Topic
emptiness
3 essays follow this thread across the codex.
- 01 Literature · July 2026 · 10 min
A Handful of Words Against Words: Bodhidharma, Red Pine, and a Book That Points Past Itself
The oldest surviving words of Zen are four blunt sermons that spend their whole length insisting no word can hand you the thing—not even these. Red Pine renders them into English so spare it nearly vanishes: a book built, line by line, to make itself unnecessary.
- 02 Art · June 2026 · 15 min
Chaos and Order in Painting: The Form and the Formless
Every painting is a treaty between order and chaos—composition against energy, the carved against the uncarved, form called out of the formless. The greatest pictures do not resolve the war. They hold it open.
- 03 Philosophy · June 2026 · 16 min
After Vedanta, or Simply Being
Advaita is often called the most evolved philosophy we have made—one seamless reality, the world a passing appearance, the self identical with the ground of all. Take it seriously enough and a stranger question opens: is there anything after it, or only being?