1. THE NAKED TRUTH

Blake - The Creation of Eve

In the Zohar, which together with the Séfer Ietzirá, are books central to understanding the Kabbalah, the world is described as we too would describe it: as being without form or outer covering... It is refered to as the Naked Truth and it clearly cannot be described by thw words and cognitive ideas which cover it. This in the Kabbalah is called the Sod (Secret) of Truth.

All things being without form remain far beyond rational cognitive thought and words used as descriptions. What is unrevealed is called Mystery within mystery, but really that does not mean? That we cannot get close to that truth so that our lives can be reconstructed but, more than that, as the Kabbalah declares, "once we recognize the real of the real, where the veils of the material world are stripped away, we may achieve Universal Oneness with all things."

This appears so spiritual and distant from afar but is really so close that with the liberation of understanding and contemplation you only have to stretch out an open hand to receive it.

What is the core of this mystery? The Zohar calls it Timeless, changeless, motionless and Eternal. However, in Chan we can say that at the level of the senses its contents are impermanent and always changing, without specific Identity, chaotic and not ordered, in conflict internally and without meaning.

So how do we compare this timeless, changeless, motionless and eternal mystery that is boundless of Dao with the conceptualization of God as the Mystery?

All that can be said about the Jewish God as far as the Kabbalah is concerned is that He is complete and lacks nothing. Furthermore, He is good and that His attribute is the Desire to Impart, the manifestation of that desire being termed positive energy.

What we say about Dao is that, in and of itself, as a process it lacks nothing, its expression derived from the Life Force which we call FUNCTION is good inasmuch as it generates natural  QI, natural energy of survival manifested in the human creature survival paradigms, the experiences of which are Gladness, Compassion, Benevolent affect and Equanimity.

Just as we say that Dao, the Way of nature, is not diminished, so it is said in the Kabbalah that the energy and force of God transmitted and received is never diminished.

We said that the desire to Impart and the desire to receive are closely linked, so we must ask the question, what can God receive if He is complete and what can the Life Force  receive if it is complete?

That becomes and interesting question, for it reveals differences between the Dharma concepts and those of the Kabbalah.

We also then must ask how God arose and how the Life Force arose.

We agreed that the Life Force arose from what is timeless, changeless, motionless, boundless and an eternal mystery.

Within that mystery we declare that natural evolution, which is part of Dao itself generated within the changeless manifestations, gave birth to the Life Force.

Can we compare that to the presence of God, and the creation of life?

The God force, the Kabbalah states, is the Desire to Impart which comes from the base of the Desire to receive, though God is complete and actually desires nothing which will add to His completeness.

What we can declare is that He receives the bounty of the presence of a true Receiver of what is given.

Here we come upon what the Kabbalah calls the THOUGHT OF CREATION, which is the process by which God's infinite desire to Impart led to the creation of a vessel (sefirsa) to receive his blessing.

Yet the Kabbalah states clearly that the original God state of the desire to Impart was never created.

So we see in the Kabbalah that the Desire to Impart was the original attribute of he who is called God.

Does Dao then have a desire to Impart that cannot have been created?

If we examine the Life Force as an attribute of Dao, all that is nature, we see that its base is Survival -manifesting itself in the human creature as survival of the apparent self, offspring, others and the environment which supports all.

We can say then that the Energy or desire of Dao is directed at Imparting the Survival of Life itself, no matter what form it may take.

The difference really then that we detect is the conceptualization of INTENT on the part of God, which is without intent as far as Dao is concerned, but a natural outcome of internal evolution of natural energy.

We can call Dao a force of positive energy as the Light of God can be considered as a force of positive energy.

The creation of this receiving vessel is called by the Kabbalah "Yesh ma' Ayin", which means that something was created from nothing.

The generation of this Life Force was the also, we agree, generated from nothing, although its generation did not stem from "intent", but from the natural internal process of energy, which, being infinite, has an infinite number of possible characteristics with infinite possibilities of internal change, with the origin life being one outcome.

We can conclude then by declaring that the Kabbalah generates the idea that the world was made from the Eternal substance of the Desire to Receive, while Dao and Chan would say that the energy of transformation (receiving) resulted in natural receiving which evolved eventually as a Life Force.

From what we have set forward surely we can say that the differences conceptually do not outweigh the similarity of consequences.