SkyDancer - Essays | ||
![]() |
||
Sunyata (shunyata)
"Emptiness"? Spacious Sky? This concept is central in Buddhism but there is no good English equivalent. Emptiness has been most frequently used, but is unfortunate in that it sounds nihilistic. A better way of thinking of it is spaciousness; its an understanding of underlying spiritual reality as a vast field of potentiality, where all our concepts are inadequate, all things as our mind likes to think of reality do not actually have any existence in their own right, as the things we think of, but only in complete interconnection. Thich Nhat Hanh has coined a much better term, interbeing. Larry Rosenberg, in his book Breath by Breath, uses the term "Silence"; see his wonderful chapter 7, "Breathing ino the Silence." (Just finished reading it, don't know whether it'll go on the booklist, but had to mention this chapter.) The sky that a dakini frolics in is sunyata. © copyright Catherine Holmes Clark, 2001; last updated 29 June 2004 |