Emptiness in a Christmas bauble

What's in a Christmas bauble?

Probably not much!

Christmas tree baubles are usually empty (unless you've got one of those edible ones filled with chocolately niceness!). But what does "empty" mean? It's not really completely empty – it's filled with vibrating air molecules zipping about bouncing off the walls of the bauble. But even if we were to empty it of air (assuming the bauble would be strong enough to stay up against the vacuum), would it really be empty? No, the vacuum would still be full of electromagnetic radiation (granted there would be no visible light, but there would be plenty of radio waves). The emptiness is really a living, vibrant emptiness full of change and potential. What it's truly empty of is anything fixed or permanent.

Now being, going to nothing

If you've got an old metal bauble, then you might begin to notice some rusting or discolouration from age. If it's glass then it might be a little more hardy, but (sorry to be pessimistic) chances are one day it's going to get smashed... Plastic ones are perhaps the hardiest of all, but even those will be slowly changing and degrading (due to heat, light, or chemicals such as acids or alkalis from your skin).

The point is no matter how strong or well-made it is, it's always going to be changing. As a Zen teacher of mine likes to say "now being, going to nothing" – given a long enough time, there will be absolutely nothing left of the thing we now call the "bauble". Really, the bauble is better thought of as a process rather than a thing.

Your bauble contains the entire Universe

If you've got one of those shiny baubles, then it'll reflect everything around it. And if your tree is covered in shiny baubles, then they'll all be reflecting each other. The whole of your living room will be there in each bauble, and each bauble in each other bauble! This is kind of how reality is. The whole is present in even the tiniest little part.

In a single grain of salt you might rub into your Christmas turkey there are millions of sodium and chlorine atoms bonded together, each atom made of energy in the form of protons, neutrons and electrons – just like every other atom in the entire Universe. And those sodium and chlorine atoms were most likely formed inside a star aeons ago, and wouldn't ever have come into existence if it wasn't for the precise conditions of the early Universe.

So the Universe is made up of a vast interconnected web, or, in the words of the great physicist Heisenberg, "a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine." William Blake knew this when he wrote:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Which is very similar to a verse from the Avatamsaka Sutra (pointed out by Mattieu Riccard in his book The Quantum and the Lotus)

As in one atom,
So in all atoms,
All worlds enter therein—
So inconceivable is it.

Enso - the symbol of Zen

Hanging up in the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell where I teach is a large painting of a circle. In Japanese it's called an enso, and is one of the most distinct symbols of Zen. In a way, it's very much like our bauble: vibrantly empty, slowly disintegrating, and containing the entire Universe.

The enso hanging in the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell

Śūnyatā is the Sanskrit/Buddhist word for emptiness (śūnya means zero or nothing), and is studied at great length in the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy, which was developed around a few hundred CE. To them, sunyata represents the flow of dynamic processes in the Universe, ordered by the laws of nature and by past actions (karma), where everything is interconnected, interrelated, and interpenetrating.

I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

I'd love to hear from you

How many more nuggets of wisdom can you find on your Christmas tree? I'd love to hear from you! Leave a comment below, join the discussion.

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