The Book of Form and Emptiness

Listen, Shariputra,
form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.
Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness
is not other than form.
The same is true with feelings, perceptions,
mental formations, and consciousness.

-Heart Sutra

Funny that when you google “form and emptiness,” it is only Ruth Oseki’s book that appears on and beyond the first page of hits. Not the Heart Sutra, not philosophical commentary, or poems, or even definitions, or some other imaginative link to these broad terms. One has to dig a little to find Thich Nhat Hahn’s beautifully simple articulation of inter-being, the recognition that while things have form, they are also possessed of emptiness, meaning no thing exists alone but arises and falls in its form with all things. 

The Book of Form and Emptiness, in its simplest articulation, takes as its thesis inter-being. The story follows Benny, a young boy whose family and sense of self is radically reorganized in the wake of his dad’s tragic and accidental death. The world Benny begins to inhabit is one in which books, scissors, birds, spoons and just about anything and everything, both human made and not of the human world, speak. Benny experiences sentience from all quarters. The din can be overwhelming and results in a series of events that leave him labelled as mentally ill and questioning what is real. 

Where the other kids in school make nothing of a bird hitting a window pane, Benny hears the window start to whimper, then vibrate and cry. Overwhelmed by the intensity of the window’s communications, Benny begins pounding on the glass. When asked to explain his behavior, he says, “It remembers being sand, it remembers the birds, the way their feet felt, walking, making little races. It never wanted to be glass. It never wanted to be sneakily transparent…” (77). Inter-being. 

The Book of Form and Emptiness is divided into five sections that alternate between narrative perspectives from Benny and from the book that is Benny’s story.  And so the book, the very one we read, is itself a voice, a character. As it explains to Benny, ”We had to start somewhere…most people don’t notice when their book comes calling. They’re too busy checking their cell phones” (292).  Books, they explain themselves, “are in an odd position, caught halfway in between. We are sensible, if not sentient. We are semi-living” (78). 

By the book’s second act, Benny has discovered that the public library is a quiet place that offers a safe harbor from many of the voices, and from the chaotic home environment where his grief stricken mother, Annabelle, is lost in a material and emotional hoard. It’s also at the library that Benny reconnects with a psych ward friend, a mysterious girl who goes by The Aleph, and an unhoused Slavic poet known as the Bottleman. 

It is through these relationships that Benny’s attempts to make sense of the voices and of himself take on a broader and more philosophical frame. These characters introduce additional layers of literary allusion; the Aleph referencing Jorge Luis Borges short story, The Aleph, a point in space that contains all other points in space. The allusion not only deepens the ways in which all the characters and voices of the book reflect their personalized sense of being back into the mirror that is emptiness, but articulates the funhouse that is language and its attempts to capture experience. As Borges writes, “I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my spare as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into worlds the limitless Aleph, which my foundering mind can sacredly encompass?”

Benny’s conversations and explorations with the Aleph and Bottleman allow Oseki to craft meta narratives about books and their functions in human life, and about the interdependent nature of all things. Oseki’s previous work has similarly taken to the task of using fiction to embody and explicate core tenets of Zen Buddhism. This at times results in a distinctive effect that, read one way, comes across as somewhat disjunctive and strange. The minutiae of the snow globes and tea pots that form Annabelle’s hoard, or the sometimes urgently political judgements about systems and their functions can feel keenly at odds with the broader sweep of consciousness pulsing through Osaki’s writing. Read another way, it is exactly this strangeness that emphasizes the point. This is that. What I thought this was, or what I believe I am, is not apart from that.