Emptiness

Merely sitting in emptiness, the mind settles into itself. Environmental sounds appear as empty forms—neither rejected nor affirmed, neither attended to nor ignored. I play a sound on my kacapi that arises as soundful emptiness and dissolves into the boundlessness of emptiness. This is not the same as saying that it arises from silence and returns to silence. Emptiness is not silent; it is audible as the fullness of form and does not exist apart from form.

For anyone who is not simply here—for anyone whose mind is divided into past and future, object and subject—the same sound just played can serve as an intimation of emptiness. What for the kacapi strings was emptiness actualized becomes, for them, the beginningless beginning of emptiness.

Sounds are the audible movements of emptiness. A good performer knows how to express emptiness and how to intimate emptiness. How we intimate emptiness is a tacit process that cannot be reduced to certain techniques or stylistic strategies; it is a mistake to assume that emptiness will be intimated by soft or quiet sounds surrounded by long silences and a clear sky. Emptiness is always sounding, though not always heard. Simply recognizing this is what intimating means.