-The Buddha
Hmmm! Have you heard the lotus sermon in the Zen Buddhist tradition ( in every Buddhist tradition actually but this one sermon became the basis for Zen).
The Lotus Sermon
One day the Buddha was sitting with his five disciples during a sangha. Before him was a pond where beautiful lotus flowers floated.
The disciples looked expectantly to their teacher for him to expound his usual wisdom but that day he merely dipped his hand into the muddy water and pulled out a lotus flower. Holding it in the air with its roots still dripping with pond water, the Buddha remained silent. Saying nothing, he showed the flower to each of his students who fervently and unsuccessfully went to their minds to look for the meaning of what their teacher was trying to impart.
The Buddha went from one student to the next until he got to his last student Mahakashyapa. Mahakashyapa looked at the flower , his eyes alight with Buddha's wisdom, and smiled. Buddha smiled back giving him the flower.
This one student understood the lesson! No one else did.
Seeing the Whole Picture
What Mahakashyapa got was that in that flower existed the whole universe. He not only saw the flower that his teacher held out like the other students did, but he saw the ocean, the sky, everyone and everything.
William Blake, much, much later, wrote a poem about karma that spoke to this understanding.
To
see a World in a Grain of Sand
And
a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold
Infinity in the palm of your hand
And
Eternity in an hour
What a wonderful lesson for all of us. what this understanding entails is the true message of all Buddha's teachings. When we can get past the veil of 'me' that exists in most of our minds...we too will be able to see the connectedness of everything. It is this clinging to those awful pronouns of "I", "me" and "mine" that stops us from remembering who we are beneath our stories.
It is attachment to these pronouns and our so called stories that keep us stuck in this idea of suffering or Dukkha. It is this clinging to ideas we have of ourselves and others and the world that keep us small and separated from the whole....that in turn leads to fear based behaviours like addiction, violence and isolation.
We fail to see that we are not subjects looking at an object...we are the lotus flower. We are not broken, isolated beings we are connected and part of everything.
Remembering
We just forgot who we were. We need to remember.
Deepak Chopra in his conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn tells us that remembering is remembering (reconnecting) the wholeness of the dismembered.
When you see yourself in an object, the experience is beauty. When you see yourself in another person, the experience is love. -Deepak Chopra
How beautiful is that?
Back to the Tao...again
I go back to the Tao to understand the lesson Buddha's best student understood so quickly. In Verse 22, James Legge translates Lao Tzu's wisdom as:
Therefore the sage holds in his embrace the one thing(of humility),
and manifests it to all the world.
He is free from self-display, and therefore he shines;
from self-assertion, and therefore he is distinguished;
from self-boasting, and therefore his merit is acknowledged;
from self-complacency, and therefore he acquires superiority.
It is because he is thus free from striving
that therefore no one in the world is able to strive with him.
So much wonderful wisdom to learn from, heal with and experience.
All is well.
References
Blake, William (n.d.) Auguries of Innocence. from Poetry Foundation. Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43650/auguries-of-innocence
Deepak Chopra in Conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn (Nov, 2017) The Chopra Well. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyqGrwujf-0
Legge, James ( 1891) Translation of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. Retrieved from https://www.sacred-texts.com/tao/taote.htm
The Flower Sermon.(n.d.) from Buddha's World. Retrieved from http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/flower-sermon.htm
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