“The so-called “Four Statements of the Zen Sect” ascribed to Bodhidharma in the sixth century A.D. are an almost perfect signpost to find the Void Which Binds, at least to find its outline as an absence of otherworldly clutter,” continues Aenea. “First, no dependence on words and letters. Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated. The Void Which Binds is to be found in the deepest secrets and silences of things… the place where childhood dwells.
“Second, a special transmission outside the Scriptures. Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move. A musician can tell another musician apart from the millions who play notes as soon as the music begins. Poets glean poets in a few syllables, especially where the ordinary meaning and forms of poetry are discarded. Chora wrote—“Two came here, Two flew off—Butterflies.”—and in the still-warm crucible of burned-away words and images remains the gold of deeper things, what R. H. Blyth and Frederick Franck once called ‘the dark flame of life that burns in all things’, and ‘seeing with the belly, not with the eye; with bowels of compassion.’”
“The Bible lies. The Koran lies. The Talmud and Torah lie. The New Testament lies. The Sutta-pitaka, the Nikayas, the Itivuttaka, and the Dhammapada lie. The Bodhisattva and the Amitabha lie. The Book of the Dead lies. The Tiptaka lies. All Scripture lies… just as I lie as I speak to you now.
“All these holy books lie not from intention or failure of expression, but by their very nature of being reduced to words; all the images, precepts, laws, canons, quotations, parables, commandments, koans, zazen, and sermons in these beautiful books ultimately fail by adding only more words between the human being who is seeking and the perception of the Void Which Binds.
“Third, direct pointing to the soul of man. Zen, which best understood the Void by finding its absence most clearly, wrestled with the problem of pointing without a finger, of creating this art without a medium, of hearing this powerful sound in a vacuum with no sounds. Shiki wrote—
“This—and I do not mean the poem—is the essence of seeking the key to the portal of the Void Which Binds. A hundred thousand races on a million worlds in days long dead have each had their villages with no houses, their dancing under the moon in worlds with no moons, the smell of raw fish on oceans with no fish. This can be shared beyond time, beyond words, beyond a race’s span of existence.
“Fourth, seeing into one’s nature and the attainment of Buddhahood. It does not take decades of zazen or baptism into the Church or pondering the Koran to do this. The Buddha nature is, after all, the after-the-crucible essence of being human. Flowers all attain their flowerhood. A wild dog or blind zygoat each attain their doghood or zygoathood. A place—any place—is granted its placehood. Only humankind struggles and fails in becoming what it is. The reasons are many and complex, but all stem from the fact that we have evolved as one of the self-seeing organs of the evolving universe. Can the eye see itself?”
Aenea pauses for a moment and in the silence we can all hear thunder rumbling somewhere beyond the ridge.
The monsoon is holding off a few days, but its arrival is imminent. I try to imagine these buildings, mountains, ridges, cables, bridges, walkways, and scaffolds covered with ice and shrouded by fog. The thought makes me shiver.
“The Buddha understood that we could sense the Void Which Binds by silencing the din of the everyday,” says Aenea at last. “In that sense, satori is a great and satisfying silence after listening to a neighbor’s blasting sound system for days or months on end. But the Void Which Binds is more than silence… it is the beginning of hearing. Learning the language of the dead is the first task of those who enter the Void medium.
“Jesus of Nazareth entered the Void Which Binds. We know that. His voice is among the clearest of those who speak in the language of the dead. He stayed long enough to move to the second level of responsibility and effort—of learning the language of the dead. He learned well enough to hear the music of the spheres. He was able to ride the surging probability waves far enough to see his own death and was brave enough not to avoid it when he could. And we know that—at least on one occasion while dying on the cross—he learned to take that first step—to move through and across the space-time web of the Void Which Binds, appearing to his friends and disciples several paces into the future from where he hung dying on that cross.
“And, liberated from the restrictions of his time by his glimpse of the timelessness on the Void Which Binds, Jesus realized that it was he who was the key—not his teachings, not Scriptures based on his ideas, not groveling adulation to him or the suddenly evolving Old Testament God in which he solidly believed—but him, Jesus, a human man whose cells carried the decryption code to unlock the portal. Jesus knew that his ability to open that door lay not in his mind or soul but in his skin and bones and cells… literally in his DNA.
“When, during the Last Supper, Jesus of Nazareth asked his followers to drink of his blood and eat of his body, he was not speaking in parable or asking for magical transubstantiation or setting the place for centuries of symbolic reenactment. Jesus wanted them to drink of his blood… a few drops in a great tankard of wine… and to eat of his body… a few skin scrapings in a loaf of bread. He gave of himself in the most literal terms, knowing that those who drank of his blood would share his DNA, and be able to perceive the power of the Void Which Binds the universe.
“And so it was for some of his disciples. But, confronted with perceptions and impressions far beyond their power to absorb or to set in context—all but driven mad by the unceasing voices of the dead and their own reactions to the language of the living—and unable to transmit their own blood music to others—these disciples turned to dogma, reducing the inexpressible into rough words and turgid sermons, tight rules and fiery rhetoric. And the vision paled, then failed. The portal closed.”
Aenea pauses again and sips water from a wooden mug. I notice for the first time that Rachel and Theo and a few others are weeping. I swivel where I am sitting on the fresh tatami and look behind me. A. Bettik is standing in the open doorway, his ageless blue face serious and intent on our young friend’s words. The android is holding his shortened forearm with his good right hand. Does it pain him? I wonder. Aenea speaks again. “Strangely enough, the first children of Old Earth to rediscover the key to the Void Which Binds were the TechnoCore. The autonomous intelligences, attempting to guide their own destiny through forced evolution at a million times the rate of biological humankind, found the DNA keycode to seeing the Void… although “seeing” is not the correct word, of course. Perhaps “resonating” better expresses the meaning.
“But while the Core could feel and explore the outlines of the Void medium, send their probes into the multidimensional post-Hawking reality of it, they could not understand it. The Void Which Binds demands a level of sentient empathy which the Core had never bothered evolving. The first step toward true satori in the Void is learning the language of the beloved dead - and the Core has no beloved dead. The Void Which Binds was like a beautiful painting to a blind man who chooses to burn it like firewood, or like a Beethoven symphony to a deaf man who feels the vibration and builds a stronger floor to damp it out.