Take a vessel
Top it up with water
Now pour some wine
What happened?
Did it hold the wine?
Did it fulfill its purpose?
Now imagine our mind
as that vessel
Filled to its limit
With knowledge
With ideas
With meanings
Somewhere in this chaos
We lose the blissful ignorance
The vacancy of the mind!
Obsessed with fulfillment
We forget that it can’t exist
Without the emptiness!
So why not stop for a while?
Pause, take a deep breath
And revel the emptiness inside!
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Wu is a Chinese word that translates to “Emptiness”. Lao Tzu explains the concept of “Wu” best in Verse 11 of The Legend of Tao (english translation by Michael Rossman):
“Spokes join the rim to the hub,
but the wheel’s use depends
on the hole in the center.
We make a bowl from clay,
but emptiness makes it useful.
We cut out doors and windows,
but vacancy makes the room habitable.
So what’s there is advantageous,
but what’s not is what makes it useful.”
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Thanks for reading!