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Seng-ts'an
Ashbery
Pynchon
Tsongkhapa
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From Relying on Mind by Seng-ts'an (China, sixth century)
The subject disappears with its objects,
objects vanish without a subject.
Objects are objects because of subjects,
subjects, subjects because of objects.
If you want to know both these aspects,
originally they're one and empty.
A single emptiness unites opposites,
pervading all things equally.
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Flow Chart by John Ashbery
But give
everybody time, even no-shows, and it will all flow backwards, that
caparisoned night, a trial for some, and otherwise it all gets out
into your childhood and the beach that was its launching pad before
hunger and fears took over even as delight fostered the notion that
there was going to be enough for everybody, for children to pause
and have a happy home no one talks about anymore. Best to rest, sleep, and
laugh
about it to someone who no longer matters and then you'll find that you are
indeed
in it and have been all along, only that the show was on a kind of
treadmill moving
at the same leaden pace of your jokes and ambitions, which is why you
never knew about it and therefore consented to come along anyway
on this dangerous outing to the very sources of time. Don't
excuse yourself, nothing could.
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From The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time sheíd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. Thereíd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her...
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From Tsongkhapa (Tibet, 14th Century)
Unborn emptiness has let go of the extremes of being and non-being. Thus it is both the center itself and the central path. Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves.
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