In a recent piece for Shambhala Sun magazine, Zen teacher Norman Fischer writes beautifully on the Heart Sutra, the Buddha’s treatise of achieving love and compassion through mastering the concept of ‘emptiness’. But empty of what you may ask:
Empty of separate self, empty of weightiness, empty of burden, empty of boundary…The emptiness of the Heart Sutra isn’t the emptiness of despair; it’s the emptiness of all limitation and boundary. It is open, released.
Too often we find ourselves so constrained by our thoughts, circumstances, and historical conditioning, that there is no room to let the fullness and beauty of life enter in its entirety. Only by emptying ourselves of those burdens, can we release ourselves from suffering and move forward into love and oneness with all of reality:
When I am bound inside my own skin and others are bound inside theirs, I have to defend and protect myself from them. And when I do place myself among them, I must do it carefully, which is hard work, because I am often hurt, opposed, and thwarted by others. But when there’s openness, no boundary between myself and others – when it turns out that I literally am others and others literally are me – then love and connection is easy and natural.
May we all one day experience a world with no boundaries or limitations…
-Jay Kshatri
www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com
