Buddhism said,

“Let go of everything.”

Shiva said,

“Remain.”

Both were pointing to the same fact.

You are not the one meditating.

You are what meditation appears in.

Shiva wasn’t contradicting the Buddha.

He was bowing to him from another angle.

Shiva wasn’t a deity. He was a user interface.

A symbolic face for what Buddhism had trained me to see without faces.

Buddhism called it emptiness.

But it wasn’t empty the way a room is empty.

It was empty the way the sky is empty of furniture but full of flight.