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.

Now, during such a night, a boy absorbs himself into the abyss, contemplating on how nature is, indeed, a teacher (a sutra). In silence, he nods and affirms that all is a sutra, the sutra, or one of the many sutras. What is a sutra? I should refuse to define it because the sutra is something, not something, both something and nothing, and other than all the options previously mentioned. This is the paradoxical truth of Nagarjuna’s catuskoti. Trying to determine the absolute nature of being, one shall fail. Depending on one’s interpretative framework and epistemic access, being presents itself differently. Fortunately, Being presents itself to us pre-reflectively: answers can be acquired. However, absolute answers are mere hallucinations.