Representing/Śūnyatā
Monologue
That night, a little after two o’clock in the morning, there was a sudden sharp pain in my head. It seemed as if countless particles rapidly condensed into a tiny point in my brain and then violently exploded. The sharp pain, repeatedly contracting and exploding in waves, caused me to fall to the floor, where I waited for it to subside.
I don’t know how much time passed while I was lying paralyzed on the floor and before the pain went away. Staring at the fluorescent light on the ceiling, I gradually lost focus and it appeared to be a floating tunnel suffused with light. It was then that I became faintly aware of the cause of my searing pain. It wasn’t just physical, but perhaps was a sign that the concerns that had been worrying me for the last few months had just bid me farewell.
At the first light of day, my cell phone rang. It was my brother, who said, “When I got up this morning, I discovered that Mom had passed in her sleep.”
It’s a short ride to my brother’s house, but on that day the taxi and the receding cityscape outside the window both seemed to be moving slowly, one forward and the other back, and everything about the taxi seemed to be happening in slow motion. A memory of my mother appeared in my mind—it was not many days after I finished my military service, and she had taken my hand and muttered to herself and to me, “You’re like me. We don’t have a hometown, and people without a hometown can’t look back so often. People who look back too often forget to look toward the future. In a few days, you should just move out and try not to come back, except for the lunar new year.”
Whenever she had something important to say, my mother would always start with her childhood, and would only get to her point after telling a long and tedious story.
I had little patience for my mother’s stories when I was young. It wasn’t until I reached middle age that I realized my mother, who since childhood, didn’t have family to rely on and had to support herself, could only tell the stories of her life to her children again and again so that they wouldn’t be completely forgotten.
I thought my mother was a true paradox; she didn’t want me to look back, yet at different intervals, would repeat her own life history to her children. Her stories grew each time she told them, and the vast majority of them came from her dreams. This often made me think that our mother lived in two different worlds, but perhaps she didn’t think there was any border between her dreams and reality.
After my mother finished speaking to me on that day, she gave me an envelope containing money, telling me, “This should be enough to pay a month’s rent and the security deposit. Afterwards, you’ll have to rely on yourself.”
After a few moments of silence, she seemed to remember something and said with a smile, “You were an easy child to look after. As long as you were given some paper and a pen, you’d quietly draw pictures. Sometimes you’d spend hours on them. You were a child who really loved using your imagination.” Then for some reason she started mumbling to herself and said in a low voice, “We are all brought into existence by conjurers, but a conjured person can also become a conjurer.”
I could never understand what my mother was talking about when she was recounting things in the Minnan language, but this sentence that she suddenly muttered was especially strange.
Many years later I realized that this sentence came from the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, in which Maňjuśrī asks Vimalakīrti, “How should the bodhisattvas view all sentient beings?,” to which Vimalakīrti answers, “As a conjurer sees a conjured person, so should a bodhisattva view sentient beings.” Following this, the Sūtra details an elaborate discussion explaining māyā and the true nature of things.(1)
But how did my mother, who couldn’t read, know this?
Perhaps when she was young, she heard it from someone lecturing on the Sūtra and later paraphrased it.
Not long after that conversation with my mother, I began my life of drifting on my own. Even though the place I rented wasn’t far from my mother’s, I returned less often for no particular reason.
When I was thirty six, the military dependents’ village where I grew up was leveled to make way for public housing. Originally, my family members thought that one of these new houses would be affordable, but later realized that the mortgage payment would be much more than they had anticipated. As a result, my family had to leave Shuiwei in Xindian District, which came to be filled with prisons, munitions factories, nursing homes, export processing zones, and illegal construction, and could hardly be called a hometown anymore.
At this point, my family members and I became people who couldn’t even imagine returning to a hometown.
Or maybe we all, who are just in this world temporarily, never had a hometown with eternal significance.
No matter how slow the taxi, it eventually took me to my destination.
After I arrived at my brother’s house, I went into my mother’s room and saw her head resting on her right hand, and her left hand placed at the midpoint of her reclining body. She seemed to still be dreaming while serenely sleeping on the bed.
According to custom, the deceased’s consciousness doesn’t fully leave the body for at least eight hours, and during this time, the body cannot be moved. As my mother’s soul was leaving her body, which was long ago pregnant with my brother, sister, and me, I imagined that she wouldn’t want me to cry. In her mind, we were created by her, just as a conjured person is created by a conjurer, and every conjured person must know that in time, life ends and there is no need to be sad.
Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but shed tears.
I also couldn’t help but want to ask my mother’s departing soul, “In this deathly manifestation, is this the last time you’ll appear to us conjured people who, just like you were, are able to become conjurers?”
“Perhaps in this deathly manifestation, you’re showing the separating body and mind of a conjured person, a process which is both an illusion and reality called māyā. Is this a life lesson that we conjured people must learn?”
I also wanted to ask, as my mother’s soul was leaving her body, “I have listened to you tell your life history for so many years, at this time:
Have you met your five-year-old self who was sent from Malaysia to the Kinmen Islands as a child bride?
Have you met your seven-year-old self who was left behind in Kinmen when the family who had originally bought you immigrated to another country?
Have you met your ten-year-old self who used to collect seaweed on the beach for food?
Have you met your fourteen-year-old self who made a living by collecting firewood in the mountains to sell to wealthy people in Kinmen?
Have you met your seventeen-year-old self who set up a fruit stand by the well of the East Gate Market in Kinmen?
Have you met your twenty-three-year-old self who married our father, someone from the most abject social class in China, who became a low level soldier because the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party happened?”
“Mother, was it over those years that you gradually came to understand that a conjured person could also become a conjurer?”
Like you’re drifting off to sleep, your face is that of the five-year-old you on a steamship to an unknown destination and gazing at a dark and starless sky and infinite sea.
Your face seems like a screen on which your corporeal body at different ages is projected.
But Mother, no matter how long I gaze at your face, no matter how much I search my memory for you, I cannot see anything or call forth any image of the tears you once cried.
Even though you suffered through your son’s fever, dementia, paralysis and eventual death, contended with your daughter’s lifetime of labor in an electronics factory and death, and even endured the death of our father who was rarely home, I never saw you cry. I just remember you calmly caring for them to the last light of their fading lives. I just remember your silent acceptance of everything that happened.
Even though in the last few months of your life, arrhythmia caused your heart rate to slow to twenty or thirty beats per minute, you stubbornly refused to go to the hospital for treatment. It wasn’t until your failing heart led to coma and the family rushed you to the hospital for emergency treatment that your mind cleared, but you still refused a pacemaker, and still stubbornly wanted to pull off all of the wires and tubes attached to your body. You even angrily accused us, “Why on earth did you bring me to the hospital? I’ve been telling you for decades now—how could you still not know where I want to go?”
After returning from the hospital, you acted as if nothing had happened and watched a television program about the origin of the universe with your three granddaughters. I noticed what were perhaps some tears in your calm eyes, but wasn’t sure if it was just an image of the stars from the television being reflected in your eyes or a mixture of tears and starlight.
We, the conjured people that you created, all knew our time with you was limited, but you suddenly turned away from the television and said, “There’s nothing to worry about. Go back to work!” Then you gently took my hand again and said, “Go back. There’s nothing to worry about” and continued to watch television. Seemingly under your spell, I could only unconsciously get up and walk to the door. It was then that I remembered what you had told me, “People without a hometown can’t look back so often.”
But still, I turned my head and saw your back bathed in the light emanating from the television screen.
I didn’t know if, after stepping through that doorway, I would have the opportunity to see you again while you were still alive, but I knew at that moment you wouldn’t turn to look back at me. I was thinking that you remembered what you had told me thirty eight years before, and you stubbornly refused to turn back and glance at me to cut off any tender feelings that I may have had for you.
The doorbell at my brother’s house rang. Our eldest brother, who had been suffering from serious depression for many years, arrived. He was weak and after entering my mother’s room, sat on a rattan chair at her bedside. With an empty expression, he looked at my mother’s remains lying on the bed and sank deeply into some invisible abyss. I was unable to detect any emotion in his expression.
Before my mother’s death, when returning home each time for Lunar New Year, I saw my elder brother, who seemed to be sinking deeper into the abyss, and was reminded of the time when I was seventeen and bought my first camera with money I had saved from my part time job at a factory. When showing me how to operate the camera, my brother secretly mentioned that his business had been really expanding. Later, he showed me how to pack the product he was selling inside the camera so it could be smuggled into different underground dance halls. While he was serving in the army, he continued to ask me to pack the product inside the camera and deliver it to the army base.
After this experience, the camera carried a double significance. When loaded with film, it was a device for capturing and freezing the world, but when loaded with LSD, Seconal, or Quaaludes, it was a carrier for drugs that enabled the production of images in the user’s mind. Both film and drugs have a connection to chemistry, but the former captures images of objects and freezes them as representations, while the latter causes the user to generate images in the mind. Perhaps the drugs do not create representations, but rather allow a temporary separation from what are considered normal sights and sounds, and offer an alternative way of watching and listening to the outside world.
I never had a clear idea of where my brother got his products, nor did I know much about his distribution channel. I never even asked him why he wanted to make money by selling drugs.
At the time, I was fascinated by the fact that there was more than one way to create images and illusions. Using an image creation device, such as a camera, was just one of many.
One day about six months later, my brother asked in a very nervous and low voice if I knew why the product he had hidden above the ceiling panel had disappeared. Just then, my mother, who was in the kitchen cooking, came out and told my brother, “No need to look anymore. I threw that stuff away.”
No matter what our mother was dealing with she faced it with equanimity because to her it just seemed like an everyday household affair, and she hardly ever used a reprimanding tone when speaking to us. I remember that after she finished speaking with my brother, she simply walked back into the kitchen, but I can’t remember how my brother reacted at the time.
My mother wanted me to move out that year, and sometimes I wonder if this had something to do with my brother’s situation. When she half mumbled but also sincerely said to me, “We are all brought into existence by conjurers, but a conjured person can also become a conjurer,” maybe she was trying to tell me that we are all conjured people who suddenly appear and then just as suddenly disappear into thin air, and if I couldn’t understand this, regardless of whether I relied on imaging devices, drugs, or other methods to create images or illusions, neither would they help me really understand what is meant by māyā, nor would they be enough to really make me become a conjurer.
Not long after my mother threw away my brother’s drugs he moved out, and we gradually became more distant. I only know that after he stopped selling drugs, he tried his hand at a variety of different jobs, encountered some problems, and lived in Hong Kong for a few years. In 1997, he returned to Taiwan after the Asian financial crisis, though it seems he had already been unemployed.
By 2008, he was suffering from serious depression, slit his wrists, and was rushed to the emergency room by a friend. It wasn’t until then, when I saw him in the hospital, that I had a long and real talk with him, but he still avoided talking about what he had been doing twenty or so years before.
My brother moved back to where he lived alone after the hospital and started slowly renovating his leaky apartment, changing it into an archive for alternative articles and images. He neatly packed this continually expanding database into the entire apartment except for one room, in which he never installed lights, left completely empty, and never used for some unknown reason.
One night in early 2017, my brother and I were looking at that room and talking in his apartment stuffed with alternative knowledge. I asked him why he hadn’t installed lights in that room. He said, “It belongs to the dust world.”
I had thought that along with the daily progress of the database filled with alternative articles and images, his depression would be getting better. But I discovered that his depression had returned and was becoming more serious as the overflowing database neared completion.
Perhaps as it was nearing completion, his feelings of loss were rebounding with greater force.
My older brother’s life has always been a mystery to me, and it seems that at that time he was falling into an invisible abyss. With a vacant expression, he watched the world go by, and watching our mother’s body lying on the bed, he didn’t say a word. I was never able to detect even a shred of emotion in his vacant expression.
My sister lost her husband soon after they married. One after another, she, my younger brother Chieh-Yi, who had been supporting me, and his wife and two children all moved into the old apartment where my mother and youngest brother were living.
It seemed that this tiny old apartment had never held this many of the conjured people that my mother had created.
Since the exact time that my mother passed was unknown, we could only calculate the eight-hour waiting period from the time at which my brother had discovered her on that early morning. During the waiting period before the mortician was called to move our mother’s remains, her consciousness and body were in the process of going their separate ways. The consciousness and physical matter of this tiny old apartment also seemed to be in a time and space where the same process of moving from overlapping to separation was happening.
The people from the mortuary arrived at exactly two o’clock in the afternoon. They asked us to take down the red chunlian framing the door and extinguish the lamps for worshiping gods and those in front of tablets memorializing ancestors. They then prepared to help us massage our mother’s already rigid body. Chieh-Yi and I insisted that we would do the massage, during which, the mortuary workers continually urged us not to let any tears fall on our mother’s body because then her soul would not be able to bear leaving her body.
Massaging her stiff body, I couldn’t help but think of the time when I was in elementary school and my mother would massage the arms and legs of my younger brother, Ah-Gai, who was physically and mentally disabled.
One day during the summer between my first and second years of elementary school, a middle aged woman brought a disabled child to live with us. I was given no explanation beforehand, but from the conversation between my mother and this woman, I was able to figure out that my mother, who had many children, had given my younger brother soon after he was born to this woman, a friend with no sons.
My mother and the foster mother both called my brother Ah-Gai.
Around the time of the adoption, the healthcare system in Taiwan was not well developed, and a few months after Ah-Gai was adopted, he came down with a high fever. At the stage when he should have been learning to sit and crawl, his foster mother realized that other than smile and cry, Ah-Gai was unable to move at all. She raised him until he was five years old, and then because she was utterly exhausted and could not take care of him any longer, returned him to my mother.
On that evening at the end of summer vacation, just as Ah-Gai’s foster mother was pulling a suitcase and getting ready to leave, he seemed to understand, despite his disability, that she was leaving him forever. For some reason, I felt I could see this in his expression as he watched her disappear from his sight.
Since that day, Ah-Gai and I, a second grader, shared a small room that was illegally added to the house. A few days later, I discovered that when I made certain noises, Ah-Gai would happily laugh as if I told some very funny joke. I gradually began to think that we could communicate using pure and meaningless sounds.
Thereupon, I started my life of using two different languages, or two different means of communication. At school, I used grammatical and clear language to interact with my teachers and classmates, but talking with Ah-Gai after returning home, I would use different and seemingly meaningless sounds.
While speaking softly, my mother would massage Ah-Gai’s legs and arms to avoid their complete atrophy from lack of movement. Because she used such a low voice, I could never clearly hear what she was saying to him, except once when I heard her say, “I am very sorry that I gave birth to you and you are like this now. I hope in your next life, you are born healthy to a good family.” I looked at Ah-Gai and thought his expression suggested that he understood what my mother said.
Later, my mother asked a woodworker to make a chair with a built-in basin for Ah-Gai because he couldn’t manage using the toilet. The idea was that he could just go to the bathroom while sitting in this chair and not soil himself.
After Ah-Gai started using the chair in our small room, it was filled with the odor of urine and feces. When our mother wasn’t paying attention, I would often pick up Ah-Gai from the chair, carry him on my back, and walk around in circles. He would laugh really loud, seemingly delighted because he felt he could move around by himself.
Sometimes I wonder why I cannot remember even one sentence from any of the books I have read, or why, when speaking, I lack logic and jump from idea to idea. I think it might have something to do with my experience of using two languages and two communication systems during my elementary school years.
The summer after I graduated from elementary school, it started to get more difficult to amuse Ah-Gai. From his expression, I often thought he was feeling unwell.
One morning I woke up to find that Ah-Gai, my mother, and sister were all gone. It wasn’t until the afternoon when my sister returned to pick up some toiletries that I learned our mother thought Ah-Gai was sick. She and my sister had taken turns carrying him to the hospital for treatment early that morning and afterwards they were gone for a week.
When they finally returned, my mother seemed very exhausted and didn’t tell us anything but just went into the kitchen and silently washed some vegetables, chopped them, and then cooked them. It seems the kitchen was not only her space to prepare food for us, but also her place to think.
After we ate, my sister very quietly told us that Ah-Gai had died in the hospital.
I continued living in that small room afterwards, and it seemed like Ah-Gai was still there, but I could no longer hear his peculiar laugh.
Life carried on as usual until one day when I wondered if there was a picture of Ah-Gai somewhere that I could look at, and realized there weren’t any pictures of Ah-Gai in the house at all.
Ah-Gai only exists in my memories.
When I was twenty seven, I had been living away from home for 5 years already and decided to quit my job. I imagined that if I had some free time, perhaps I could make some art and also sort out many of the problems that had been puzzling me, but the problems gradually swallowed me instead. I finally lost all of my motivation to create art, and from twenty seven to thirty five I became more depressed. It seemed I just smoked one long cigarette as a day, a month, and a year passed. Besides the support I got from my brother Chieh-Yi, I lost contact with the outside world and lived in a vacuum.
By the summer of my thirty-fifth year, my nights and days had been turned upside down for a long time. One hot and muggy day while I was sleeping, I dreamed I was walking through an extremely long tunnel, and saw Ah-Gai who was backlit by the light at the end of the tunnel. Because of this, I couldn’t see the boyish figure’s face very clearly, but I knew it was him. Getting closer, I realized that Ah-Gai, who was always soiled with his own tears, snot, urine, and feces when he was alive, had become unusually pretty and clean. He said to me, “Brother, you don’t need to worry,” and continued to speak in very eloquent and clear sentences. In the dream, I felt that he had resolved all of my confusion, but after I woke up, I could only remember a small part of his long and eloquent speech, “The meaning of life is silence.” After he spoke, he led me out of the tunnel to a boundless wilderness, and then a group of people in a funeral procession walked toward me from the distant horizon. As they got closer, I could see more clearly that the funeral procession had no end, and everyone seemed to have some kind of infectious disease causing pus filled ulcerations on their skin. They were following a raised coffin at the front of the procession moving slowly and aimlessly in the dark night.
Next, I was a camera flying in the sky looking down at the person lying in the coffin, who I realized was me.
In the dream, Ah-Gai asked, “Brother, do you understand?”
After waking, my only thought was that the sunlight streaming through the window hurt my eyes. I sat on the bed staring blankly and for no particular reason remembered the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, in which Vimalakīrti, adopting a posture of illness, calls forward countless bodhisattvas who are suffering from confusion, and greater in number than the grains of sand in the Ganges, to visit him. He asks this multitude how one should enter the Dharma Gate of nonduality, and how sick bodhisattvas should regulate their minds, and thereupon, they embark on every direction of explanation and dialectic. As these countless bodhisattvas draw their discourse to a close, the Maňjuśrī Bodhisattva says to Vimalakīrti, “We have each made our own explanations. Sir, you should explain how the bodhisattva enters the Dharma gate of nonduality.” At this point Vimalakīrti remains silent, saying nothing.
It is said that each person will dream tens of thousands of dreams in a lifetime, but so far, I only remember this one.
I think that Ah-Gai is my Vimalakīrti because he adopted a posture of illness to teach me how to enter the Dharma Gate of nonduality.
I know that my faculty of wisdom is limited, but since I had this dream, I’ve thought that difficulties, such as illness, are tests that can help guide mutual healing between a conjured person, such as myself, and another conjured person.
After this experience, I started making art again.
Chieh-Yi and I massaged the arms and legs of our mother’s body, and then our sister and my sister-in-law changed her into the clothing and shoes that she only would wear to weddings. The workers from the mortuary covered our mother with the funerary blanket and placed her in the white peaceful remains bag. The bag was slowly zippered from bottom to top, and like a stage disappearing behind closing curtains, our mother’s body and face were slowly covered. At this point, my mother’s journey of being a conjurer seemed to be ending.
My mother’s voice then drifted up in my mind, saying, “A conjured person can become a conjurer, and all sentient beings should view the bodhisattvas and the world as such.”
Thirty-eight years ago, my mother told me, “We are all brought into existence by conjurers, but a conjured person can also become a conjurer.”
From then on, during Taiwan’s restrictive Cold War/anti-communist/martial law period, I began to find that there were wormholes everywhere. As long as we held the attitude that we could suddenly appear and then just as suddenly disappear into thin air, we were able to freely move about in the highly controlled society of this period. This realization led to my first performance art work, Dysfunction No. 3, which I carried out in 1983 on Ximending’s Wuchang Street, commonly called “film street” at the time. As far as I was concerned, during this period, AIT’s American Cultural Center (which was responsible for Cold War cultural brainwashing), the Chung Cheng Auditorium at National Chiao Tung University, informal art galleries, or even empty apartments could all be considered exhibition venues. Also, as long as we maintained the spirit of Buddhist Niṣyanda, which is manifestation in different forms in response to surroundings, by continually changing our name or the name of our performances, we were mostly not being identified by martial law surveillance mechanisms. Therefore, I changed the name of our group every time we performed an action, and as long as I tried to work with people who did not have the means or opportunities to present their own perceptions and continued to make connections in this way, I thought that maybe one day under the martial law system, some kind of cultural scene that could not be named would form.
In 1986, when reaching the peak of the so-called Taiwan economic miracle, various aspects of society experienced a sudden release of pent up power, but I sunk into a difficult to describe darkness.
More than thirty years later, I feel that I might be able to explain that feeling of darkness.
As a conjured person made in my mother’s womb, I could only enter into another womb after leaving hers—but this one was constructed and dominated by the logic of the Cold War, anti-communism, and martial law. But why after thirty-seven years of continuous control did this incubator start to show cracks in 1986? Of course, one of the reasons was that the people rose up, and this is the main narrative taught in schools today, but are there some other, more important reasons, that might have been missed?
Perhaps it was because of a conflict I had with the American Cultural Center before an opening there in 1984 that I started paying attention to issues of the cultural Cold War during the martial law period, which was marked by tightly controlled information. Although I felt that there were some big changes happening at the time, changes that were hidden behind the cracked incubator of domination, I still harbored an unnamed confusion. I formed the group Nobody’s Rite with Chieh-Yi’s friend Ite Shao and a classmate from the Department of Radio, Television and Film at Shih Hsin University. We made an action-art piece titled Trying to Blow up the Controlling Incubator, the performance of which happened in four installments over several days—commencing in the symbolic commercial center of the city, Zhongxiao East Road; continuing to the basement of a little theater; then moving to a valley in Pinglin; and ending on the beach in Tamsui. I was confused, and instead of dissipating, the feeling grew stronger every day and had the secondary effect of diminishing my will to make art after the end of martial law in 1987.
Dreams I was having about Ah-Gai until the summer of the year I turned thirty five made me gradually realize that, since the beginning of mankind, there has been a struggle between two strategies of conjuring, and this struggle may never end.
I have temporarily named the first the paradise control technique and the other the śūnyatā awareness technique. These two strategies of conjuring employ spoken and written language, narrative, symbolism, pictures, images, sound, the body, and various scientific and technological methods.
Simply put, the paradise control technique means that, along with the invention of new production tools, a newer and better shore will be repeatedly described, and as long as people follow this constantly updated narrative logic, they believe they will reach that newer, distant shore, which is the promise of a new paradise. In other words, in order for the paradise control technique to continue operating, the position of the distant shore needs to be changed constantly, so that those who believe in it will never reach it. In this way, the paradise control technique continues to manipulate the suffering people of this world. For example, the classical discipline style of the martial law system was replaced with the neoliberal trap of extreme private ownership. Today, people have, without really thinking, chosen to enter a new caste system, which is the post-Internet world constructed by multinational financial capital, the military-industrial complex, and digital and biotech giants.
And there seems to be no turning back from all of this!
The second conjuring method, which I called the śūnyatā awareness technique, is also a conduit to a paradisiacal different shore. This paradise, however, isn’t in a distant place but rather exists in the here and now in our thoughts at every moment of our lives. Like the first method, the śūnyatā awareness technique also involves hierarchical relationships, but after being described, all hierarchies are deconstructed, and likewise, the bodhisattva may get sick, and therefore will need to ask a layman who is not yet a bodhisattva, “How should the bodhisattva who is ill control his mind?” just as Vimalakīrti does. The bodhisattva may still fall into the logic of differentiation and classification, such that it will be necessary to ask the goddess, who is lower than the bodhisattvas in the rank, why she appears as female and not male. From this, the goddess is led to quote the Buddha’s words, “All dharmas are neither male nor female.” The bodhisattvas also desire to enter a higher level and therefore Mañjuśrī asks Vimalakīrti, “How should the bodhisattva penetrate the path of buddhahood?” Vimalakīrti says, “If a bodhisattva traverses impure paths, this is to penetrate the path of buddhahood.” In other words, one of the most active ways that the śūnyatā awareness technique can assist those who are suffering is to break open the caste system created by the paradise control technique.
In light of my limited wisdom, what I just described is the only positive meaning of śūnyatā I have realized in this world.
My mother always said, “You’re like me. We don’t have a hometown, and people without a hometown can’t look back so often. People who look back too often forget to look toward the future.”
But Mother, what you did was different from what you said. You always talked about your life history and integrated it with your new dreams, didn’t you?
By looking back, you won’t only see the past, and by not looking back, you won’t necessarily be able to see the future.
Mother, perhaps you have known for a long time that the point does not lie in looking back, not looking back, or even somewhere between the two, but rather lies in the fact that conjured people truly realize that they are conjured people only when encountering great confusion. It is then that they understand “A conjured person can become a conjurer, and all sentient beings should view the bodhisattvas and the world as such.”
Following custom, after holding my mother’s funeral, the eldest grandson carried my mother’s memorial tablet back home, and the rest of us conjured people created by our mother accompanied her body to the crematorium.
Several days later, the eldest grandson said to me, “Dad, don’t be sad. I don’t think Grandma really died. You know there is a disease that puts people in a state of suspended animation. Grandma just has this disease, so she will be back in a few days.”
Maybe what he said is another kind of truth—us conjured people suddenly appear and then just as suddenly disappear into thin air, or we suddenly disappear and then just as suddenly reappear out of thin air.
At this moment, inside and outside of this space, we are people that suddenly appear and then just as suddenly disappear into thin air, and people that suddenly disappear and then just as suddenly reappear out of thin air, which together constitute mutual observation of light and shadow, and listening of sound, and this is, in a broad sense, film.
Images, sounds, performances, and bodies should all be viewed as māyā.
(The monologue manuscript starts to burn)
Representing/Śūnyatā Film Performance
December 4, 2020, 7:30–8:30 pm
Guling Street Avant-garde Theatre
Monologue finished on December 3, 2020
Edited on May 12, 2024
Chen Chieh-jen
Notes
- The Sanskrit word māyā is often translated as “illusion” in the Western context, but does not carry the same meaning that “illusion” does. Although māyā includes the notion of a magician using deception to create an illusion, the main connotation of the word is that all things in the universe, including human beings, have no absolute essence and are in a state of constant flux, so they seem to exist like an illusion (māyā). Knowing that nothing can remain unchanged, we realize the positive meaning of the concept of emptiness (śūnyatā), and the subjective agency of human beings can be truly mobilized to change the inequalities in the world.