Monday, October 31, 2011

Form and Negative Space

The title of my previous post is "Emptiness and Negative Space".  In the Heart Sutra (心經), it says: Form implies Emptiness (Void) and Emptiness implies Form (色即是空,空即是色).  What is the relationship between Form and Negative Space?

Whenever there is an image or a group of images, there must exist negative space, and vice versa. In the Heart Sutra, likewise it says whenever there is Form, there must exists Emptiness, and vice versa.

Mathematically it is like this:

Form (Image) implies Emptiness (Negative Space) AND
Emptiness (Negative Space) implies Form (Image)

Therefore Form (Image) is equivalent with Emptiness (Negative Space).

And in drawing, after you have drawn out the negative space, you got the image too! And a BETTER image (see previous post).

Corollary: One can't escape Form and one can't escape Emptiness too. And Wisdom lies in perceiving both. Positive and negative, the Yin and Yang of Tao!

Conclusion: If your spirituality leads you to forget about or look down upon the physical Form, you're still not THERE. And in classical Chinese spirituality, the state of being THERE is the same in Buddhism and Taoism, in Chinese it is called "You've got tao/the way (without a capital T) - 你得道了!

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