Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form...

Form, Emptiness & Schrödinger's Cat

Many times I have heard the Buddhist phrase: Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Many times this phrase has been explained, each time, touching upon my interest, holding it there for a moment while I understand, but then the second I think I’ve got it, the paradox seems to win and I relapse into my former confused state of mind. It’s the same thing with math for me. An equation has to be drilled into me countless times before the reasoning sinks in deep enough to stick.

Yesterday I was reading a book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, and came to the chapter on “Shunyata” which is the Sanskrit word for nothingness. Apparently, when the Buddha first gave his talk on shunyata, several arhats attending the talk died of heart attacks from the impact of the teaching. I braced myself.

But it was old, familiar waters I was swimming in. The phrase I had heard many times, was repeated on the page: Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Perhaps it is because I have more life experience now, or maybe the author, Chögyam Trungpa, laid out the truth differently, or it could simply be that it was probably the twentieth time this phrase has been explained to me, but somehow, its meaning finally began to solidify for me.

Trungpa gives the example of a maple leaf falling from a tree onto a mountain stream. This is form. Without labeling the leaf, the tree, the stream, the action still happens, objectively. Were someone not there to witness the leaf falling, it would still happen, and it would still be exactly what it is. Form is simple: it is what is. When we withdraw our labels, our identification with, our subjectivity, then that is when we are left with emptiness. So, all things, when we take away the observer, completely remove our self and our rationalizing mind, then we are left with nothingness, emptiness. It’s simple…once you get it.

The second part of the phrase, emptiness is form, though, challenges this simplicity. It is stating that though the maple leaf, the tree and the mountain stream are empty, they are also form. It is our very attempt to view these things as empty that “clothes them in concept”. The first part of the phrase simply states what is, but the second part of the phrase introduces a broader sense of what is, feeling; feeling the rawness of what is there, recognizing the isness in all forms. So form is emptiness and emptiness is form. After untangling the web around this idea, we can conclude, similarly, that form is form and emptiness is emptiness, because when it comes down to it, things are how they are.

My boyfriend, Will and I were discussing this, and being more scientifically inclined and rational, he mentioned that this is very similar to a popular quantum physics thought experiment, Schrödinger's Cat. Similar to the lesson of shunyata in Buddhism, Schrödinger's experiment fundamentally challenges our subjectivity with regards to how we view reality. It is also a paradox that could give you a heart attack.

Because I am not well-versed in physics like Will, I pulled this explanation of the experiment from http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci341236,00.html

Here's Schrödinger's (theoretical) experiment: We place a living cat into a steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid. There is, in the chamber, a very small amount of a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will, in turn, break the vial and kill the cat. The observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed. Since we cannot know, the cat is both dead and alive according to quantum law, in a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box and learn the condition of the cat that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes one or the other (dead or alive). This situation is sometimes called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox : the observation or measurement itself affects an outcome, so that the outcome as such does not exist unless the measurement is made. (That is, there is no single outcome unless it is observed.)

We know that superposition actually occurs at the subatomic level, because there are observable effects of interference, in which a single particle is demonstrated to be in multiple locations simultaneously. What that fact implies about the nature of reality on the observable level (cats, for example, as opposed to electrons) is one of the stickiest areas of quantum physics. Schrödinger himself is rumored to have said, later in life, that he wished he had never met that cat.

In this experiment, when we take away the observer of the cat, then it is easier to conceptualize that the cat is both dead and alive. That metal box in which they put the cat, is the way we see the world: we think we’ve figured it out because we have a name for everything and we have an opinion about everything, but the truth is that we really don’t know what’s in this metal box of a world we’re living in. Our frame of reference, everything we are basing what we “know” on, is a small fraction of the truth. We do not know what is on the opposite sides of the spectrum of this life, and so we base our knowing on what is apparent. This is form. I am here right now. I am drinking tea. It is form. But the fact that I really don’t know where here is in the great grand scheme of things…that’s emptiness.