by Miura Susumu
Part 3
3. jori is the endowment of objects with nature and body; nature itself is one, and when it opens as bodies one yang is matched with one yin. And so one possesses two, two open one. Therefore one is two, and two amount to all the things of the manifold. There is nothing that is not unified in the one.
When we first look up at the sky above us, blue as lapis lazuli, we take this as "heaven", and the vast crust of soil and stones beneath us we call "earth". So they may be, but these are a very coarse heaven and earth. When heaven and earth are studied from this point of view we do not get beyond astronomy, geography, and predicting the paths of heavenly bodies, which is no further than making calculations about particular things.
Heaven and earth are nothing other than ki and object, heaven being ki, and earth being object, such that if there is one thing there is one heaven-and-earth, if there are ten thousand things heaven-and-earth is ten thousandfold.
The ancients have said that each thing constitutes One Primary Ultimate,
or that things are numberless as the sands of the Ganges. However high
the Ganges sands are piled these heaven-and-earths will never come to an
end. There are but two things. I say there are two, for although we see
heaven-and-earth as profuse diversity, however many things we seem to see,
there is the one thing with shape, the one thing without shape, and nothing
else whatsoever. The thing with shape I call "object", and the thing without
shape I call "ki".
3.1 Because the thing without shape does not confront the eyes, is not felt by the hands, people in the olden days misunderstood it, they described it as void, or nothingness.
Of course in opposition to the substantiality of earth, the body of
heaven is hollow, and in contrast to the matter of the earth it is immaterial,
but it is a great mistake to think of it as merely nothing or void. If
what they meant by "nothingness" or "void" were truly nothingness or void,
there would be no place for the sun, moon, stars and planets to hang, and
no place for ourselves and other things to dwell. Insofar as the sun, moon,
stars and planets are hung within it, and we and other objects dwell within
it, it is indeed a hollow body. But what could be more foolish than to
point to something and call it "nothing"?