Defining Emptiness

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The main terms used to refer to emptiness in Chinese are xu 虛, kong 空 and wu 無.  I've seen a wide range of different terms used in English to translate each of these, to the point where there is no meaningful distinction between the three.  In putting them together as a compound word, xukong-lingtong, we are attempting to point to a single experience which can be hinted at by it's components.

Lingtong (靈通) means lively and animated all the way through.  If I wanted to sound pedantic I might call it whole-body attentive-listening.  It also means that there is no articulation of the joints, which is an advanced skill, most training begins with developing clear articulation of the joints first. 

In earlier blog posts I have defined xu as empty like a puppet, and kong as empty like a container.  But it is how they fit together that matters. Xu is a "dead-weight" body, but it is also radiant and luminous. Kong, is a container in the simplest sense: It has a boarder.  There is a way to train which will make the container feel hard, but the xukong container seems porous to air and light--like a dragonflies wings.  

The terms hard and soft are used a lot in martial arts, but I haven't found them very useful for describing what I do.  With regards to the origins of Golden-Bell and Iron-Shirt body conditioning practices, which come form India (or are considered gifts form the gods); these practices make a distinction between two types of emptiness, impenetrable and insubstantial.   Those terms are more meaningful than hard or soft.

Here is a list of xukong concepts:

  • luminous
  • radiant
  • limitless
  • formless
  • empty
  • absorption
  • melting
  • dissolving
  • toukai (refracted light)
  • permeable
  • hollow
  • spherical intent
  • mind outside the body
  • dead weight
  • numb
  • fake
  • perfect visualization
  • zero density

As a last word, let me remind readers that conceptually Chinese cosmology do did not use the dichotomy of Form and Function.  The dichotomy was Form and Emptiness!  As the Heart Sutra puts it (awkwardly in English);

Form is not other than emptiness;

Emptiness is not other than form.