Hebrew has a word for something — yesh, thereness, creation, the furnished world. And a word for nothing — ayin, absence, void, the emptiness the mystics go looking for.
Between them they cover everything. Anything you could point at is yesh; the absence of anything you could point at is ayin. There's no third option, which is what makes the phrase Bodri quotes so strange:
Judaism has the famous phrase "neither yesh (something or creation) nor ayin (nothing or emptiness)."1
Not the furnished world. Not the void either. If you've met the Buddhist formula — neither existent nor non-existent — you'll recognise the shape immediately, and that recognition is exactly what this passage is built to produce. Bodri's whole comparative project runs on it: the same refusal, in an unrelated language, from people who had never read a sūtra.
He assembles the witnesses fast — five traditions in two paragraphs — and the speed is part of the effect.
Zen opens: "enlightenment lies in neither existence nor nonexistence. Discriminate either of these extremes and you're wrong, be off by as much as a hair's breadth and you're off by a million miles."2
Hasidic Judaism, immediately after: "Arriving at the gate of Ayin [emptiness], you forget your existence altogether."3
Pseudo-Dionysius, the Christian apophatic tradition: "It is … not something among what is not, not something among what is."4
Plotinus: the One is "something higher than what we call 'being,'" and "even being cannot be there."5
Shi'i Ismāʿīlī Islam: "God and the Nothing-with-him are one unity."6
And Bodri's own conclusion, printed without hedging: "Cultivation schools across traditions commonly recognize that the Ultimate Reality or God or Buddha nature, does not mentally fall into either existence or nonexistence. To fall into either mental extreme would be to particularize and miss the Tao."2 Taken at face value it is a striking convergence. Five traditions, four language families, no shared institutional history, all arriving at a double refusal that is not the obvious thing to say. God is real is the obvious thing. God is nothing is the interesting thing. Neither is a peculiar destination to reach by five independent routes.
Whether they're independent is the question this page has to answer, and it comes later. ## Al Ilaha Ill-Allah, Retranslated
The sharpest move in the passage is a retranslation of the most-recited sentence in Islam.
That's the meaning of the al ilaha ill-Allah of Islam, which is usually incorrectly translated as "There is no God but Allah." The correct translation is more akin to "There is no divinity if it be not the Divinity," meaning that any experiential realm you realize is not the Tao.7
The standard rendering is a statement of monotheism — one God and no others, a count of the divine. The rendering converts it into a statement of apophatic epistemology — a rule about identification. Whatever you've identified as divine, on the strength of having experienced it, is by that fact not it. A Muslim shahāda standing where if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him stands.*
Two things sit alongside it and pull opposite ways. It has real precedent. The Sufi reading of the shahāda as negation-then-affirmation, and the fanāʾ literature around it, is not Bodri's invention, and the Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh line he attaches supports the mystical reading: "The realization of al ilaha illa'llah … is one of the states of the heart that can neither be expressed by the tongue nor thought out by the mind."8
And it's stated flatly. Usually incorrectly translated declares the ordinary rendering of the Islamic profession of faith to be a mistake, in one clause, with no argument, no Arabic, no scholarly citation, and no acknowledgement that the standard translation is standard because it's what the sentence says at the plain level and what a billion people mean by it. A mystical reading available inside the tradition is being promoted to the correct reading, and the tradition's own primary sense demoted to an error.
The pattern recurs through the book: careful from the inside, confident and unsupported when annexing someone else's material. The claim should be carried as Bodri's mystical reading, which has precedent in Sufi exegesis, and never as a translation fact. [CONTESTED]
Three pages later he goes further, and the passage he uses is the sharpest thing in the whole comparative stretch:
If one asks you, "How did He bring forth something from nothing? Is there not a great difference between something and nothing?!" Answer him … "The something is in the nothing in the mode of nothing, and the nothing is in the something in the mode of something." Therefore they have said (Sefer Yezirah 2:6): "He made His nothing into His something" and not "He made something from nothing," to indicate that the ayin is the yesh and the yesh is the ayin.9
The grammatical point is doing the metaphysical work, and it's beautiful. He made something from nothing has a preposition in it. From implies two terms and a transaction between them — a starting material and a product, even when the starting material is a void. Nothing gets quietly promoted into a substance you can make things out of.
He made His nothing into His something removes the transaction. One thing, in two modes.
And the pay-off line is an identity claim, not a relation: the ayin is the yesh. So it isn't only a parallel to form is emptiness, emptiness is form — it arrives at the same place through a preposition rather than through an argument about aggregates. Bodri lets it stand without comment, which is the right call. The passage is stronger than anything he could say about it.
The last piece is the one that shows how far the vocabulary can be pushed:
Christian mysticism therefore calls the process of creation ex nihilo and says it is equivalent to ex Deo; the nothing from which the world was created is God.10
Ex nihilo and ex Deo collapse into each other. The nothing the world was made from was never an absence — it was the name being used for what can't be called a something.
Set that beside the Ismāʿīlī line — God and the Nothing-with-him are one unity — and beside the Sefer Yezirah identity, and a pattern emerges that is more specific than "mystics like paradoxes." In each case nothing is functioning not as a negation but as a proper name — a placeholder for what the positive vocabulary can't reach without falsifying.
Which is precisely why the double refusal is needed. If nothing has become a name for the thing, then saying "it is nothing" is now a positive assertion, and it needs denying just as much as "it is something" did. Neither yesh nor ayin isn't mysterious once you see this. It's what you are forced to say once your word for absence has been recruited as a word for presence.
Before the roll call proper, there's a two-sentence sequence that shows the convergence method working at its smallest scale — and it's worth slowing down on, because at this size you can see the whole mechanism.
That's why the Zen masters say that enlightenment lies in neither existence nor nonexistence. Discriminate either of these extremes and you're wrong, be off by as much as a hair's breadth and you're off by a million miles. As a Hasidic text says, "Arriving at the gate of Ayin [emptiness], you forget your existence altogether." Shakyamuni Buddha also said, "If you are off by a hair's breadth you lose it in an instant."2
The same proverb, twice, in the same paragraph. Once credited to "the Zen masters," once to the Buddha. Neither footnoted.
The Chan version is a famous line from the Xinxin Ming and the doubling isn't suspicious in itself — proverbs travel, and a saying attributed to the patriarchs being also attributed to the Buddha is ordinary in this literature. But look at the effect on the page. Two attributions in three sentences make the hair's-breadth principle look like something two independent authorities arrived at, when what a reader is actually seeing is one proverb with two labels.
Then, a paragraph on, comes the rule the whole roll call is built to establish:
However, if you identify any dharma, any matter, any experience as being the real, then it is not. … if you seek the Tathagata in sound, form or appearance, then it is not the Tathagata; if you identify anything as being the Tathagata then it is not the Tathagata. As Lao Tzu said, the Tao that can be spoken (realized) is not the true Tao.16
That's the operational content of neither yesh nor ayin, and it needs no comparative apparatus at all. It's a rule about identification: the act of identification is what disqualifies its object. Whatever you've named as the real is, by having been nameable, not it.
Worth separating the two things happening here. The identification rule is self-standing and sharp. The convergence around it — Zen masters, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Hasidim, all in one paragraph — is doing rhetorical work that the rule doesn't require, and it's assembled the way the larger roll call is assembled: at speed, mostly unfootnoted, with the independence of the witnesses assumed rather than shown.
Late, and you're sitting, and things have gone genuinely quiet — not the thin quiet of a settled mind but something wider, where the sense of a room and a person in it has loosened. The mind reaches for a word. Emptiness. And there's a small click of arrival, the feeling of having got somewhere nameable.
That click is the whole thing this material is about. Emptiness has just become a yesh. It's a something now — locatable, describable, arrived at, and quietly yours.
The instruction isn't to reject the word or to find a better one. It's narrower: catch yourself naming, and take whatever you named as being on the wrong side of the fence. Not because the state is bad — it's genuinely wide and genuinely quiet — but because the naming has moved it into inventory.
So you decline both handles. Not this is something, which is obviously wrong. And not this is nothing, which feels sophisticated and installs the second handle.
Weeks later this gets more useful outside the cushion than on it. A conversation about what you believe. You feel the pull toward one of the two available slots — the believer's or the sceptic's — and you notice they're yesh and ayin, and that the honest answer to the question you were asked isn't located in either. Saying that out loud sounds evasive. It usually is evasive when other people do it. That cost comes with the position, and there's no version of it without.
Where the five witnesses come from is checkable. Go through the footnotes on the ten pages this material occupies:
Five of the non-Asian witnesses, from one book: Robert K. C. Forman, The Problem of Pure Consciousness, Oxford University Press, 1990. Four of the five from a fifteen-page span of it.
Two of the remaining witnesses are Daniel Matt's The Essential Kabbalah (the gate of Ayin at p 480) and a Sufi manual for the Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh line.38 Plotinus is the one exception in the stretch, cited by internal Enneads locator rather than through an anthology — worth recording, because it shows the author can do it when he has the text.5
This is not plagiarism and it is not concealment. Every footnote is present and accurate. Forman's anthology is a serious academic volume and its whole purpose is to gather cross-tradition material bearing on exactly this question.
The problem is what the citations are being used for. Everything here rests on convergence — on the witnesses being independent of each other. And an anthology assembled by a scholar arguing a thesis about pure consciousness is, by construction, a selected set. Forman chose those passages because they support a claim of the same family. Reading five of them off consecutive pages and presenting them as five traditions independently arriving at the same place double-counts the selection: the convergence you're seeing is partly Forman's, and there's no way to tell from Bodri's text how much.
What makes this worth a case study rather than a footnote is that Bodri elsewhere states this exact selection criterion out loud, about a different source. At p 308, recommending reading on Kabbalah: "Scholem emphasizes the history of Kabbala whereas Matt emphasizes the pursuit of ayin, or emptiness."12 He knows the sources have emphases. He picks the one whose emphasis matches his thesis. He tells the reader he is doing it — and then the material selected on that basis is presented, in the argument, as independent testimony.
The fix is not to discard the convergence. It is to state its actual strength: these traditions contain apophatic strands, and a scholar who set out to collect apophatic strands found them in all of these places. That's a finding worth having. It's a much weaker one than five independent witnesses, and it's the one the citations will bear.
Strongest support: the Sefer Yezirah passage doesn't need the convergence argument. He made His nothing into His something, and the identity that follows, is a self-contained piece of reasoning from a preposition, and it holds whatever its route to this book.9
Second: the double refusal has a derivable motive. Once nothing is functioning as a name for the ineffable, denying something is no longer sufficient. That explains the formula rather than merely reporting it, and it's available from the Ismāʿīlī and Christian material without any comparative claim at all.610
Tension: five of the witnesses arrive through one anthology. Five of the non-Asian witnesses in ten pages come from Forman, four from a fifteen-page span.13 Tension: the shahāda retranslation is asserted flatly and unsupported. A mystical reading with genuine precedent is promoted to the correct translation and the standard reading demoted to an error, with no Arabic and no citation.7 [CONTESTED]
Open question. Does apophatic language show up in every developed contemplative tradition, or only in traditions with a certain kind of theology to negate? A tradition with no positive doctrine of the absolute would have nothing to refuse — and if apophasis tracks the presence of a positive doctrine rather than the presence of an experience, the convergence is about theology rather than about what anyone found. Not addressed in the range read (pp 479–488).
Set this beside The Middle Way Is the Best Description and the two make a pair the book never explicitly assembles. That page shows the double refusal being selected, on the ground that it eliminates all possible objects of clinging. This page shows it arriving independently — or apparently so — in traditions with no access to that selection criterion. Together they pose a question neither asks: if the formula is chosen for its prophylactic effect, and unrelated traditions converge on it, is the convergence evidence about reality or evidence that anyone facing the same clinging problem is driven to the same formal solution? The second reading is weaker metaphysically and stronger as an account of why the convergence happens, and it costs the comparative argument its punch.
Against Method Accepted, Result Rejected, this page is the method's best case and its clearest hazard in one place. The Sefer Yezirah identity really does translate; nothing is being forced. The shahāda retranslation is the same method applied where the target tradition's own plain sense is being overruled to make the translation work. Same operation, and the difference between them is whether the source tradition would recognise the result.
Against One Process Described Many Ways: that page carries the thesis this material is evidence for, and this page is where the evidence's provenance turns out to matter most.
The negative-space method is one line long: take an existing system and ask what's significantly absent from it. Its power is that absence is invisible to anyone inside the system, because systems are described by what they contain.14 Apophatic theology is the same operation aimed at a target that can't be contained at all. Pseudo-Dionysius's not something among what is not, not something among what is, Maimonides' claim that "you come nearer to the apprehension of Him … with every increase in the negations," and neti neti are all descriptions built entirely out of exclusions.11
The correspondence is methodological and it's exact: both replace a positive specification with a boundary drawn from outside. Neither says what the thing is. Both progressively fence off what it is not, and the fencing is the description.
What the pairing gives is a way of telling when the method is working and when it's hiding. Negative space is powerful because the answer eventually converges — the absences you name narrow the field, and if they narrow it to nothing you have learned the system has no gap there. Apophasis has no convergence criterion. Maimonides' formulation is explicitly unbounded: every increase in negations brings you nearer, with no stated arrival. So the same method that in a business analysis terminates in a specific missing thing, in theology terminates nowhere by design.
That's either the method's deepest application or its degenerate case, and the honest position is that the difference can't be established from inside the method. Which is a useful thing to know about every via negativa, including the ones this vault finds most persuasive.
(Third use of this target in this build, and the argument differs. Earlier uses tested agreement between four vocabularies describing the same states, and agreement between nine traditions on the same technique. Here the question is prior to both: whether witness independence can be established at all when the witnesses reached the author through one anthology.)
Convergent evolution is the strongest available frame for why unrelated traditions might land on the same structure: given similar problems and similar constraints, similar solutions recur, and the recurrence is evidence about the problem space rather than about contact between the solvers.15 Applied here it cuts both ways, and the two-way cut is the yield.
In favour: the double refusal is not an obvious formulation. Traditions under pressure to say something about an absolute that resists both affirmation and denial face an identical constraint, and neither/nor may be the only stable output. That's a genuine convergence claim, and it doesn't require anyone to have experienced the same thing — only to have faced the same logical bind.
Against: convergent evolution is established by demonstrating independent lineages, and the demonstration is the entire evidential burden. A biologist claiming convergence must show the two forms didn't inherit the trait. Bodri's five witnesses arrive via one 1990 anthology assembled by a scholar with a thesis, and no lineage work is done anywhere.
Neither source gives this alone: where the witnesses came from and whether they agree are the same question at two levels, and the first settles the second. Where the witnesses were picked by somebody arguing for the convergence, what you have is a record of what the picker went looking for. This doesn't refute the claim. It relocates the burden: the finding stands as apophatic strands exist across these traditions, and the stronger version needs lineage work that this book doesn't do and couldn't have done from these sources.
Sharpest implication. The double refusal isn't mystical excess and it's not evasion — it's what a tradition is forced to say once its own word for absence has been recruited as a name for presence. That's a derivable, almost grammatical necessity, and it means the formula can be reconstructed from the logic without anyone having to have experienced anything.
Generative questions.
If ayin becomes a name and therefore has to be refused, does the refusal itself eventually become a name and require refusing? The Buddhist line runs this out to drop the middle way; the Jewish and Christian material stops earlier. What determines where a tradition halts the regress — its logic, or its liturgy?
And: could the convergence be tested properly? It would need traditions whose apophatic material demonstrably predates contact, catalogued by someone with no thesis about pure consciousness. The sources exist. Nobody appears to have done it, and this book's own citations show exactly why the shortcut is so tempting.