Well, what to say of this nursery rhyme? It was
written as a playful response to the words of
Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche that head the poem:
that fundamentally it is empty essence (nothing)
that is cognizant, or knowing. The poem is actually
a response to the humorous paradox of language and
its capacity either to get stuck on itself or to point
beyond itself, according to how our minds receive it.
Hence the paradox of the word "nothing," which, as soon as it is said, becomes "something." It is as if the Rinpoche is making the absurd statement: "There isn't anything, and it's really smart." And we naturally tend to take "isn't anything" and turn that into something called "Nothing," and then tell a story about it as a way of explaining everything. Whew!

As long as we take language as literal representation with a literal reference we will miss the boat on one side or the other. Emptiness, nothingness, shunyata, will always be imagined as a special kind of thing or condition; and prajnaparamita - "the wisdom that goes beyond" - will always be imagined as "something" that goes beyond something to "somewhere." In truth, emptiness signifies "empty of our projections of concrete or fixed reality or separate existence." And gone beyond signifies "gone beyond our linguistic creations and mental structures" - even the structure of "something" or "nothing." That is why, as we are told over and over again, our own mental processes keep us from seeing what is right before our eyes.

The great ninth century zen master Huang Po says simply, "There is nothing which can be said or made evident. There is just the omnipresent voidness of the real self-existent nature of everything, and no more." The mind naturally wonders whether such words refer to a mundane experience or to a cosmic experience. Do not imagine it to be either.

The Buddha, wandering in the forest one day, was approached by a man who was struck by his countenance, and who asked, What are you? Are you a saint, a yogi, a savior? And the Buddha replied: "I am awake." This simple original wakefulness is empty of all fixed qualities other than its own nature, which is intrinsically aware and conscious. This awakeness, this union of knowing and empty being, the original and only knower, is the all-pervasive joyful reality unhindered or unstained by any apparent phenomena, yet manifesting freely in all of it, subject to no politics, no philosophy, and no religion.

Inconceivable reality is empty of the mental categories of "liberation" or "non-liberation." It is empty of "truth" or "illusion." Hence, it is potentially either and may manifest as either in consciousness: self-aware of its own transparency or provisionally identified with its creative forms and expression. Our cognizance, or awareness, which is none other than this transparent reality, can identify with the apparent solidity of our experience, the apparent concreteness of things, and the apparent solidity of our own thought forms and emotions - including the thought of an "I" who is the doer and the knower. Or we may, at any moment, relax that identification and allow our awareness to resume its transparency, its essential and existential freedom, simply shining and illuminating our absolute nature as well as any conditionally arising forms and thoughts.

If we look again at the Rinpoche's words, which express the essence of Mahayana insight, we may also see that something very playful is reflected here. When we try to reduce reality to One, what we actually end up with is a dance; a dance not of one, but of three - whether in the phenomenological language of Buddhist thought - essence, cognizance, capacity - or in the theological language of Christian thought. It is the same trinity referred to in the Hindu name for the Divine - Satchitananda. Sat is empty being; chit is consciousness; and ananda is the abundant and generous and unconfined nature of being - the willingness to get involved - overflowing into expression, evolution, and realization as its all-pervasive capacity. Its energy is joy. Its actuality is love.

Buddhism speaks of the dance of reality as the three bodies (kaya) of the Buddha. Empty essence is the dharmakaya; consciousness or illumination is the sambhogakaya; and their inherent unity gives them endless capacity to manifest as the compassionate incarnate activity of the nirmanakaya, the Buddha - fundamentally, me and you. These three qualities are the Divine Person, or even the Divine Imperson, if you will. They are not separate and they are not objective. They are Nothing. They are infinite expression. They are the body of reality.

These three kayas are also our own mind, our own nature. So although these terms can remain abstract or abstruse philosophy, they reflect and record a direct experience of reality that is accessible to our own investigation. We are invited not merely to speculate about metaphysical truth, but to actually inhabit, or to embody, the most profound truth as not separate from what we are. When we relax the mind and resume our natural spaciousness, empty presence, awareness, and compassion is our own fundamental experience.

There is a rumor that says that monotheism was the great theological advance of mankind, and we seem to have a love affair with the "One." But you have to be a bit heavy-handed to keep One from getting away from you. It is always wanting to morph into many, into male and female, and into diversity. Even in the most developed theologies of One, we see it keep slipping into three. Even among the most patriarchal of ones and threes we see the suppressed feminine being projected and elevated.

Actually the great "theological" advance of humankind is the capacity to see into the nature of things. This ever-awakening capacity has been with us for a long time. It is realized in each moment that we rest in empty presence. And this capacity may be as present in the midst of polytheistic, shamanic, and indigenous responses to reality that celebrate and engage the diversity of the manifest dance, as it may or may not be in our monotheistic systems. Our spiritual genius lies not in theology - not in our various paradigms of one god, many gods, no god, or quantum physics. It lies in the depth and quality of our relationship to the mysterious and reciprocal reality in which we find ourselves, whose proof is in the subjective pudding of our lives, not in our illusion of cultural or theological superiority.

The genius to be found in much indigenous spirituality is the round and personal engagement with life in all of its cycles and aspects of natural and divine manifestation, honoring and feeding both light and shadow within the realm of divinity. Here too is available that same human wisdom that allows an intuitive or intrinsic grasp of "essence" underlying the relationship to many. That essence is what gets projected as the great "One" of monotheism. Then underlying essence becomes ultimate overweening authority. The imperial sun god banishes diversity to the shadows, only to fight never-ending skirmishes or scorched-earth campaigns against self-nature. This is inevitable when fundamental experience gets distanced into language, and then further distanced into ecclesiastical doctrine, and then further into competing doctrines, and then further into systems of domination and control - the terminal end of that degenerative condition known as "hardening of the categories." This is the unfortunate history of Christian theology, including the theology of trinity. And Buddhism doesn't have its hands clean either. It's plenty capable of distancing intimate reality into doctrine. That's what we do.

But essence is fluid, not exclusive. It is not One, but All including One. God is not sovereign but vulnerable. Trinity is not doctrine but tango. Prajnaparamita is not only the mother of the Buddhas but the mother of poetry. The medicine is to drop our attachment to the concept-forming activities of the mind, to the literalism of language, and to the love of doctrine, and always to return to simple presence. To intimacy. To vulnerability. To dance. Which is what trinity - what reality - is really about.

And as long as we are speaking here of trinity, let us reclaim the dance of trinity as our own story, disguised as it may be in Christian culture; taking some space to befriend even those words that may understandably have alienating power. Let us see through them to that life-giving stream out of which they, like all things, have arisen; that reveals the underlying play of Satchitananda. The Father, our ground of being, is empty essence, in eternal process of manifesting its cognizance and love - Holy Spirit - which in its infinite potentiality and joy arises as its own loving and beloved manifestation, apparent form, the nirmanakaya, the Son. Appearance is perfect even as the father (the ground) is perfect. And how are we to come to the father except through the son, appearance becoming transparent to its ground.

Our essential reality births its own dance, the dance of relationship. And the mystery of our lives is the embodiment of it all. We are the gaze that goes both ways: now lover, now beloved; now "father," now "son." There is a time to be a child of the awesome immensity of Being, and a time to maturely embody and to express that same life-giving power. There is a time to rest ourselves in the lap of the "Father" and there is a time to hold God's head in our laps. Doesn't life (doesn't Jesus) also ask this of us? "Those who have fed the hungry have fed me." This absolute occasion of intimacy - or avoidance - is true of every moment of our lives - as parents, lovers, friends, and citizens. It is the true reciprocity and dance of all our relations. The whole play of our lives and the whole story of creation is, in truth, the transparent manifestation of one intimate reality, this dancing union of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - or of Mother light, Child light, and their mutual recognition, as the Tibetan Buddhists might say. It is the intimacy of our capacity to choose and practice conscious loving presence. It is the revelation of the three kayas.

All this may be known as living reality in the surrender of deep meditation or prayer; in the joyful communion of mystical experience; or, simply, as Life - in our direct, surrendered, and intimate experience here and now, manifest in how we live. This playful intimate reality is nothing at all but our own capacity to know and to appear. To arise as a smile. To wriggle the toes. To gaze outwardly with open eyes, or inwardly with eyes closed. To reflect the pure radiance of being when awareness remains unruffled by the winds of the mind. To celebrate and praise all manifestation in infinitely creative ways. To take the continual risk of intimacy and vulnerability as the unique occasion of this existence. There is no separate one who is born, no separate one who dies, no separate one who is clever or wise. There is "nothing" - other than that same undefined and unconfined aware capacity flowing into existence, singing out through all things, true of everything, playfully "supposing" every kind of self-limitation, speaking itself through all our language, inviting us to "believe," or simply: to sing.