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The Book of Form and Emptiness constructs a hallucinatory auditory world, triggered by a traumatic event of a family member's death. Drawing on phenomenological paradigms and psychopathology, further deepened by Ruth Ozeki's grounding in Sōtō Zen Buddhism, this article analyzes the intentional structure of the protagonist Benny Oh's hallucinatory experience by examining the dynamic between the subject that perceives and the objects that are perceived, as revealed in his gradual shiftfrom resisting to embracing auditory hallucinations. This analysis argues that the subjective link between embodied vulnerability and the belief in pain informs one's understanding of impermanence, and, thus, subjectivity and the world. Under this circumstance, Ozeki reconstructs subjectivity through compassionate intersubjective relations, while challenging the epistemological dominance of neoliberal rationality about mental illness.