INTRODUCTION
✨ In this contemplative writing, Master Woo Myung explores the nature of emptiness—how people cast their pain, sorrow, and burdens into the void, only to continue living in blindness to the truth. Through imagery of wind, fallen leaves, and the empty sky, he reveals how humans chase illusions rather than understanding the true place to which all things return. 🌿
This poem gently exposes the tragedy of living without awareness: people follow emptiness and wind with their eyes closed, unaware that nature continuously shows the way. The fallen leaf becomes a silent teacher, yet the mind—covered by illusions—cannot recognize its message. 🌌
Through this piece, readers glimpse the profound truth that the empty sky is not empty at all, but holds the answer to life’s deepest questions.
ORIGINAL WRITING BY MASTER WOO MYUNG
Emptiness
The wind blows hurriedly following in the emptiness.
The mind lives life hurriedly.
One lives casting the pain he has in his mind
into the emptiness;
he lives casting the sorrow he has in his mind
into the wind.
He is tormented
as he lives following the wind and the emptiness
with his eyes closed.
Long ago people lived,
but they have all passed on.
Each person creates countless places that are his own
and so even though those people have all passed on,
he does not know the true place
that those people have passed on to;
instead he looks to the empty sky
thinking about those people who have gone.
There is no one in the world who knows
what this empty sky really is.
There is a fallen leaf tumbling around in the backyard;
one asks it what the empty sky really is.
Without a word,
the leaf teaches him,
but he is too blind to see it.
– Woo Myung
REFLECT AT SANTA CLARA MEDITATION
At Santa Clara Meditation, seekers learn to look beyond the illusions of the mind and observe the truth that exists within nature. 🌠 Teachings such as this help practitioners understand emptiness not as nothingness but as the original place—the Universe itself.
