This slogan is quite a difficult one, and it’s on this
subject of shunyata: “Seeing confusion as the four
kayas / Is unsurpassable shunyata protection.” The
part about seeing confusion is pretty accessible to all
of us, but the rest of the slogan requires discussion.
The word kaya means body. The four kayas are
dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, nirmanakaya, and sva-
bhavikakaya. You could say that the four kayas are a
way of describing how emptiness manifests and how
we could experience it.
First there’s a sense of the basic space of dhar-
makaya—dharma body. In our morning chants we
say, “The essence of thoughts is dharmakaya; nothing
whatever, but everything arises from it.” Dharmakaya
is the basic space from which everything arises, and
everything that arises is essentially spacious—not
fixed or clunky.
Sambhogakaya—the “enjoyment body”—points to
the experience that space is not really emptiness as
we know it; there’s energy and color and movement.
It’s vibrant, like a rainbow or a bubble or the reflec-
tion of your face in a mirror. It’s vivid, yet nonsub-
stantial at the same time. Sambhogakaya refers to
this energetic quality, the fact that emptiness is fluid
and vivid. Sound is often an image for sambhogakaya;
you can’t see or capture it, but it has vibration, en-
ergy, and movement.
Nirmanakaya—the third of the four kayas—
Cutting the Solidity of Thoughts 89