I appreciated the article by Ajahn Sumedho—from Tricyle, Fall 1995—that Jack posted.
Not only is it a wonderful appreciation of spaciousness which is remarkably consonant with the TSK vision, but it tells its own story independently of the TSK vision. Somehow that makes both stories feel more true, and brings out the light shining in each.
The accompanying painting by Magritte is also magical. Seeing a comb as long as the bed on which it rests–and both so precisely rendered– somehow makes the space they both inhabit flow into the room. But then the room has no walls, just a way of framing the openness of sky and cloud. One of the most intriguing elements in this picture is that we can see the reflection of a window in the glass front of the cupboard. But why do we need the reflection of a window when the entire room is open to the sky? I suspect there is a mystery worth pondering here.
Could it be that we are looking for an open, accommodating world for ourselves, but frame our search in a way that places it out there? The sense that we need to frame and retrieve something absent—could that cause us not to notice that we already live in such a world and are never separate from it?
