At the beginning of a talk which Professor Masahiro Shimoda recently gave at Three Wheels, he said that Emptiness, "constitutes the foundation of Buddhist philosophy”.

It is therefore clearly an impertinence that I should be here in the Temple giving all of you a talk with such a title, but old habits die hard and I shall probably remain an impertinent man to the day that I die.

When I told you, kneeling in seiza last year, that emptiness was to be my subject if I was invited again, Kayoko Hosokawa san said it was time that I took a chair, but I told her that I was unwilling to trust my backside to an illusion!

She then replied that my topic should, indeed, be illusion and so in fact it is, for to talk about emptiness is to speak of illusion, to speak of illusion is to talk about emptiness.

The way that, out of practical necessity, we forever distinguish this from that, talk about emptiness on one day and illusion on another, as if they were separate topics, is to forget that concept of the unity of all that is, which also lies at the very heart of Buddhism.

In the everyday world, as we perceive it, there is, of course, no such thing as emptiness in any absolute sense.

A glass, for example, is never empty, if it does not contain this it contains that, if not water, then air, for example, and we only call it empty because we are thinking of this and not that.

There is likewise no such thing as a perfect vacuum, a space with nothing in it of any kind, whether artificially created in a laboratory or in the so-called vacuum of outer space.

Apart from the billions of neutrinos, and the gamma rays and other atomic particles, that pass every second through the vacuum and, indeed through each of us, 'empty' space is teeming with particles that come fleetingly into existence in the emptiness and almost instantaneously disappear back into the void.

Worse still for our current state of scientific knowledge, it seems that the atomic structures that make up ordinary matter, including ourselves, account for no more than about four per cent of the apparent mass of the universe, and three quarters of even that small total seems to be missing!

As, with our modern, space based telescopes, we reach back almost to the birth of the universe and the beginning of time, the millions of billions of galaxies and other forms of matter that we can observe, and these are the sort of numbers that the writers of the Sutras would have understood, may seemingly account for no more than one per cent of the whole.

It is a humbling thought that ninety six per cent of the universe appears to consist of unobserved, and at present unobservable, dark matter, about which there are innumerable theories and no hard facts, but perhaps encouraging to see the extent to which modern scientists admit, for all their knowledge, how much it is that they still do not know.

Indeed, according to many theorists, there is also an unknown dark force that accounts for an otherwise inexplicable acceleration of the expansion of the universe that appears to be taking place.

In short, it is of the nature of science that every discovery, every solution of one puzzle, opens up a host of new problems and makes us even more aware, in the midst of our triumphs, how ignorant we are.

This is not only true in the abstract, mathematical world of physics, but in the immediate world of our own, everyday lives.

As I have said, many times and in many contexts, the past is irretrievable, the future unknowable, and that therefore ' now' is the only thing we can really know.

But I was wrong, for even that is empty, is an illusion.

I have thought about 'now,’ for quite a long time, and in May last year I unexpectedly thought of a waka which turned out to be a condensation couple of unsuccessful longer poems:

Now
is always now,

always not now,
always gone,

always
forever,

a dawn breeze
through the fingers;

thought
is too slow
to catch it.

In purely scientific terms the fact of the matter is that whenever we think that now we are doing something, or that something is happening 'now', the neurons in our brains, unknown to us, have fired a fraction of a second before we think that thought with our conscious minds.

When we consciously think of 'now' it is always 'then', has always escaped us into the irretrievable past; even the apparent anchor that holds us fast to what we think of as reality is only another illusion in this world of illusions; is empty in the sense that that word is used, not in everyday terms, but in Buddhist philosophy and in the Sutras.

There is no fixed point, no moment of stasis, that we can ever perceive or capture in the smooth, seamless flow from past to future, in which we live our lives.

There is nothing to hold, to cling to, as we are all swept along on the stream of existence.

Yet again, it seems to me, in a very practical, even a scientific sense, the Buddhist intuition that all that exists is in a state of flux, of continual change, has much to recommend it, and so, to wake when rested and to go sleep when tired; to be, and to joy in being, wherever the current may carry us, is what the Zen masters have said in so many ways is the meaning of Zen.

That seems to me, who has never been wise, to be, at the very least, the beginning of wisdom.

In Buddhism, as you all know far better than I, emptiness refers to non-independent origination, to the idea that all is relative and that nothing at all has a self, is an independent, individual entity.

In the words of the Sutras 'What is form that is emptiness, what is emptiness that is form" within that world of absolute unity, of paradox piled on paradox, which lies beyond the reach of reason or thought or concept, where no distinctions or separations exist, and which is, in itself not separate from, but identical with, the world of intellect and illusion which we perceive with our senses and think with our thoughts, and in which we live our daily lives.

But perhaps at this point, before I have wasted too many more words on things that are always beyond words, I should break off for a moment and tell you a thought that I had about emptiness when I was walking home late one night after a very good dinner, in the middle of trying to write this talk:

What is emptiness?

The sun in the morning,
the wind in the trees,

myself,
as I think that I am;

a glass,
containing nothing

and always full.

But now to return, however inconsequentially, to the business in hand, you will, perhaps, possibly remember that I spoke in an earlier talk about what appeared to me to be the extraordinary prefigurations of twentieth, and now of twenty first century science in that distant, prescientific, intuitive world of the Sutras.

Of course, the very mention of relativity in connection with Buddhist emptiness brings to mind Einstein, but science is moving on, if not quite with the speed of light, then something quite close to it, in a whole range of its chosen disciplines.

Would you or I ever have guessed, even as recently as ten years ago, when as Buddhists, you talked of illusion, that one of the two main headlines in bold type on the cover of last year’s September issue of New Scientist would read "Your Mind’s an Illusion", but it did.

I have spoken in the past of some of the variations on the Buddha’s repeated statement, according to the Diamond Cutter Sutra, that “All beings are without self".

It is interesting to discover that the eighteenth century philosopher David Hume, who certainly knew nothing of the Sutras, concluded after intense introspection that he could find, and I quote from the New Scientist, "no enduring identity, only a bundle of sensations.... he asserted that human beings are nothing but a collection of perceptions which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement."

Now, a number of leading neuroscientists are beginning to come to the conclusion that our minds, our consciousness, which we normally see as a continuous, central, and indubitable feature of our experience may indeed be an Illusion.

They argue that many, indeed most, of our mental processes can never be conscious; to take a single, perhaps surprising example, that I have mentioned already in the context of ' now', the electrical impulse in the brain which initiates action occurs up to half a second before we consciously take the decision to act.

We appear to be an assemblage of perceptions and behaviours in which consciousness figures only intermittently and over a limited range, and it seems that one side of our brain has evolved to create coherent narratives out of these discontinuous events, and has developed a capacity for delusion which is an essential feature of our normal functioning.

Again, I find it fascinating to see that modern cognitive scientists, entirely in the course of their scientific research on the physical processes and functioning of the brain, are saying things that parallel ideas that the writers of the Sutras, living in a very different world at a very different time, with what was, in many ways, a quite different agenda, were trying to express.

Quite a long time ago, I wrote a poem, that some of you probably know from Taira's translation in The Breath in the Flute, that summed up my feelings and is, perhaps, relevant in this particular context:

I cannot count
the lives that I have lived
in this,
my only life,

each moment
a death
and a new beginning.

Who
I am now;

who I was
then;

who I will be
a day,
a month,
a year from now:

how can I tell,

who do not even know

what I
means.

On two occasions when stating, in the context of emptiness, his non-belief in the existence of matter or of the self, the Buddha is said to have concluded his seemingly abstruse and intrinsically difficult observations with the words “and this is known by children and ignorant persons."

These passages have fascinated me from the time that I first saw them and it may well be that there are books and learned commentaries on them that I have never read, but nevertheless, I think that what they mean is fairly clear.

In speaking of ignorant persons, I believe that the reference is to simple, non-intellectual people, who do not think in terms of such concepts as self and not self; who in general do not reason about their actions, but simply do whatever it is that they do quite naturally and unselfconsciously, because that is the way it is done; no more, no less.

And this, of course, is the connection with children.

When a small child with a cardboard box plays at cars or houses or boats, it is not using imagination in an adult sense, is not consciously thinking that a cardboard box has certain limited features which allow it to be thought of as a house or a car, for the child, it simply is a house or a car.

Small children remember things and can be extremely selfish, but have no concept either of self or of the continuity of self.

For a brief period in their lives, they do not consciously reason and make distinctions and separations; what to us, as adults, is seen as some particular thing can, in an instant, be this or that or the other, and the writers of the Sutras saw that children lived without effort in the world of emptiness.

One whole aspect of modern art concerns the struggle of art school trained, professional artists to get back to and to retain, into old age, the ability to draw and to paint without thought, like a child.

If all our perceptions and our conscious experience, our very conviction of the continuity of consciousness and the sense of self that arises from it, are all illusions, all empty, then, so too, is enlightenment.

But that is not to say, in spite of all our illusions, that you and I and the world, and enlightenment with it, do not exist.

For a Buddhist the world of emptiness and the world of illusion that we inhabit are not separate things; they are one and the same.

I think that for you, as Shin Buddhists, the Pure Land, properly understood, is not some future abode way out in the West, it is here and now and comes into being, if it does, as the whole, not simply a part, of the lives that you actually live.

And so, as I did in my talk last year, I will end with a waka on that mysterious goal towards which all true Buddhists travel, without ever needing to move, in the hope that one day, perhaps, in whatever way by whatever means, they may arrive.

It is called Enlightenment and it goes like this:-

A thought
without thought

and a cloud
of unknowing

waka
with no words

soft
slow
coming of summer

or a lightning flash ---

laughter.