We do wake up to this great vast body. A stone woman bears a child by night. Again, this is symbolic language. Stone woman also means barren woman, which is a metaphor for emptiness. Bears a child - everything is inconceivably empty yet it exists.
Emptiness gives birth to form.
The child here means the universe. The virgin woman is another image of emptiness and she gives birth to the child Jesus, to form. We were having a women's discussion recently during Easter and we decided to talk about how our Christian roots have conditioned our values and how we felt about that now. I was very involved in the Christian church when I was young, but one of the things that I had a problem with was the notion of original sin, that we were all so sinful in the eyes of God. Later on, after leaving all of that, one of the things that attracted me about Buddhism was that we are all, at the essence, Buddha-nature.