Pitch-Black Sutra

The woods murmur silence as their invisible shadows blurs the line between the earth and the sky, replacing presence with the breath of indeterminate being; the night dilates through 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 and previous tools that induced comfort—by allowing one to measure and divide the world into manageable regions—fall apart. These sanctuaries are no longer, they no longer lull thought into the same presence, into 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 that is aware of one’s pre-reflective intercorporeal intertwinement with the invisible.

What is a sutra? Is nature a sutra (a teacher)? I should refuse to define it because the sutra is something, not something, both something and nothing, and different from all aforementioned options. This is the paradoxical truth of Nagarjuna’s catuskoti; to genuinely speak about the absolute one has to speak about nothing because the absolute is not something. Indeed, one cannot fully grasp the nature of nature itself because the minimal self, the what-it-is-like-for-me-ness, is pre-reflectively opened to a world whose interrogation is an infinite task.