06/25/2026
New painting[s], a diptych: Form / Emptiness. And now the explanation.......
These two derived ideograms refer to the Buddhist Heart Sutra (the core of the large philosophical Prajaparamita treatise), which states "form is emptiness, emptiness is form." It points toward process metaphysics, behavioral attributes, quantum fundamentals and observational dependency, concluding that existence is not based on nouns or stuff but on gerunds, verbal actions that serve as nouns, and are mutually dependent.
In English, the first character is translated to "form," but Chinese has several characters that are synonyms pertaining to form. The sutra ideogram itself, found in Korea and Japan as well, variously means, depending on context (usually specified by a follow-up ideogram), appearance, or hue, or substance, or the material world; however, artistically, aesthetically it is inferior to the one substituted for this work, which means appearance, shape, and form by structure or conceptual category. A third ideogram synonym might have worked in the sutra, as it refers to domain, territory, boundary, or indeed the world itself, everything in perceptive existence.
[The painting is self-referential via brush strokes. The form of the Form ideogram has common vertical brushing while the green background space is irregular, turbulent, chaotic.]
The second stylized Chinese character in the sutra is typically translated as emptiness or void or space or hole. These meanings imply duality in being absent with respect to something. Another way to translate it, particularly for this sutra (which presents paradox), is "no-thingness."
The background of this painting Emptiness suggests a rainbow or prismatic color spectrum. A rainbow from ancient times has been a symbol of a non-thing thing. A rainbow is not a substance, but an untouchable appearance dependent on the angle of observation [40-42°] with water droplets serving as a prism that splits composite white light into the spread of component hues. We nonetheless name that form and can describe it, hence becoming perceptively real, but it does not exist alone.
In Daoism, Lao Tzu's treatise begins with "the Dao that can be named is not Dao." In the Bible, the first act Adam assigned himself was to name the beasts in the field and birds in the air, everything in the world, hence causing separation and differentiation. In the quantum world, the packet of energy that comes out of the void, or itself, can act as a particle that individually and collectively behaves as a wave depending on observational/detectional design. In the Hindu Upanishads, the expression is neti, neti, not this, not that. In the common world, we concretize the metaphor.
![New painting[s], a diptych: Form / Emptiness. And now the explanation.......These two derived ideograms refer to the Bud...](https://img3.glartent.com/024/094/1549093750240945.jpg)
