Friday, February 13, 2015

An Idea

On Sunday, Pedro sees Mary as usual at a local Buddhist temple assembly. When the morning service is over, a vegetarian buffet lunch is served. There are spinach and mushroom soup, five-spice tofu, Vietnamese spring rolls, silky rice noodles, stir-fried mixed vegetables of mushrooms, cauliflower, vegetarian nuggets, bell peppers, and ginger. The dessert includes fresh cut figs, oranges, apples, grapes, cookies. The dishes of this meal vary from day to day, and they are made from fresh organic ingredients, by seasoned cooks, so that the tastes bring back memories of childhood feasts. However, one ascetic practice here is that the Sangha disciples eat only one meal a day. They must eat slowly to digest the food fully.

Vegetarian buffet.jpg
Vegetarian buffet

A brief rest follows the silent meal, and then the community work begins. Mary and Pedro work together in the garden to pull weeds. During a break Mary tells Pedro about the Buddha Boy video she has recently seen.

Pedro is looking at Mary’s shiny dark hair, ruby cheeks, slightly upturned nose. Her body gives off a natural scent like the jasmine. Her sweet voice catches him a little off-guard. He blinks his eyes a few times, and then tells her the dream he had about the books in the castle.

“Maybe the enlightenment of the Buddha was that he discovered the mind,” Pedro says.

Mary: “Is it that simple? Most people know about the mind. Why would it take so much effort to discover it? And how does it solve the problem of sufferings?”

Pedro: It’s not so easy to understand abstract ideas such as the mind 2,500 years ago when Siddhartha Gautama lived. There was no name for it at the time. How do you describe something that has no name? It’s like Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity. He had to invent a name for it in order to explain it, and that name came from the word “grave”.

Mary: ‘Grave’! What a grim word. What does it have to do with gravity?

P: Well, you know the story about the apple and the discovery of gravity. Newton was studying the data collected by the astronomers Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe, and the Laws of Planetary Motions. He was puzzled by why the planets moved in circular orbits, or more closely, in ellipses. Newton had devised his own laws of motions, and one of them was that a moving object would move and remain in a straight line unless it’s altered by external forces. He couldn’t understand why the planets did not move in straight lines, since there were no visible forces acting on them. This puzzle turned him into a typical absented-minded scientist, until one day he saw the apple fall to the ground. Bingo! That was it - the invisible force. All things on Earth, like the apple, fall down to the ground eventually, just as people will lie down to their graves at the end. On that count maybe the British did not do cremation much. Anyway, Newton saw that the planets were moving in straight lines and being pulled down by the force of gravity at the same time. The result could be the elliptical orbits. And that’s the story of the word 'gravity'.


M: Ah, the apple story. So, did the Buddha coin the word ‘mind’?

P: I don’t know. I think ‘mind’ is a relatively recent word used by English speakers. It came from the word ‘memory’.

M: Now I remember. The Sanskrit sutras translated into Chinese have always used the word ‘heart’ for ‘mind’. The Chinese, in her 5,000 years of history and culture, has no word for ‘mind’ except ‘heart’, and some other words related to 'heart'. The Heart Sutra (般若心經) that we recite in the morning assembly should probably be called the Mind Sutra. Yes, in it it says “… form is emptiness, emptiness is form (色即是空 空即是色)... “ It all has to do with mind perceptions, and not the physical heart.

P: Yes, translation is like magic. It bridges ideas from one culture to another, and one epoch to another, as if they can be one and the same. But really they are quite different. The Western thinkers like Socrates and Plato talked about memory and thinking. The Eastern Buddhism talked about the buddha nature, wisdom, heart, meditation. Yet they are all linked to the word ‘mind’.

M: Don’t forget consciousness, emotions, identity, spirit, desire. These words are so mysterious when you examine them. I remember a story of Zen Koan (公案) that made no sense: A master sees a disciple in the garden. He points his stick at him and says, ‘Answer me quickly. If you say something, I will beat you with this stick. If you do not say anything, I will beat you with this stick.’ The disciple, on hearing this, puts a shoe on his head and walks away.

P: I think it means that all meanings are subject to the mind. The dilemma of an impossible situation is a form of suffering. To break that dilemma, one needs to change one’s mind about it. So the disciple’s action shows that he is steering his mind to break the meaning of the master’s bidding.

M: It’s very confusing to talk about the mind. It’s almost like the four blind men describing the elephant.

P: Four blind men describing an elephant?

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