God is form (the immanence of God)

This is part of a series reflecting on God-talk and Buddhist terminology. It is an opening to dialogue, not a final word on the subject.


There is a quite a bit of discussion in Western Buddhism about form and emptiness, as these concepts are featured prominently in the Heart Sutra which in turn has a close association with Zen. This invites comparisons between the Buddhist teaching of non-duality and the concepts of transcendence and immanence. The emphasis today is on form.

Form seems simple enough, given the Western emphasis on materialism. Everything that exists can be reduced to some measurable form of matter or energy, so form is anything composed of these things. Many English-language books on Buddhism use this frame of reference as an analogy to explain emptiness by pointing to subtler and subtler forms of energy until one gets to the fuzzy level of what has been dubbed the quantum field (or in some versions the quantum foam), which itself is compared to emptiness.

This can be misleading as it places the emphasis on an external process rooted in a strictly materialist paradigm. It is fine as an analogy, but prudence suggests it is risky and and unnecessary to draw a direct equivalence. Form is a phenomenological concept that precedes any explanation of the basis of what is being described. Form is, in a sense, anything which can be described and is hence born of discrimination and labeling by the mind. Feeling, intuitions, imaginings, logical musings, judgements, and the like are forms as much as tables, chairs, and chew bones.

In other words, whatever mind is or isn't, wherever and however mind originates, it is itself the origin of form.