Emptiness is as familiar to you as the Hudson river Barry Magid May 14th 2016

How do you understand emptiness? Is it something to be perceived or attained? When we chant "Form is exactly emptiness," we get muddled up. We almost inevitably imagine it's saying "Stuff is the same as no stuff." We get confused by this idea of emptiness as if it describes something other than form. The Hudson river is a thing that is in many ways constant. It's the Hudson, month after month. And yet, it's always flowing. We're never looking at the same water we looked at last time. Those are two perspectives on the same thing. And we're OK with that. It's pretty clear to us the river is simultaneously a constant object and something always changing.

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