Hi,
First, this is best felt and experienced, rather than just thought about, which is what our Zazen is for ... as it softens and sometimes drops away the hard borders that separate 'this' from 'that,' me from you and the other thing.
I speak of "Emptiness" as actually the flowing Wholeness of all that sweeps in all individuality, and yet is all things too. Sometimes mystics use the image of the individual waves rising and falling on the surface of the sea which are actually nothing more or less than the moving sea itself (I use in my book the Great Dance that comes alive in all its individual dancers, yet the dancers are just swept up and vanish in the total dance). The sea or dance is not a "thing," can't be nailed down or pinned to the wall with a label, but is the very motion and change itself. When the wave or the solo dancer recognizes itself as not only an individual, subject to birth and death, rising and falling, but as the whole Sea, the whole Dance ... we are free.
Frankly, I am not crazy about Deshimaru Roshi's little explanation there, which strikes me as very tangled on some points. I am not sure why it is so, maybe how the translator handled it. Why is he calling "ku" as "nothing"? The tree's leaves falling is not a very good example of "shiki becomes ku," because the tree with leaves is Emptiness, the tree without leaves is Emptiness. The leaves are Emptiness, the falling is Emptiness. Nothing escapes Emptiness which, in fact, is not "nothing," but the wholeness so Whole Holy Whole that it leaps right through all dichotomies, even "something vs. nothingness," "falling vs. not falling" etc. etc.
And what the heck is "
There is unceasing movement between one pole and the other. With ku, nothing, even the poor can become rich. The negative potentially contains the positive and actualizes it at the right moment. In this way, the negative annihilates itself by liberating the positive."
That sounds more like some kind of Yin/Yang idea, nothing about form and emptiness. Rich is Empty, poor is Empty, as the Dance leaps through all "rich vs. poor," yet is sometimes a dance of being poor and sometimes a dance of being rich! Also, his example is mistaken (if it is meant to show some poles of "form and emptiness") of "
From death appears life; birth leads inevitably towards death. The beautiful becomes ugly; the ugly becomes beautiful." One "pole" is not empty while the other "pole" is form. It is a basic Zen teaching that death is Empty (the sea, the dance) and life is Empty (the sea, the dance), likewise for the beautiful and ugly ... all Empty Empty Empty, thus we leap beyond "life vs. death," although sometimes we live and sometimes we die.
Sorry, that is just one very confused passage. Deshimaru was a great teacher of sitting, but sometimes I find his explanations of Zen philosophy a bit his own.
We recently had a series of Talks on the Heart Sutra, if it helps Dick, during our monthly Zazenkai's early this year. Here is the one that dealt with the "form/emptiness" words ...
https://www.treeleaf.org/forums/show...AND-CLOTHES%21
And the whole series is slowly being turned into a Podcast ...
https://www.treeleaf.org/forums/show...Podcast-Series
Gassho, J
STLah
PS - Risho, rather wordy ... but not too bad.