Empty mind is the origin of all – all the dharmas, every name, all beings. Empty mind is the foundation of all things. Realizing that empty mind is the foundation of all things; all that you have to do is to throw away all the furniture that you have gathered in your mind. It is all junk. It is destroying your precious spaciousness.

Have you ever thought about the word room? Do you know that the word room means spaciousness, roominess? When a room is full of furniture and all kinds of things, photographs, and flowers, its roominess is covered. It is less roomy, less spacious than its reality. If you remove everything from the room, it can be described as an empty room; but that is really repeating the word. Room simply means emptiness, spaciousness.

That’s why Ma Tzu does not use the two words together: empty and mind.

To him mind itself means emptiness, it is another name for emptiness. And out of this emptiness everything arises.

It was thought to be a very mysterious idea, unbelievable, but now science has to concede that the philosophers and the objective scientists have been wrong, and the mystics have been right. Now they can see…and you can see it in everyday life. Have you ever taken a seed and cut it into two? Do you find any roses inside it? Or do you find any kind of foliage? You find simply nothingness.

But the same seed, given the right opportunity and climate, the right soil and a loving gardener, will start sprouting as the spring comes. Those green leaves that come in the beginning…because you are so much accustomed to seeing all this, you don’t see the mystery of it. From where are those two leaves coming? You have looked into the seed, there were no leaves in it, no roses in it. And now there is a great foliage of thousands of leaves and hundreds of flowers. From where? From nowhere; from the emptiness of existence they arise.

And then one day the flowers disappear, the leaves fall away, the tree disappears. Where? Where has it all gone? Again to rest, into emptiness.

Now science is agreeing that even great stars…and their greatness is really shocking even to think of. We think of them as small stars, but they are not small. They are very far away, that is why they look small. Our own sun is a star. It is six hundred times bigger than our earth, and it is considered to be, in the universe of stars, a mediocre star, a middle-class fellow – because there are stars thousands of times bigger than this.

And every day hundreds of stars are dying – but where do they disappear to? And hundreds of stars are born, so the balance remains. From where?