[In the following essay, Rudy applies several key concepts of Zen Buddhism—wholeness, the state of "no-mind," and the Zen idea of emptiness—to his study of the poetic metaphysics of William Wordsworth.]

In his Prospectus to The Recluse (1814), the work which announces that the chief aim of his poetry is to examine and to celebrate the mind, William Wordsworth writes:

Not Chaos, not The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,
Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out
By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look Into our Minds,
into the Mind of Man—
My haunt, and the main region of my song.

(35-41)

Though it emerges as a potential nightmare realm, the mind appears here as a distinctively human phenomenon accessible to the poetic self committed to exploring it.

In poignant contrast to the image of mind depicted in the Prospectus is that which the poet offers in his "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" (Poetical Works: 259-63), which he wrote and published in 1798. Describing a moment of deep repose along the banks of the Wye, Wordsworth tells of how he owes to the "beauteous forms" of the harmonious landscape, which includes cottages, orchards, and hedgerows as well as such naturally occurring phenomena as woods, sky, and cliffs,

sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration.…

(27-30)

Wordsworth does not explain what he means by "my purer mind," and he makes no effort to adumbrate its dimensions. He speaks only of its receiving sensations of the "beauteous forms" of the surrounding environment and of his own subsequent restoration in tranquillity. After mentioning how the "unremembered pleasure" of such experiences contributes to "a good man's life… acts/Of kindness and of love" (33-35), he returns to the theme of what he owes to the forms of things, proclaiming finally the emergence of a

blessed mood In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

(37-49)

Both the Prospectus to The Recluse and the lines from "Tintern Abbey" imply that human consciousness must be understood in relation to a deep and abiding spirituality. But the terms of that spirituality are profoundly different in these works and lead to very different perceptions of what Wordsworth means by his reference to the mind of humankind as the "main region" of his "song." The Prospectus depicts the region of mind as a specific place accessible to our understanding through the application of a clearly discernible cultural idiom. The poet's reference to Chaos and Erebus, for example, recalls Milton's portrayal of the fall of Lucifer in the early books of Paradise Lost. Though Words-worth, earlier in the Prospectus, spoke of passing beyond "Jehovah—with his thunder, and the choir/Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones" (33-34), he nevertheless uses Miltonic imagery and the Judeo-Christian culture it evokes to locate himself in relation to the mind he wishes to explore. The effect is twofold. Firstly, we gather the impression that a journey into mind is a troublesome, possibly a forbidden, undertaking. Secondly, we cannot help but recall Satan's famous claim that "The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." The Miltonic references contribute a sense of the mind as a separate realm and suggest, further, that Wordsworth's poetic undertaking is grounded in a culturally rich, dramatic confrontation between human consciousness and the individual self.

Even when the poet abandons his allusions to the mind as a place of fear and awe and as a potential danger to the venturing self, he does not move beyond a dualistic perception of mind as one thing, the world as something else. Later in the Prospectus, for example, Wordsworth evokes the prothelamic metaphor of the healthy mind as existing in a state of marriage with the world. Asserting that "Beauty" is "a living Presence of the earth.… An hourly neighbour," while questioning why "Paradise, and groves/Elysian" should be viewed as "A history only of departed things,/Or a mere fiction of what never was" (42-51), he declares confidently that

the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.

(52-55)

The marriage Wordsworth here celebrates, however holy its occasion and unitary its effect, preserves nevertheless a distinction between the "discerning intellect of Man" and the world that joins it in the mutual creation of a quotidian paradise of Elysian beauty.

The "purer mind" of "Tintern Abbey," however, is much more difficult to locate and describe. Indistinguishable from its surroundings, it is aligned with a spirituality outside or beyond the idiom of a specific cultural tradition. So far as it can be said to exist at all, the mind to which the poet alludes in "Tintern Abbey" is in a state of disappearance. The "beauteous forms" that attract the poet's consciousness serve not to define it, as in the Prospectus, but to produce first a set of "sensations sweet,/Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart," then feelings that contribute a moral climate of "kindness and of love," and finally a "serene and blessed mood" that suspends "even the motion of our human blood," leaving the percipient "a living soul," adrift in a condition of disembodied, centerless spirituality. The movement of thought and image here, though no less powerful in its effect on him than the soaring expectations of the Prospectus, is downward toward a spiritual ground that hides or obliterates the sense of mind as a distinct intellectual realm. To feel sensations "in the blood" and "along the heart" is to be sensation itself, not a separate being experiencing sensation as impulses different from the self. One cannot locate the mind in a still point or stable perspective outside the moving events that constitute it. The "beauteous forms" that produce the sensations and the "purer mind" that receives them occupy an existential priority, a unitary ground of being in which percipient and perceived emerge as variant aspects of each other.

In the "blessed mood" resulting from this configuration of moving sensations, the poet speaks of seeing into the "life of things." But the "life" into which he sees, like the "purer mind" that perceives, is disembodied, unlocated, a state "In which the heavy and the weary weight" of things "Is lightened." So far as the sensations of things form the very being of the perceiver, the things seen and the act of seeing are extensions of each other. The seeing eye, like the "purer mind," is unsituated, or, if situated, then existing in the motion of the poet's bloodstream; it is moved not, as in the Prospectus, by an impulse to discover something separate from itself but by a "power/Of harmony" that makes it quiet, passive, requiring only that it open simply to what is—literally, to the moving dimensions of its own nature. The result is a mode of seeing in which the weight of things, the density and mass that make things separate and distinguishable, disperses or falls away into a spiritual ground upon which all things, including the observer, appear light, disembodied, free of specific location, lacking not form but substance or essence: having been "laid asleep/In body, and become a living soul… We see into the life of things." The light of seeing is coextensive with the lightness of being that comes with the sense of the essential emptiness of all things, their essencelessness.

The cognitive process of these lines, so far as we can employ such terminology, involves a steady renunciation of anything that could stand between the observer and the observed. To be a "living soul" in this sense is to be one with a world in which all things, including the human individual, are in motion and interanimate with all other things, hence disembodied, lightened, continuous with a moving environment. To see into the life of things so construed is to be the life of the very things one may perceive initially as "unintelligible" to the separate self. Unlike the visionary state marked out in the Prospectus, the spiritual ground Wordsworth apprehends in "Tintern Abbey" enables him to see not a new paradise, a place construed, so to speak, as the result of a creative engagement with that which is perceived initially as external to himself, but a world of "things" uncolored or unadorned by the imaginative application of a cultural overlay of images extracted from a human spiritual or religious tradition. The intelligibility Wordsworth encounters here, a mode of apprehension that lightens in the sense of both illuminating and disburdening, shifts the grounds of knowing from the individual as a separate observer to a perceptual field in which knowing is a condition of the being of all things. Cognition so conceived is not an act of discovery so much as a surrender to being, a yielding of the separate self to a condition of identity with, rather than apprehension of, "the life of things."

In book 2 of The Prelude, the massive poem he devoted to the growth and development of his own mind, Wordsworth describes these early visionary states more specifically and at greater length than in "Tintern Abbey":

How shall I trace the history? where seek
The origin of what I then have felt?
Oft in those moments such a holy calm
Did overspread my soul, that I forgot
That I had bodily eyes, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself, a dream,
A prospect in my mind.

(2.365-71)

The question of origin as Wordsworth presents it here is, of course, unanswerable. If indeed all that one apprehends appears like something in oneself, whether viewed as a dream or as a prospect in the mind, the perceiver is for all practical purposes that which he perceives. Her state of consciousness is prior to the question of source and tends to render nugatory all concern with origin. To seek origin as a cause beyond oneself, that is, to seek it outside the dimensions of the mind, is like trying to see the very eye by which one perceives. At the same time, however, the force behind the question, the generative impulse to know, is both pertinent and necessary, for it impels recognition of a profound spirituality, a "holy calm," as Wordsworth calls it, that eliminates all sense of self and other in a condition of radical oneness with the world. To question the origin of one's feelings in the ambient light of such consciousness is to understand that in moments of high unitary vision, we cannot speak of the human as one thing, the natural as something else. Both the human and the natural share the same absence of origin and essence, the same bodilessness, the same lack of density and mass, the same inaccessibility to conventional logic and intellect.

Occasionally, however, Wordsworth's concern with origin, with the desire to know the source of his feelings, becomes a usurpative energy linked to the needs of an insecure, possibly traumatized, self. In the middle portions of "Tintern Abbey," for example, Wordsworth looks back on the visions of his youth with the discerning eye of a suspicious intellectual. Sensitive to the limitations of his present spiritual life, he tells of how he frequently recalls his early visions for solace in his adult-hood, amidst "the fretful stir/Unprofitable, and the fever of the world" (52-53). But he is diffident, moved by a sense of their possible vanity, as he implies in line 50, before going on to say:

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished
thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again.…

(58-61)

The earlier light is now "dim and faint." What the lines from The Prelude offer as a generative question, as an interrogative mood that forwards and enhances the developing sense of mind as a capacious extension of nature, surfaces in "Tintern Abbey" as an admission of limitation. Writing from the perspective of a troubled adulthood, Wordsworth admits that "I cannot paint/What then I was," when nature was "all in all" (75-76). The "picture of the mind" as it emerges for him in the middle portions of "Tintern Abbey" is framed by a "sad perplexity" and distorted by the presence of an alien concern—the compensatory need to derive human lessons from nature and to find for the self a secure, if subdued, place within that which he had earlier experienced as coterminous with his own being:

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.

(88-93)

There is a certain peacefulness here, a marked quietude that bespeaks a mind at rest, but it differs radically from the earlier repose in which the abiding harmony of things rose upon the poet as an innate aspect of his being and as a "power of joy." The quietude Wordsworth now experiences results from learned behavior, from the disciplined submission of a chastened and subdued self. What he had experienced earlier through an efflorescent opening to a realm of disembodied, essenceless forms now comes to him as a teacher, as an otherness bringing with it authority and a poignant sense of the human as somehow distinct from the very nature out of which it comes and to which it is joined in obedient submission. The present learning process is focused in the human dimension and culminates not, as earlier, in a dispersal of the self into a decentralized and disembodied consciousness but in the individual apprehension of a separate coadunate force or power indwelling in things, a kind of elan vital, as it were, that yields for all things and all beings a cohesion among, rather than an identity with, each other. In the "sad perplexity" of a troubled adulthood, Wordsworth writes:

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.…

(93-99)

The "serene and blessed mood" of lines 37-49 has given way to "a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused." The defining characteristic of the earlier mood is its alignment with spiritual emptiness, with the absence of essence. The later "sense sublime," however, apprehends a "presence," a "something" that is yet separate from the things it inhabits. Moved by this presence, Wordsworth concludes, in lines that parallel the theme of mutual creativity in the Prospectus, that he is yet

A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

(103-11)

If the visionary focus of this passage differs from that of lines 37-49, so also does the sense of pleasure and morality Wordsworth acquires from his experiences in nature. The earlier pleasure, together with the "little, nameless, unremembered, acts/Of kindness and of love" it produced, derived from the visible absence of stability, from a process "In which the affections gently lead us on" until the human is suspended. Wordsworth's experience of pleasure, goodness, and spirituality issued earlier from the happy acceptance of motion. Lines 103-11, however, depict a mood grounded in the need for stability. Wordsworth is now "well pleased" rather than joyous in his acceptance of "nature and the language of the sense" as the "anchor" of his thoughts. He looks now to nature for guidance and protection. The earlier process of opening to the world of things, of blossoming to an acceptance of instability as the ground of his being, of his own being as well as that of other things, has given way to a quest for moral and intellectual anchorage.

It is important for us to understand, however, that the later mood, the "sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused," does not replace or in any way negate the earlier state of "serene and blessed" dispersal into centerless consciousness. To his credit, Wordsworth does not reject the visions of his youth as false or vain, nor does he lose the impulse to move somehow beyond the present selfhood that obscures his earlier experiences of oneness with nature. He turns, instead, to his sister Dorothy, claiming that

in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes.

(116-19)

Dorothy retains the "purer mind." Her "wild eyes" have not been dimmed by "the fretful stir/Unprofitable, and the fever of the world." Even in her later years, when the "wild ecstasies" of her youth will have "matured/Into a sober pleasure" (138-39), Dorothy will retain, not a mind that seeks for anything beyond itself, but one that accepts freely, that opens to the impulses of nature—to the shining of the moon, to the play of "misty mountain-winds" (134-36). It is a mind that will persist as a "mansion for all lovely forms" and whose memory will be "as a dwelling-place/For all sweet sounds and harmonies" (140-42). Being the eyes of nature itself, Dorothy reads only what is there and seeks nothing beyond the surface of things.

Structurally, the poem reveals a movement from memories of disembodied spirituality, through a sense of sublimity as inclusive of a chastened but nevertheless persistent selfhood, to a final displacement of the self in the poet's deferral to the spiritual force and authority of his sister. Her acceptance of the mystery of things, her ability to see, hear, and feel without necessarily seeking for an intellectual principle behind things, for a separate logos, as it were, is the measure of her identity with the universe. To the extent that he catches in Dorothy's voice the language of his former heart and in her eyes the quality of his former pleasures, the earlier state is yet alive for the poet. The dimensions of its effect may have altered for him, and the manner of its surfacing may differ from one situation to another, but its power to displace the self is no less persistent. The poem thus celebrates a spirituality grounded in the notion of mind and world as a composite unity manifested through the necessary disappearance of the self as the locus of perception.

But what the poet offers as a vital unity his readers tend for the most part to understand in contexts that emphasize fundamental distinctions among the components of his vision. Influenced more perhaps by the Prospectus to The Recluse than by "Tintern Abbey," critical discussions of Wordsworthian unity employ a dualistic idiom that presents mind and nature as complementary, but nevertheless separable, realms. Relying, for example, on the following lines from the Prospectus—

How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too—
Theme this but little heard of among men—
The external World is fitted to the Mind

(63-68)

M. H. Abrams claims that the central vision of Wordsworth's poetry is the power of the individual mind "as in itself adequate, by consummating a holy marriage with the external universe, to create out of the world of all of us, in a quotidian and recurrent miracle, a new world which is the equivalent of paradise." Kenneth R. Johnston argues similarly that "Wordsworth's great faith is in Nature, the extrinsic, what is 'out there,' and in the excursive power of Imagination to go out to meet it." Frederick Garber, also focusing on the marriage metaphor, asserts that "Wordsworth's was a middle way, giving equivalent weight to each partner in the relationship. The high argument in the Preface to The Excursion is an exercise in parity, its main point the creative efficiency that comes from interlocking the powers of mind and world." More recently Barbara Schapiro, invoking the principles of modern quantum physics, maintains that "imagination and Nature, or mind and the material world, are mutually reflecting realms for Wordsworth—the order of mind mirrors the order of Nature."

Other readers find in Wordsworth's poetry a radical opposition between the mind and the external world. David Perkins, for example, argues that what is foremost in Wordsworth is "his sense of the gulf between human nature, with all of its greedy demands, its turbulent assertions, its often chaotic passions, and the rest of nature." For Geoffrey Hartman, the central drama in Words-worth's poetry is an unresolved opposition between imagination and nature, a tension that culminates in a willed, akedah-like binding of the individual mind with the external world. Charles J. Rzepka, extending the work of Robert Langbaum, Frances Ferguson, and David Simpson, sees Wordsworth as struggling to achieve personal and professional identity in a paradoxical dialectic comprising "on the one hand, a solipsistic self-diffusion and mental appropriation of the perceived world as part of the self within, and on the other, a search for right recognition that will give this indefinite, inner self outward form and definition." And John Jones, underscoring Words-worth's high regard for solitude and distinctness, condemns the entire critical involvement with questions of unity in romantic poetry: "The large and lazy assumption that the Romantic poets were all striving to express unity has obscured the structure of distinct but related things which is the world of Wordsworth."

Whether viewed as the poet of nature whose work affirms a vital connection between the individual mind and the external world, or as the complex, problematic, often contradictory poet of a suppressed imagination and a divided identity, Wordsworth evokes for many readers a powerful sense of a separate creative self deeply conscious of, sometimes preoccupied with, its own transforming and organizing energies. The recorded confluence of mind and external world, when it occurs in Wordsworth's poetry, produces critical responses grounded in a dualistic idiom that stresses the notion of unity as a partnership or alliance of deeply related but nevertheless separate items.

The source of the critical tendency to employ a dualistic idiom in discussions of Wordsworthian unity can be traced to the intellectual predisposition of Western culture itself. Western thought is "plagued," as Amalie Enns puts it, with a subject-object dichotomy that "begins with Plato who located truth in the intellect, thereby separating man from his world and the entities in it." This separation, according to Enns, "was intensified by Descartes and continues to preoccupy philosophers to our own day." Though "plagued" is perhaps a little strong, the impulse behind the word conforms to the insights of many thinkers who have looked into the cognitive procedures of Western culture. Winston L. King, for example, remarks that the "Cartesian division of reality into immaterial, invisible, subjective consciousness and material, visible objectivity is the epitome of Western thought, the creator of its cultures and civilization. Out of this climate has arisen the Western dichotomous type of logical assertion that A is not, cannot be B." Criticism tends naturally to reflect the philosophical milieu which helped to produce the texts readers engage. M. H. Abrams… finds Wordsworth's effort to effect a reciprocity of mind and nature representative of "the overall movement of thought in his age." Explaining that Wordsworth represents life "primarily in terms of a transaction between two agencies, his mind and outer nature," Abrams proclaims: "For the great contemporary philosophers in Germany—Fichte, Schelling, Hegel—also represented all human experience as generated by an interaction between two agencies; and what Wordsworth called mind and Nature, they called the self and the other, or subject and object." Readers working within the parameters of Western philosophy, especially as it appears to have influenced romantic poets, employ, imperceptibly perhaps, a critical idiom that reflects such basic dualisms as internal and external, mind and nature, self and not-self. Albert O. Wlecke, for example, understands Wordsworthian consciousness entirely in the dualistic terms of "intentionality" as defined by Franz Brentano: "This characteristic is, quite simply, the fact that consciousness in any of its acts always exhibits 'direction towards an object.' There is never merely consciousness but always consciousness of." Wlecke locates consciousness in the percipient. Like Abrams's appeal to a vital reciprocity between mind and nature as the ground of Wordsworthian unity, Wlecke's understanding of consciousness as intentional and directional certainly conforms to the poet's efforts to exalt the generative powers of individual mentalities, but it does not escape the sense of the mind as one thing, the cosmos as something else. Readers influenced by the philosophical authority of such considerations must necessarily employ a dualistic terminology in their analyses of romantic creativity. Thus, Marilyn Gaull, in an overview of the entire romantic epoch, says with considerable confidence that the romantics' "interests were not in external nature itself but in how the mind relates to it" and that their poems "have a common concern: how the poet feels about the external world, how he relates to it, and what it means to him as an occasion, a metaphor, or a symbol."

Much of Wordsworth's poetry, however, labors to hide or to obliterate the felt presence of a separate organizing or opposing self in favor of a prejudgmental, prereflective consciousness so deeply aligned with a perceived matrix of creative forces that it is impossible to say where the world's energies leave off and those of the poet begin. This deeper consciousness, coextensive with the world it illuminates, does not exist apart from, but is rather inclusive of, the mind presented in the Prospectus to The Recluse. I would like to explore this inclusive consciousness in the terms offered by Zen thought and art. Combining key elements of Mahayana Buddhism with Chinese Taoism, then carried later to Japan, where it was further refined, Zen is perhaps best understood as neither philosophy nor religion as such but as a spiritual practice that embraces both profound philosophical insight and deep religious experience. So far as we can think of it in philosophical terms at all, we are best served, perhaps, by Masao Abe's definition: "It is a philosophy based on a 'non-thinking' which is beyond both thinking and not thinking, grounded upon 'Self-Awakening', and arising from wisdom and compassion." In like manner, Robert Linssen employs highly qualified terms in viewing Zen as a religion: "If religion means an organization of spiritual aspirations whose aim is to understand and pass beyond the tangible world by freeing ourselves from the impulses attaching us to it, then the various forms of Buddhism could be qualified as religious." Neither a philosophy nor a religion in the conventional sense, Zen offers a perception of mind and world as a vital continuum, as a basic identity or unity beyond or prior to hermeneutic impulses to find meanings, to interpret the world in accordance with the projected needs and wishes of a discerning self and a specific cultural idiom. Tanzen, a nineteenth-century Japanese priest and philosopher who held the chair of Indian Philosophy at Tokyo University and who was later president of the Soto Sect College (now Komazawa University) in Tokyo, defines the Zen mind in terms remarkably similar in spirit to those expressed by Wordsworth in book 2 of The Prelude. Asserting that "In other religions and philosophies the so-called mind is looked upon as the governor of the body or the lord of things," a misconception "Which is the outcome of speculation, or stupid reason," Tanzen explains that

The law of the mind is above human understanding, for the mind is timeless and permeates all. Its function is not merely that of perception and cognition. It is limitless, containing all phenomena—mountains, rivers, the whole universe. A fan can soar skyward, a toad fly, yet never outside the mind.

As in Wordsworth, for whom everything frequently appears like something in himself, an inward prospect, as it were, the mind for Tanzen is essentially subsumptive and combinatory, larger than its own processes and inclusive of the world.

What emerges in Wordsworth's poetry as an inclusive consciousness utterly continuous with the universe appears to Zennists as a state of "no-mind" or "one-mind," a perception that reflects the general Buddhist concept of 'sunyata', or "the Void," as it is sometimes called. Buddhist thought is founded on the notion that because all things change, their reality, their suchness (Sanskrit, tathata), is not their existential particularity, but a ubiquitous and eternally undivided ground variously called "the Void," "the Buddha-mind," "the Buddha-nature," "the Unborn," or, in Western terms, "the Absolute." The essential nature of this ground, so far as it can be said to have an essential nature, is its emptiness—a state beyond what might ordinarily be conceived as a spatiotemporal dimension. The Heart of Perfect Wisdom, a key text extracted from the Prajñapdrãmita Sutra and recited daily in Zen monasteries throughout the world, states the case succinctly: "form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness."

The Void or the Emptiness of Buddhist thought is not, however, a mere vacuity or a nihilistic vortex issuing from the perception of universal transience. It is predicated, rather, on the insight that the entire phenomenal world, all that exists, is tied together in a gigantic, inter-related, interanimative web of moving aggregates. Even individual human beings, as Thich Nhat Hanh explains in his commentary on the Heart Sutra, are a collection of five elements, called "Skandhas" in Sanskrit, which "flow like a river in every one of us." These forms, which are themselves currents of physical, mental, emotional, perceptual, and conscious being, cannot, according to Thich Nhat Hanh, exist individually: "Each can only inter-be with all the others." In the Buddhist view, nothing possesses self-existence. Everything depends on every-thing else. Nothing remains unchanged. Yet each thing, so far as it comprises eternally moving aggregates, contains, indeed is an expression of, the Absolute. "Form is empty of a separate self," writes Thich Nhat Hanh, "but it is full of everything in the cosmos." Hua-yen Buddhism expresses this sense of interpenetrative fullness in what one philosopher, Steve Odin, calls "the summary formula: 'All is one and one is all.'" Predicated on an acute sense of the dialectical interpenetration of the one and the many, of subject and object, of unity and multiplicity, Hua-yen Buddhism sees the identity of form and emptiness as an eternally shifting spatiotemporal togetherness in which, Odin explains, "the large and small thus inter-penetrate without the slightest obstruction" and "every event is virtually present or immanent in every other event."

The oneness Zen thinkers proclaim, however, cannot be apprehended in the dualistic context of self and other, nor can it be ascribed to a separate creative force. Zen unity, according to Masao Abe, "is not a monistic or monotheistic oneness but rather a nondualistic oneness.… Monotheistic oneness does not include the element of self-negation and is substantial, whereas nondualistic oneness includes self-negation and is nonsubstantial." There is nowhere to be found in the universe a separately existing logos, a creative center behind or above reality. "In the Buddhist perspective," writes Nolan Pliny Jacobson, "the source of everything is no determinate actuality but a creativity infinitely productive of actualities."

The Zen Buddhist endeavors to experience this creative ground directly, not as a separate habitat, but as the lived and living essence of his own being. Zen master Sasaki Joshu writes: "Absolute being works as complete, perfect emptiness and embraces subject and object. If you want to see God or Buddha, you must manifest yourself as emptiness." This condition of extreme egolessness reveals itself in the disposition to accept all things, to avoid discriminations based on a priori judgments, and to eliminate any thought of a distinction between one's own consciousness and the world one apprehends as seemingly other. Buddhists frequently see this state as a condition of harmony with the Tao or Way, "the origin of the universe and the source of life… the undifferentiated, complete reality that existed before Heaven and Earth… the life force of all things, animate and inanimate," as Sean Dennison defines the term. Relating this concept of radical harmony to the notion of universal identity Seng-t'san, in his famous treatise "On Believing in Mind," asserts that "In the Mind harmonious [with the Way] we have the principle of identity/In which we find all strivings quieted." This is a place where "All is void, lucid, and self-illuminating" and where "There is neither 'self nor 'other.'" Eihei Dogen, a thirteenth-century Japanese priest and philosopher generally credited with founding the Soto school of Zen, views the Buddhist understanding of universal identity as resulting from a process of self-forgetting and concurrently as a means by which the universe of myriad things realizes itself through the individual: "To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things."

For Zen Buddhists throughout the world, freedom from self is identity with all things, a means by which the perceived harmony of life is the actual lived and living center of one's being. "Zen is the essence of Buddhism, freedom is the essence of Zen," writes Thomas Cleary. In a later refinement of this definition, Cleary explains that "Liberation of the human mind from the inhibiting effects of mesmerism by its own creations is the essence of Zen." The freedom that Cleary here remarks is not simply the freedom of the human individual to be and do as he pleases but the freedom of all things to emerge and to illuminate themselves in a field of consciousness at once individual and universal. What Wordsworth describes as seeing without "bodily eyes," to recall book 2 of The Prelude, the Zennist understands as a mode of self-illumination in which the seer's identity with that which he sees is also the means by which, for all practical purposes, things view themselves through the pulse of human perception cleansed of any conceptual frame. A philosophical-religious practice whose deepest insights and experiences issue from a condition of freedom from the very impulses that form the contents of human life, Zen is, then, a way of experiencing life in its deepest ranges without becoming attached to the cultural and psychological conditions that animate and define the moment. Reiho Masunaga, in a summary comment on the spiritual implications of the Buddhist process of self-emptying, remarks simply that "When the self dies, the universe flows in."

Throughout his poetry, Wordsworth chronicles moments of self-forgetting extraordinarily similar in course and profile to the Zen experience of cosmic influx resulting from its formal procedures of self-emptying. As with Zennists, these occasions of self-forgetting form the spiritual basis of his art and the driving force behind his creativity. Wordsworth's poetry issues from a radical spirituality inclusive of, yet beyond, all cultural systems and all modes of self-hood, a spiritual freedom that allows the poet to experience in a condition of profound detachment the very cultural and psycho-logical phenomena that comprise his being at any point in time and space. "I was a Freeman," he tells us early in book 3 of The Prelude, "in the purest sense/Was free, and to majestic ends was strong" (89-90). Enlarging upon this condition of radical interior spaciousness, Wordsworth continues:

I looked for universal things; perused
The common countenance of earth and heaven;
And turning the mind in upon itself
Pored, watched, expected, listened, spread my
thoughts
And spread them with a wider creeping; felt
Incumbences more awful, visitings
Of the Upholder, of the tranquil soul,
Which underneath all passion lives secure
A steadfast life.

(3.110-18)

As a vital, coherent, yet nonideological, body of thought and experience grounded in the perceived interactive oneness of all beings and things in the universe, Zen offers us an opportunity to understand the "tranquil soul" of Wordsworth's lines, what the poet later calls "the one Presence, and the Life/Of the great whole" (3.130-31), in nonmonotheistic, non-pantheistic terms. A comparison of selected poems in the Wordsworth canon with some of the leading documents in Zen literature and philosophy establishes a less self-conscious, less egotistical strain in Words-worth's art, refines our understanding of the poet's engagement with the unio mystica, and creates for his work a less ideological, more universal context than what it has encountered among readers whose understanding of metaphysics is grounded in such traditional Western dualisms as self and other, subject and object, nature and spirit.