Sitting at the feet of the world’s greatest spiritual teachers has led me to believe, like WH Auden, that while I may not be able to bless, life is indeed a blessing, sometimes a miraculous one at that. Witnessing Masters who “promise no miracle” to students who have traipsed across continents to find them, yet in the next breath are able to dissolve themselves into light bodies of sparkling atoms at will- all this and more has already convinced me as to the impermanence of matter and the transformative capacity of an eye-witness account to bring about a changed world view.

I am surprised, none-the-less, when a package arrives from the US with no sender name on its exterior wrapping. By the feel of it, it’s a book. Opening it, I discover no note, no letter, just a book with a yellow-gold cover, entitled Notes On Nothing by Anonymous. I flick through, looking for clues. Who sent me this? Who even wrote it? There is no author bio at the back, just a QR code to take me to a publisher’s website. As I don’t have my phone to hand, I decide to read the book instead. Maybe I’ll pick up some clues along the way.

The author says that he writes to share an experience of Nothingness, though not from any particular spiritual or religious viewpoint. This immediately makes me think of Krishnamurti: “You see, sirs, the earth is not communist or capitalist, it is not Hindu or Christian, it is neither yours nor mine.” The story in this book, claims the author, is no more his own than anyone else’s. Perhaps it is actually ours. The experience he describes is at once something that happened and didn’t happen. As a student of Buddhism, I am intrigued.

Who is ‘anonymous’?

So far, all this is sounding terribly Buddhist, but of which school of thought, I wonder? In my mind, I’m already subtitling the book “Journal of an Urban Yogi”, for it is clear from descriptions in the Notes that the author has been writing for a quarter of a century, that he lives in the city, enjoys a garden, has a family and is of mixed Asian and European heritage. He is definitely a he, as he describes himself as having a wife. Mind you, I think: shes can have wives nowadays too, so maybe this is another test of my assumption, another writerly provocation to get me to explore whether there is any such thing as absolute conviction in any definitive reality.

I flick back to the very beginning, to a page of praise by other authors for the book. Maybe this will give it some context. Noticing that Zadie Smith has written the first critical praise, I wonder if I can find out more about the author this way. After all, I have Zadie’s email somewhere and she describes the writer of the book as “an old friend”. A little more investigating and I discover that Zadie and the author were in fact college mates. Ah ha, I think. Now I’m getting somewhere. I look up dates and discover that the author may well have lived in the college’s Garden Hostel, built next to a Fellow’s Garden in which a beautiful “Dove Tree” (a Daividia Baill) was planted in honour of Sri Aurobindo who was a student at the same college from 1890-93. Though more than a centenary before our current mystery author’s time there, I feel the resonances of Aurobindo in the author’s depiction of his experiences, especially when he describes the impact of discovering Nothingness upon his body and nervous system. Aurobindo says: “…emptiness and quietude free from all anxiety or trouble or thought about people or things is not a bad sign or an undesirable state. It is a state of what the Yogis call udasinata, a separateness from all things and indifference, an untroubled neutral quietude.”

I discover that if Smith and the author were contemporaries, then their time together would have been just a couple of years after His Holiness the Dalai Lama visited their college. The Provost at the time was Patrick Bateson, a celebrated and widely respected biologist, who proved beyond all doubt that red deer felt high levels of stress when being hunted, a discovery that changed hunting laws and endeared Bateson to Animal Rights defenders around the world. At one of his charmingly hosted parties, he told the story of tripping over monks in the corridor of his home when the Dalai Lama came to stay. The monks refused all offers of beds, preferring to guard the doorway of His Holiness’s room with their physical bodies, wherever he slept.

In his capacity of a teacher of the Middle Way Madhyamika school of thought, HH Dalai Lama explains the view of Emptiness in Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics Vol 1: The Physical World. “Even the minutest particles of matter,” he writes, “(are empty of) real existence”. This view leads us straight to the laws – or should that read the unlaws – of quantum physics, laws the author of Notes seems to endorse when he writes about “No time. No boundaries in space.”

I turn to Shantideva (685-763 CE), the 6th-century student of Nagarjuna (150-250 CE) who elucidates in The Way of the Bodhisattva:

“There is nothing” –
When this is asserted,
No “thing’ is there
To be examined.
For how can nothing
Lacking all support,
Remain before the mind as something present?

— Verse 33.

By considering this question, which seems to be the same one as the one the author of Notes asks us to contemplate, we arrive at a state which (Buddhist, at least) practitioners often denote as “spaciousness”. I consider the many pages in the book left blank or half empty as carefully curated breathing spaces. I view the way in which the author’s thoughts, anecdotal experiences and poetry are interspersed. A story told in three ways, perhaps from three directions, all pointing the reader towards a central space of Nothingness. “You can feel that total splendour only when you are not committed to anything,” Krishnamurti would agree.

The moral struggle of finding Nothingness

And here we reach our first dilemma, spiritual, social and ethical. For if there is no commitment to the physical world we perceive and inhabit, no commitment to its form or content, then what of family, what of love? It has long been a quandary to me (and I’m sure to many other female lay Buddhists) that even Lord Buddha himself had seemingly few qualms about leaving behind his beautiful queen and children. Practically speaking as a mother and educator, there are so many times when commitment to the very real and tangible earthy, messy, intractable everyday-ness of the domestic is fully necessary in my world and I relate to the author of Notes when he describes the moral struggle of finding Nothingness. Will this mean, he wrangles with himself, that he will grow further away from those he loves? Does discovery entail withdrawal? How will he explain it all to his wife when Nothing has actually happened?

The reader breathes a sigh of relief. His wife strokes his arm. She gets it (even if she doesn’t get it). It would seem that his breathtaking realisation actually connects him even more deeply to her, for in understanding the truth of emptiness, he also understands the pitfalls of attachment. Being overly attached to his soulmate is another way of inhibiting her fulfilment. The author seems to comprehend, in the words of the 17th Karmarpa (Ogyen Trinley Dorje) in his book Interconnected, that “our own freedom is inseparable from the freedom of all other people.”

Both the blissful spaciousness and the subsequent realisation that love-soulmate-family are part of liberation further encourage the author to accept and acknowledge the totality of nothingness/emptiness – or in a word that feels more comfortable to me, of shunyata.

So where does the author lead us from here? Have we come to the end of our journey together? Shantideva would suggest that yes, with this understanding, it’s now time to rest in the spaciousness of clarity:

When real and non-real both
Are absent from before the mind,
Nothing else remains
For mind to do
But rest in perfect peace,
From concepts free.

The author, however, feels the need to keep on writing. It is not the same sort of writing as before though he cannot tell whether his words are coming out better or worse now. He tells us that he sits before his computer screen no longer governed by mania, ego, drive, animus or anxiety. Whatever flows onto the virtual page is written through the body, by the body: the thoughts that arise are manifested through a rare kind of simultaneous being and non-being. In a poem placed after the narrative of the realisation, the author (whom we discover is also a poet) includes six capitalised abstract nouns, one adjective and one demonstrative pronoun:

Formlessness.
This.
Boundlessness.
Unknown.
Emptiness.
Absolute wholeness.
Freedom.

I feel like unpacking this choice of words: the suffix “ness” which concludes four of the six nouns describes what happens when an adjective becomes a quality, condition or state. Since the first two nouns suffix their “ness” with “less” (!), there is a feeling that as readers, we (like the anonymous author) must thin out and pare down before reaching the state or condition of simply being. By a third of the way into the text, the narrative “I” of the poems has decided to become lowercase. There is in fact no longer any need for capital letters with all their associative hierarchies and economic infrastructures.

By midway through the text, the author has realised that “Nothing already includes Everything”: after all, we are entitled to abundance and joy. In the penultimate poem, the author reflects upon a small, sparkly diya made by one of his daughters at school and brought home as a Diwali offering for her family. With its distinct echoes of the Heart Sutra, which the author mentions in the acknowledgements, we discover that at the last:

here 
there is no story
no name no
school no
india no
journey no
…
need
for illumination…

only itself
ablaze
unknown

I thank the unknown sender of Notes on Nothing for thinking of me and sending me his exploration of an experience so mysterious, yet so familiar, as to be almost impossible to put into words. It has prompted me to continue unravelling the constant mystery of existence through stories, poetry and philosophic thought, both ancient and modern.

But I’m still curious, dear Writer: will I ever know who you actually are?

Notes on Nothing: The Joy of Being Nobody, Anonymous, As If Press.