The master began to make tea. When it was ready, he poured the tea into a scholar’s cup until it began to overflow and run all over the floor. The scholar saw what was happening and shouted, “Stop, stop! The cup is full; you can’t get anymore in.”

The master stopped pouring and said: “You are like this cup; you are full of ideas about Buddha’s Way. You come and ask for teaching, but your cup is full; I can’t put anything in. Before I can teach you, you’ll have to empty your cup.” (Zen)

The concept of emptiness is also well-understood in Tengriist thought, which reveres the ‘Eternal blue sky,’ ( Mongolia is sometimes poetically referred to by Mongolians as the ‘Land of Eternal Blue Sky,’ ‘Munkh Khukh Tengriin Oron’ in Mongolian). This Central Asian philosophy is seen even Hungary’s ‘national’ poet, Sandor Petofi. As Hungarians originate from Central Asia, this should not come as a surprise.

“Your song, like the bells of the puszta, is simple in its sound,
As pure it is and clear as any puszta bell;
Undistrubed by the din of the world, it rises from the ground,
And travels across the plains, a music no noise can quell.”

Wrote Sandor, (puszta = Great Hungarian Plain), though I am also intrigued by legendary outlaw of the puszta, Sandor Rosza, (whose English name is Axle Rose, the same as a singer of a famous rock band of course). How anyone can be an outlaw on a large, flat plain where everyone can see for miles around is something of a puzzle. Yet Sandor Rosza used the empty plains to his advantage and evaded capture for years, when sympathetic villagers arranged a simple communication trick to warn the highwayman of nearby police posses, by lowering the arm and bucket of the large puszta wells downwards when the police were in the vicinity, and raising them when they were not, something that could be seen for miles around.

I worked in Eastern Hungary, in the flat puszta for five years just after the break of communism in 1990. If I could sum up the puszta in two words it would be soul destroying. All my fears for the future of Hungary in those days seem to be realised now with the fiercely anti-Semitic racist Hungarian government and populace, who speak of ethnic cleansing when they talk about their minority Roma.

I remember the sweltering hot trains crossing the cold, snowy, empty and muddy puszta, the Roma people in the trains getting beat up by Hungarian border guards, and those same Roma filling my cup of tea to the brim repeatedly.

I remember many things of course, but those five years remain a mental scar in the form of a certain emptiness. But I miss it, in many ways, I miss those years.

emptiness
though not in memory
—the well remains full

This piece was written for the Ligo Haibun Challenge, prompt *Empty*