Bodhidharma, “Vast Emptiness no holiness”
The king asked Bodhidharma about the highest truth. Kings always want to reach the highest to be on the top of this world. The highest and lowest belong to the thinking mind. It is more narcissistic. The king never worried about enlightenment because enlightenment required renouncement.
Civilization gives birth to desire and how to attain it but enlightenment wants you to go back as an animal and even renounce your mind. The king always keeps sages in the courts in order to experience enlightenment through their words. The king always wants to reach the highest form of life through borrowed wisdom because they don’t have time to meditate and attain wisdom.
When Bodhidharma walked in King asked him ‘what is the highest truth’. The king doesn’t know the basics, the truth itself 100% but how can you go beyond truth. How can you travel beyond 100%. The innocence of the king just came out of his question?
The time you utter the truth it will become false coz the moment you try to define your mother she falls out of language. Why?
The mother is beyond language, it is she who invented the language for her child. Language is a part of mom. So part cannot define the whole, hence the language cannot define the mother. The same here the truth cannot be defined and asking the highest truth is more like madness of the king rather than his approach to wisdom. He doesn’t want to know the truth but he wants to hear the highest truth.
The reply was ‘Vast Emptiness’. Emptiness means nothing, how it can be vast emptiness. The Bodhidharma would have told just ’emptiness’ then the king mind would have asked how much emptiness. Hence Bodhidharma told the king in his language, and he added ‘vast’ to emptiness.
The emptiness is unmeasurable, adding the vast becomes meaningless. why? ‘Vast’ attached before to emptiness because the king questioned the ‘highest’ brought ‘Vast’ in the reply of Bodhidharma. Here Bodhidharma came down to answer the king in his language but he also added ‘no holiness’. There is no holiness because the holiness belongs to a divided mind. The mind only divides holiness and wickedness because the mind always wants to select. Hence he said there is ‘No holiness’.
Emptiness is emptiness there is no way you can define emptiness, there is no divine or evil in emptiness.
There is no expression, because the search for expression belongs to mind. Where there is no expression there is emptiness.
The conversation between king and the Bodhidharma never met, and the king cannot and never knows the truth. even if he carries to any sages and No sages can explain the meaning of Bodhidharma’s reply.
The moment someone tries to define the truth, there is no truth in that expression.
Experiencing alone is the only solution to the understanding of the ‘truth’ and ’emptiness’.