A friend gave me a copy of Painting Enlightenment: Healing Visions of the Heart Sutra. The book is deeply inspiring and has become one of the most cherished in my collection.

The book dives into the Buddhist art of Iwasaki Tsuneo – artist, scientist, and devoted practitioner. Each painting is a meditation on the Heart Sutra, a central text in Mahayana Buddhism. Its core idea is expressed as Form is empty. Emptiness is form.

This means everything is interconnected. Nothing stands alone. Not even you. Not even me.

Copying sutras by hand is a traditional act of devotion. Tsuneo took that further. Instead of lining up the words in columns, he shaped them into natural forms. Bamboo stalks. Spirals of DNA. Stars. Lightning.

The words themselves become the image. In his paintings, the words of the sutra become stars in the sky, or lightning bolts, or the components of the DNA helix. One painting depicts an atom, while another depicts a galaxy.

Others depict common Japanese or Buddhist themes, like a single stalk of bamboo, or a Buddha as a lotus blossom.

His work bridges science and spirit. Nature and scripture. It’s a quiet protest against the modern world’s fragmentation.

Tsuneo offers a visual ethic of interdependence. His art asks us to see the links. To recognize the spaces between. To act with compassion because we’re all part of the same whole.

If you haven’t seen his work, look it up. You won’t forget it.

2