Red Thread Zen

Love, attachment, the passions, gender, carnality, birth, bodily being, mortality, belonging, suffering, hope, despair, personhood, imagination, vitality, the struggle to be fully human – how do these things dwell wholly in emptiness, how do we reconcile their vivid life with ‘no-thingness’?

The red (or ‘vermilion’) thread originally connoted the color of the silk undergarments courtesans were obli...