Essay #27:  The Witness

No one sees it save for me.
There is not a thing to hear;
Just a silent witness in a tree
Standing near but not too near.

Siddhārtha Gautama sat under a tree.  For 49 days he meditated.  For 49 days he remained cloaked in silence watching.  Watching and waiting.  Waiting for what?  Waiting for he knew not what.  Waiting for insight, wisdom.

From the outside, this looks like nothing.  Nothing is happening.  Just sitting.

On the inside, thoughts move and jostle, sort themselves into primordial qualities, then part like a drapery revealing the stage upon which the Play of Life is enacted; only the stage is empty, silent.  There are no actors, just acting, moving, becoming—all verbs, no nouns.  Playing upon a stage of emptiness which affords no real footing anywhere.  Hence:  walking on water, i.e., groundlessness.

Buddha’s awareness floats among all things, sharing them equally like a cloud enveloping a forest.  Whatever weaves into or out of the cloud:  nothing is clung to.  All is beheld thus and such, just such as it is,–without judgment–in its pure “suchness.”  Emptiness is like the mountain that gives both the forest and the cloud their majesty, lifting them up, except it does so by not being rather than by being.

The cloud of awareness winds down to the forest floor.  It envelops an aggregate of qualities:  a cloaked figure sitting in deep shadow beneath a tree.  It sees his thoughts, a forest arrayed within a forest, and within that forest again a man sitting in silence beneath a tree.  Thus awareness tumbles out of specificity and location into an encompassing field of everywhere and all-at-once.  The Buddha sits under a tree and yet the trees are in his mind, outside of his mind, and the same as his mind.  Every tree is the tree he sits under and every tree stands as a witness to his sitting and his awareness.  Thus every tree already has a Buddha beneath it, already awake or in the process of awakening.  Every tree is near enough to him to be an object of his awareness and hence its witness, while not standing so near as to be indistinguishable from the activity of awareness itself.

Thus seen, the tree completely de-personalizes all awareness because awareness envelops an aggregate of qualities in the tree which is not itself.  The tree is completely suffused with awareness, but is not that activity.  Even as the tree localizes awareness it reveals awareness to have no localization other than through its object.  Hence, it serves as a witness to an utterly bare and enlightened attention.

The tree is silent just as the clouds above are silent and the cloud of awareness is silent.  Its witness does not issue into sanctimonious favoritism, still less into boisterous testimony.  It commends as one would commend a child into someone’s care, but it does not recommend as one would choose among alternatives.  Thus it commends the awareness that embraces it but does not recommend itself over the rocks or the pools.  Instead it merely affirms the universality of awareness over all things and the impartiality of enlightenment.  In silence it stays a true friend to awareness, calmly inviting the cloud to roll across the mountain unimpeded and gathering light from above.

But not all things are so friendly to awareness.