TATHATA

The Buddhist term "tathata" or "suchness" means that which is so of itself, or as it is also phrased, that which is of itself so.  This means that something just is and is what it is.  Philosopher Alan Watts states, coincidentally, that tathata is the correct interpretation of the virgin birth of Jesus. 

Watts goes on to sight classical music as tathata.  Classical music means nothing except itself, he says.  There is no "message" in a Bach fugue.  It just is what it is.  Rain, another example he gives, is something that needs no translation.  "It is just that which it is, though it may be impossible to say what."

Tathata, according to Buddhists, applies to the creation of the universe as well.  They do not accept the notion of a Creator and a God-created universe.  They accept rather that the universe came spontaneously out of nothing.  Out of nothing came something, just as this something will one day again be nothing.  They explain that you cannot have something without there first being nothing, that something and nothing imply each other, they create each other.  And this occurs just so of itself.

In what has come to be known in English as the Flower Sermon, the Buddha transmitted the idea of tathata directly to his disciple Mahakasyapa when he held up a flower.  The other disciples present were perplexed by the gesture, but Mahakasyapa smiled.  He saw that the flower was just of itself so, tathata.

As no moment is exactly the same, each one can be savored for what occurs at that precise time, whether it is thought of as being "good" or "bad."  This also is tathata.

A related word is tathagata.  While alive the Buddha referred to himself as tathagata, which can mean either "One who has thus come" or "One who has thus gone," and interpreted correctly can be read as "One who has arrived at suchness," tathata.