Zen and the Art of Piracy

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Physics and cosmology tell us that the first constituents of the universe burst into existence, without reason, necessity or purpose, in a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. The theoretical and observational evidence confounds all our commonsense assumptions and yet, sooner or later, we will have to accommodate ourselves to the reality of a world that came from nothing. There is no Big Bang theory in Buddhism. But Mahayana Buddhism (and Zen in particular) is fundamentally concerned with the nature of reality, which it expresses both as nothingness or emptiness (sunyata) and as suchness (tathata) - the immediacy and fullness of everything in the world, just as it is and not otherwise. This essay suggests that the language and imagery of emptiness-suchness offer us a means, intuitive rather than logical or rational, of making our accommodation with the physics of how all things began. Along the way the essay touches on issues of literary, cultural and even metaphysical appropriation or, as the title puts it, piracy.