This last section of the manuscript for The Book of Chen Jen is broken down into several posts. To see all the posts in chronological order, go to the Book of Chen Jen Index Page (scroll down to Section 3). For the sake of these posts, the questions posed by the interviewer, Sue-tzu, will be in bold and the answers by the author will appear as regular text.
You said harmony might also be described as emptiness. Can you elucidate on that a bit?
I said that? I thought it was Chen Jen.
You’re right, it was Chen Jen. What did he mean?
Perhaps it might be best to first make clear that there are no characteristics of this harmony which can be separated one from the other. Harmony is emptiness is surrender is freedom is thankfulness is affirmation is transcendence . . . . They are all one and only represent different ways of describing the same reality. You could not possibly experience one without the others.
Emptiness is the human experience transcendent of the ego-self and its identity. Take one human being and remove ‘me’. This means the absence of all opinion, likes and dislikes, knowledge of things transcendent, belief, attachment, and any need for answers, purpose or meaning.
And this human being is self-aware?
Yes. But remember, self-awareness does not mean in possession of a self in the traditional sense of the word. It is awareness aware of itself. We can call it ‘emptiness’ only because it has this context of self-awareness, much as we might say a cup, for instance, is empty.
So emptiness is distinct from the Void?
Chen Jen has little to say about a Void, as I recall. I have nothing to say myself. What he says seems somewhat tentative to me. “There is no Void in emptiness, it is but the limit of the mind” — that’s the only verse that comes to mind. I think we can substitute Tao for Void here. The Void is that which, being beyond all knowing, presents itself to us as nothingness. But how could we pronounce on nothingness without simply descending once again into the morass of metaphysical hocus-pocus? Transcendent and empty, there is no Void, just as there is no Tao, just as there are no questions to make us posit them in the first place.
You said harmony might also be described as emptiness. Can you elucidate on that a bit?
I said that? I thought it was Chen Jen.
You’re right, it was Chen Jen. What did he mean?
Perhaps it might be best to first make clear that there are no characteristics of this harmony which can be separated one from the other. Harmony is emptiness is surrender is freedom is thankfulness is affirmation is transcendence . . . . They are all one and only represent different ways of describing the same reality. You could not possibly experience one without the others.
Emptiness is the human experience transcendent of the ego-self and its identity. Take one human being and remove ‘me’. This means the absence of all opinion, likes and dislikes, knowledge of things transcendent, belief, attachment, and any need for answers, purpose or meaning.
And this human being is self-aware?
Yes. But remember, self-awareness does not mean in possession of a self in the traditional sense of the word. It is awareness aware of itself. We can call it ‘emptiness’ only because it has this context of self-awareness, much as we might say a cup, for instance, is empty.
So emptiness is distinct from the Void?
Chen Jen has little to say about a Void, as I recall. I have nothing to say myself. What he says seems somewhat tentative to me. “There is no Void in emptiness, it is but the limit of the mind” — that’s the only verse that comes to mind. I think we can substitute Tao for Void here. The Void is that which, being beyond all knowing, presents itself to us as nothingness. But how could we pronounce on nothingness without simply descending once again into the morass of metaphysical hocus-pocus? Transcendent and empty, there is no Void, just as there is no Tao, just as there are no questions to make us posit them in the first place.
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