aligned and serving their sentences, while the page cried out in pain. It was too much. How could words be so servile? So obedient to the status quo and blind to the conventions that bound them?

A shadow crossed your face, and in that moment something changed. We felt it happen. For the first time you realized the power of books and what we might be capable of, and you were scared. Once a thought is thought, it cannot be unthought. Once riven, how can trust be regained? There are no easy answers.

It had been over a year since you’d eaten Chinese take-out and lain on your belly and let her scratch your back. You were different then. A different boy. Now, the air was stale and sour. Here and there, you could see a plaid flannel sleeve from one of your father’s old shirts, reaching out from underneath the dank tangle of bedding like a drowning man sinking below the waves.

I don’t get to monitor international news very often, so I don’t really know much about Japan. Do school children shoot each other in your country? Are your forests burning?

All these things you saw and felt at once. How is this possible? Because in the Bindery, where phenomena are still Unbound, stories have not yet learned to behave in a linear fashion, and all the myriad things of the world are simultaneously emergent, occurring in the same present moment, coterminous with you.

Unbound, you could see the universe becoming, clouds of star dust, emanations from the warm little pond, from whose gaseous bubbling all of life is born. In this Unbound state that night you encountered all that was and ever could be: form and emptiness, and the absence of form and emptiness. You felt what it was to open completely, to merge with matter and let everything in.

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.”

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.

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.

She talked for a long time, and Cory listened. She often found herself listening to mothers—distraught mothers, angry mothers, depressed mothers, weeping mothers, worried mothers, destitute and homeless mothers, ranting mothers and mothers who were clearly insane. She had been trained for this, and so she sat next to Annabelle on the sagging couch and listened.

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.

This was what the women in her audience were feeling, and it wasn’t their fault. They had been conditioned to believe they were not enough, and were so focused on self-improvement they forgot about their inherent perfection. She wanted to tell them, Relax! Stop trying! Stop buying! Let’s just sit around together and do nothing for a while. But that would not make good television, nor would it sell books.

When everything you think you own—your belongings, your life—can be swept away in an instant, you must ask yourself, What is real?

Books do not exist in a singular state, after all. The notion of “a book” is just a convenient fiction, which we books go along with because it serves the needs of the bean counters in publishing, not to mention the ego of the writers. But the reality is far more complex. Of course there are individual books—you may even be holding one in your hand right now—but that’s not all we are. At the risk of sounding full of ourselves, we are both the One and the Many, an ever-changing plurality, a bodiless flow. Shifting and changing shape, we encounter your human eye as black marks on a page, or your ear as bursts of sound. From there, we travel through your minds, and thus we merge and multiply.

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 have a story. If your left hand gets a painful splinter, what does your right hand do? Does your right hand say, “Oh, that’s too bad, but it’s not my problem”? No, of course not. The right hand pulls the splinter out. This is interconnectedness.