The Void and the Human Way
by Paul Nyssen
There’s a link between the earlier reflections and a passage from Musashi’s Book of Five Rings. What Musashi names as “the Void,” and says is beyond human knowledge but knowable through observing what exists, can be understood as the idea that everything — the universe itself — is an expression of the Void. D. T. Suzuki, comparing Dōgen and Meister Eckhart, wrote that nothingness is the coincidence of “straightforward affirmation and ceaseless negation.” This is, I think, another way of describing what Christianity calls the tension between God and Satan, good and evil — or more abstractly, that place where “it is” and “it is not” coincide.
If this is so, then there must be a consequence — a form seeking to resolve this opposition — and that is why we might surmise that the entire universe is an expression of a collision between opposite, yet equally true, realities. This includes human beings. Within us, affirmation and negation are in perpetual dialogue, even in conflict.
It is a mistake to believe that people are what they appear to be — settled, defined, unchanging. History abounds with examples of great sinners who became great saints, of those who participated in evil, later devoting themselves to good. Zen reminds us that every person follows a way, which may be impossible for others to understand.
Musashi himself killed his first opponent at the age of thirteen and went on to fight many others. Legend says he was never defeated; truth suggests otherwise. He likely won many battles, survived others he lost, and, as a warrior, endured more than he conquered. There’s a story that he survived the battle of Sekigahara by hiding in a ditch. A complex and all-too-human man who, at the end of his life, could write a book of strategy that is still studied today. We can be thankful he hid in that ditch.