All rabbits are ducks seen from behind at twilight Barry Magid February 3^rd 2018

There used to be an old joke that a psychoanalyst answered every question with another question, and here we have a Zen teacher answering a question with the same question. It’s interesting to try to delve into what kind of question it is instead of what’s being asked. In Zen, we often find answers in the midst of the question, as we do here. Another example of that is when Unmon asks, The world is vast and wide. Why do you put on your robes at the sound of the bell? But here we’re asked something about our original state, clean and pure. Why do mountains and rivers appear?

I think for that to feel like it has any relevance to us, perhaps we can translate it into the monk asking, I’m told that my mind is originally clean and pure. Why is it that all these thoughts and feelings keep coming up? Perhaps even more commonly, students would say, My mind is simply filled with thoughts and feelings. How can I make it clean and pure? To translate it like that, we have the sense of the monk having a question we can relate to. And the way the question is formed both creates and answers the problem at the same time because however you frame it, there is this assumed dichotomy between some clear, pure state and thoughts and feelings or mountains and rivers. How do we go from one to the other? Why does one contaminate the other? The answer is going to have to be found in some version of the original clean and pure mind manifests itself as thoughts and feelings, and that purity is found nowhere in an isolated state. It exists only in the midst of or identical with the contents of our mind.

This is something that the Heart Sutra keeps trying to drum home to us when it says that form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form. It says there are no forms to be found that do not simultaneously exhibit emptiness, and likewise, there is no emptiness to be found apart from form. And yet everyone seems to be preoccupied with finding emptiness on its own in the absence of form, as if there’s some version of an empty mind, or clear mind, or pure mind, or uncontaminated mind, some realm of the void, See? It quickly becomes a noun, it becomes something of a mistake that we think is separate from our usual state of mind. Emptiness, of course, is simply originally intended to mean impermanence and interdependence, and these things are qualities of form, the same way mass and extension are qualities or objects. All forms are undergoing constant change, all forms are indefinable except in relation to everything else that is going on.

To ask to encounter pure emptiness is like asking: You say everything is changing – where is the change? As if the change itself is something that can be seen separate from the changing object. Emptiness is change. Putting these things together into one is something that we all apparently have a very hard time doing, and so we look for teaching metaphors to try to bring together what we seem to have a natural disposition to try to split apart.

That’s why I was telling the little fable of the duck/rabbit this morning. The duck/rabbit illusion is a very useful tool to understand the identity of form and emptiness. When you have the duck, you automatically have the rabbit, you don’t draw a duck and add a rabbit to it. It’s not two separate things that are emerged. When one figure is drawn, you can see it either in the aspect of the duck or the aspect of the rabbit, but it’s always the one thing. It’s very much analogous to what happens in what we call awakening experiences, that when we’re stuck only seeing one aspect of something and suddenly see the other aspect, we have this “Aha” experience. Right?

You know, people can stare at that duck and just not see the rabbit. You can stare at it and stare at it, and all of a sudden something happens. Look! There’s the rabbit! What does it take to see that? What does it take to see impermanence? What does it take to see interconnection? What does it take to see perfection? What does it take to see that your mind is not made impure by its contents, its thoughts and its feelings?

In the story this morning, a man is raised in a land where he only encountered ducks and he becomes restless, thinking there must be more to life than this simple life that he’s leading, and he goes on a quest to find a rabbit. In the course of that quest, he encountered difficulty and hardship, and so he must develop courage and endurance, and he encounters difficulty and suffering and the pain of others and he learns empathy and compassion, and he travels far and wide and learns all about other languages and cultures and people.

Finally, years and years later, at the end of his life, he returns home and there at his doorstep, finally, he sees a rabbit. And yet, it was at first a duck seen from behind, in the twilight. What do we make of a story like that? Would he have been better off if he, from the beginning, seeing the identity of duck and rabbit, had not gone on that long pilgrimage? Every now and then we may encounter someone who without any experience of practice at all, just has a deep feeling for the oneness of things, the inevitability of change, the interdependence of everyone, and they may have lived a good and simple life. And yet most of us have to go on a long journey and struggle hard to try to bring all these things together, but that’s how we develop courage, how we develop endurance, how we learn about suffering, and compassion.

In a sense, it’s only because we have this natural tendency to split things apart, that we also have the ability to develop these capacities in ourselves. Somehow all of them come as a package, even though we wish we could skip ahead a lot of steps and just get there already. Right? Yet that is not to exist in time, not to feel like growth happens in time. It would be like saying, I just wish I was born an adult, skip that messy childhood stuff. We go through all that struggling to see what’s there all the time, but in an important way, it’s the journey, not the arrival that matters.