Connections

I've been spending some time reading a little book by Thich Nhat Hahn called Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers, (Berkeley Publishing, 1999.) It isn't a book about religion, really, though it touches on subjects that have been sacred to billions of people for thousands of years. It is really a book about living, about reality, and about... well... about connections.

"Thay"

Thick Nhat Hanh (1926 - 2022) was a Vietnamese monk whose students lovingly referred to him as "Thay" which means Teacher. His life story is fascinating, and I hope to learn and share a lot more about him in the coming months. Though I won't get the chance to meet him, I've been getting to know him through his words on YouTube and books that he has published. He is a teacher in the best sense of the word, pointing the attention of the student toward something greater, not just promoting himself and his own cleverness. He's a quiet, funny, humble guy, and I have already learned a lot from him.

In my morning reading, I came across a passage where Thay writes about interconnectedness. This is a fundamental Buddhist idea about how nothing in the universe stands alone. We are ever-changing parts of the ever-changing whole from which we come, and to which we return. He talks about how a piece of bread - whether it is a bran muffin, a bowl of cereal, or a communion wafer - contains the whole universe. It contains not only the grain that was milled, but also the rain that nurtured it, the sunshine, the minerals from the earth, even the breath of the sower who spread the seed and the sweat of the reaper who gathered it. All are taken into our mouths when we consume the bread. Our body will use the energy and the nutrients we eat to restore and repair and remake itself. When I drink my morning coffee and eat a piece of toast, I am intimately connected to everything that made them possible. I taste the hands of bakers and touch the hearts of the stars.

This isn't pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jumbo, It's self-evident. It requires no leap of faith to say that I have a relationship with the world around me. You don't have to "believe" in anything. Actions have consequences and causes have effects. Things make things happen. We affect one another. We are connected.

In another passage, Thay talks about waves and water.  

Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura)
Katsushika Hokusai, c.1830-1832

The waves are the water, but if a wave tries to understand water in terms of ups and downs, I and you, then a wave will not be able to touch water. A wave, in order to touch water, must get rid of all these notions. The wave has ups and downs, but the water is free from ups and downs. The wave believes that she has birth and death, that there is birth and the wave comes up, the the wave goes down and there is death, But water is free from all that. So if the wave is trying to understand water in those terms and notions, he will never arrive at touching water. (Coming Home, p. 100)

A wave's identity, it's "self" is only temporary. It rises from the water, and returns to the water. The wave rises and falls, but the water continues on. Think of a leaf that buds in the spring, opens its face toward the summer sun, feeds the branches through its stem, then falls to the earth and decays, becoming the minerals and elements that the roots absorb to produce the next year's foliage and fruit. Does the leaf die? Or is it reborn again and again in the living tree of which is a part?

Birth and rebirth

There are two hard ideas here, both are foreign to my Christian brain, and both are pretty important to Buddhist thought. First is the idea of "no-self." I'm not sure yet what that really means, but think it means that there is no enduring "me" to live on after I die. I think it means that what comes after me is what came before me. Life. Breath. Water. Wisdom. Love. It's hard for me to think that there isn't a "soul" that will continue to live and move and have its being after I die, but it's kind of liberating, too. There are a couple of things about life that I'd be happy to set aside. When I compare burning lakes, wings and harps, and being used for parts by the next generation, I'm not entirely put-off by the third option.

The second hard idea - and this one will have to wait for another day - is the Eastern tradition of reincarnation. It's the idea that our next life will be determined by Karma: the consequences of actions in our previous life. At least that's how I understood it from my 10th grade social studies class. I won't lie. I could have paid closer attention. Most of my homework centered on a little brunette that year. I was pretty distracted. And yes, I still live with the consequences of that choice from time to time. Decades separate us, but we are still connected.

I don't know what I think about reincarnation. It is unlike so much of what I'm learning about Buddhism because it asserts a supernatural realm that I can't see in nature. Reducing suffering through detachment is a pretty rational idea. Coming back from the dead to give life another try feels like religion to me. I can see my tap water turning to steam when I boil it. I can't quite wrap my head around Sophie the cat coming back as the Queen of England. I'm pretty sure Sophie would consider it a down-grade. 

What was I talking about? Connections. Right.

There is a pretty important question waiting out in the garden among all these lovely Buddhist flowers: how does all this interconnectedness matter when it comes to the way I treat people?  I think it matters a lot. If we are all coming from the same source and going to the same destination, then the differences between us are pretty insignificant. Likewise, the things we think and say and do to separate us from one another are also insignificant. Your church, my politics, her gender, his race, their education, our nationality... All this stuff is temporary as a ripple in a pond that rolls to the shore and is gone. What remains? What matters?

Connections. That's what matters. The grace I give to myself. The compassion I receive from a stranger. The space I hold for a friend. The listening. The showing-up. The pitching-in. Connections.

I was raised to believe in a God who loved his creatures so much that he became one of them to show them how to live and love one another. Now that's connection. Can we honor our creator any more than by honoring the life and love that connects us?