…is compassion.
When I was thinking of a title of this journal, I found myself thinking of emptiness but not in a sad way, but more of a contentment and acceptance. That idea of our lives being vessels, constantly filling and emptying. And I found myself on this page that speaks about the fullness of emptiness.
I really don’t know very much about the teachings of Buddhism, but I am drawn to reading and learning more about it. This stood out to me from the article: “Form is the wave and emptiness is the water. To understand this, we have to think differently than many of us who were raised in the West were trained to think. In the West, when we draw a circle, we consider it to be zero, nothingness. But in India and many other Asian countries, a circle means totality, wholeness. The meaning is the opposite. So “form is emptiness, and emptiness is form” is like wave is water, water is wave. “Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form. The same is true with feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness,” because these contain each other. Because one exists, everything exists. “
Then I found myself on this article that spoke about how the Heart Sutra teaches emptiness through the epitome of compassion and how there is a union between the two. It took me several times of reading it to sort of grasp the concept.
Now here is the weird part: further into the above article it reads “The Heart Sutra is on the lower end, so to speak, and the shortest sutra consists of just one letter, which is my personal favorite. It starts with the usual introduction, “Once the Buddha was dwelling in Rajagriha at Vulture Flock Mountain” and so on, and then he said, “A.” It ends with all the gods and so on rejoicing, and that’s it. It is said that there are people who actually realize the meaning of the Prajnaparamita Sutras through just hearing or reading “A.” “
I had finished this panel several weeks ago and it had been waiting to be bound and titled that whole time before I read these articles in searching for a title. I remember when I was working on this panel and for some reason I added an A. I don’t normally add random letters to my collages, but I did that day, those many weeks ago. I can’t even tell you why I added an A. Coincidence? Yes, no, maybe, who knows. It caught my attention for sure when I read the above passage. Hmmm.
I do believe that there are times in our creative art making where we touch upon things that we are not aware of. And if we’re open, the meaning finds us.