Buddhist Wisdom for the Long Night

There’s a phrase I’ve come back to for years, sitting with the Heart Sūtra on my own porch, guitar within reach: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Easy to say. Harder to live. Hardest of all, maybe, to explain to someone who’s actually running from something—a debt, a diagnosis, a hellhound on their trail, in the old blues sense of the word.

I’m glad to share that my essay, “Hellhounds and the Void: The Heart Sūtra as Survival Technology in a Blues Epistemology,” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Africana Religions, following peer review and a full revision. It’s headed into the copyediting queue now, so I don’t have a volume and issue number yet—but the acceptance itself, dated July 9, 2026, is real. And I wanted to bring it back here first—to the folks who’ve been reading these chapter commentaries and listening to these songs with me for years—before I said much of anything anywhere else.

What the piece is actually arguing

The word “Void” sits right there in my own title, and I mean for that to create a little friction. Śūnyatā—emptiness—gets read, too often, as absence. A hole where meaning should be. Something to fear, or to escape into, or to numb yourself against.

That’s not what the Heart Sūtra is doing, and it’s not what the blues tradition has been doing either, for as long as there’s been a blues tradition. When Robert Johnson sings about a hellhound on his trail, he’s not describing a void. He’s describing motion—being chased, yes, but also moving, still capable of outrunning, still capable of choosing the next crossroads. That’s the argument at the center of this piece: śūnyatā functions as mobility, not void. Emptiness isn’t the absence of a self to protect. It’s the absence of a fixed self to be trapped inside of—which means there’s still room to move.

I didn’t get to that argument in a straight line, and I didn’t get to keep every word of my first draft. The reviewers pushed back—rightly—on how I was positioning myself in the piece, a white scholar working with a Black musical and spiritual tradition, and asked me to be more direct about that rather than let it sit quietly underneath the argument. They also pointed me toward contemporary Black Buddhist thinkers already doing serious work in exactly this space, whose scholarship ended up strengthening the piece considerably once I brought it in. The version that got accepted is better than the one I first sent out, and I’m grateful for the reviewers and editors who made me do that work rather than just letting the first draft stand.

Where this sits alongside everything else here

If you’ve been following the chapter commentaries—the Parable of the Burning House, the purification of the six senses in Chapter Nineteen, the Dragon Girl’s instant of Buddhahood—this essay is working the same terrain from a different sutra and a different musical idiom. It’s the same conviction running underneath all of it: that these teachings aren’t museum pieces. They’re survival technology, built for people who are actually being chased by something, right now, in this life.

That’s been true of every Dharma Blues song I’ve put up here, every Lotus Sūtra chapter I’ve worked through. This is just the first time that conviction has had to survive a peer reviewer’s red pen instead of just my own editing ear—and it came out stronger for it.

More news on this one once it clears copyediting and I have an actual citation to share. Until then—keep moving. That’s the whole teaching.

🙏

Tags: Buddhism, Heart Sūtra, Emptiness, Śūnyatā, Blues, Blues Epistemology, Journal of Africana Religions, Black Buddhism, Robert Johnson, Peer Review, Academic Publishing, Spirituality, Mahāyāna Buddhism