The Buddha Eye [1]

~Suzuki Teitaro Daisetz

The essential discipline of Zen consists in emptying the self of all its psychological contents, in stripping the self of all those trappings, moral, philosophical, and spiritual, with which it has continued to adorn itself ever since the first awakening of consciousness. When the self thus stands in its native nakedness, it defies all description. 

The only means we have to make it more approachable and communicable is to resort to figures of speech. The self in its is-ness, pure and simple, is comparable to a circle without circumference and, therefore, with its center nowhere—which is everywhere. 

Or it is like a zero that is equal to, or rather identical with, infinity. Infinity is not to be conceived here serially as an infinite continuum of natural numbers; it is rather a group whose infinitely multitudinous contents are taken as a totality. I formulate it in this way: 0 = Infinity. 

KNOWING SELF

Ibn 'Arabi Heir to the Prophets

All expressions of knowledge go back to our own understanding and experience. Seeing with both eyes, or what might be called “gnosis” (ma‘rifa), is no exception.The human self or soul (nafs) is “an ocean without shore,” to use the expression that Michel Chodkiewicz has chosen as the title of his outstanding study of Ibn ‘Arabi’s hermeneutics.

To the extent that we do come to know ourselves correctly as the divine form,we also come to know the infinite God in both his incomparability and his similarity. It is axiomatic for Ibn ‘Arabi (and for most of Islamic theology as well), that God never repeats himself in his creative activity, because he is absolutely One. At each moment the One discloses itself to each individual in the universe,and each disclosure of the One is one and unique. 

Every creature undergoes constant change and flux as the moments of self-disclosure follow one upon another.We are no different from any other creature in this respect, so we are endlessly changing and forever new. Each moment of self-knowledge represents a new perception of God’s manifestation in the soul and the world. For Ibn ‘Arabi, the achievement of self-understanding means to live in a constantly overflowing fountain of divine elf-expression, a neverending outpouring of knowledge and awareness. 

The Star of Redemption [3]

 ~Franz Rosenzweig

But when philosophy denies the dark presupposition of all life, when it does not value death as something, but makes it into a nothing, it gives itself the appearance of having no presupposition. In fact, all cognition of the All has for its presupposition— nothing. For the one and universal cognition of the All, only the one and universal nothing is valid. 

If philosophy did not want to stop its ears before the cry of frightened humanity, it would have to take the following as its point of departure— and consciously as its point of departure—: the nothing of death is a something, each renewed nothing of death is a new something that frightens anew, and that cannot be passed over in silence, nor be silenced. 

And instead of the one and universal nothing that buries its head in the sand before the cry of mortal terror, and which alone philosophy wants to let precede the one and universal cognition, philosophy would have to have the courage to listen to that cry and not close its eyes before the terrible reality. The nothing is not nothing, it is something.