Pitch-Black Sutra

The woods murmur silence as their invisible shadow blurs the line between earth and sky, replacing presence with the breath of non-being, a non-breath, the night dilates throughout matter. The sun falls into the invisible, and the moon is covered beneath clouds as a spectre with its never-shining light. Here the moon never comes; only pitch-black. Corners, space, and time merge, while maybe keeping themselves separate. This pitch-black is an ambiguity where things exist as non-existing, where one’s safe sanctuaries, one’s previous tools inducing comfort by allowing one to measure and divide the world into manageable regions, fall apart. These sanctuaries are no longer, they cannot lull anymore thought into the same presence, the presence of the same, into the existential slumber. Here nothing is itself, nor not itself, nor both itself and not itself, nor otherwise than the previously articulated. This night allows one to stare into the abyss, allows one to exist while immersing oneself into a nocturnal gaze.

Now, during such a night, a boy absorbs himself into the abyss, contemplating on how nature is, indeed, a teacher. In silence, he nods to himself and affirms that all is a sutra, is the sutra, or is one of the many sutras. Sutra, as in teaching, as in opportunity to transform oneself. Is the sutra that which is beyond the limits of what is, or the sutra is just ‘nothing’? Perhaps, I should refuse to define it. After all, I think that, maybe, the sutra is something, not something, both something and nothing, and other than all the options just mentioned. This is the paradoxical truth of Nagarjuna’s catuskoti. If one wants to fix the absolute nature of things, one shall fail. Just… let it be.

While immersed into profound insight, he hears his mother calling him from afar, shouting after him since he ran off again downwards to the pitch-black forest. He turns his ball-shaped head towards the hill’s top, it’s a small hill, and he just has to walk several minutes until reaching his home once more. Despite the devouring darkness, the body knows the way back home no matter where he stands since he  learned to see through steps, through gestures. This acquaintance with darkness, the forest, and the never shining moon, has inspired the body to wander, recently, upon the Gateless Gate of zen, upon the archer shooting in the dark kōan which made him ask oneself, for the first time, what is darkness.