The Sun Magazine | Long Distance: England

The Sun Magazine | Long Distance: England
I enjoyed the way the poet wove associations together.


It reminded me of an essay we must have shared...

Everything is Interrelated
Thich Nhat Hanh
Meditation is not to get out of society, to escape from society, but to
prepare for a re-entry into society. We call this "engaged Buddhism."
When we go to a meditation center, we may have the impression that we
leave everything behindófamily, society, and all the complications
involved in themóand come as an individual in order to practice and to
search for peace. This is already an illusion, because in Buddhism there
is no such thing as an individual.

Just as a piece of paper is the fruit, the combina-tion of many
elements that can be called non-paper elements, the individual is made
of non-individual elements. If you are a poet, you will see clearly that
there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud there
will be no water; without water, the trees cannot grow; and without
trees, you cannot make paper. So the cloud is in here. The exis-tence of
this page is dependent on the existence of a cloud. Paper and cloud are
so close. Let us think of other things, like sunshine. Sunshine is very
impor-tant because the forest cannot grow without sunshine, and we
humans cannot grow without sunshine. So the logger needs sunshine in
order to cut the tree, and the tree needs sunshine in order to be a
tree. Therefore you can see sunshine in this sheet of paper. And if you
look more deeply, with the eyes of a bodhisattva, with the eyes of those
who are awake, you see not only the cloud and the sunshine in it, but
that everything is here: the wheat that became the bread for the logger
to eat, the logger's fatheró everything is in this sheet of paper.

The Avatamsaka Sutra tells us that you cannot point to one thing that
does not have a relationship with this sheet of paper. So we say, "A
sheet of paper is made of non-paper elements." A cloud is a non-paper
element. The forest is a non-paper element. Sunshine is a non-paper
element. The paper is made of all the non-paper elements to the extent
that if we return the non-paper elements to their sources, the cloud to
the sky, the sunshine to the sun, the logger to his father, the paper is
empty. Empty of what? Empty of a separate self. It has been made by all
the non-self elements, non-paper elements, and if all these non-paper
elements are taken out, it is truly empty, empty of an independent self.
Empty, in this sense, means that the paper is full of everything, the
entire cosmos. The presence of this tiny sheet of paper proves the
presence of the whole cosmos.