by Richard
Our last student group discussion by Adrien was on the Thich Nhat Hanh reading Please Call Me by My True Names. The reader is asked to identify with those suffering and those creating suffering, an emaciated child and an arms dealer. It’s much easier to identify with the child who is suffering, less so with the arms dealer.
In Heart of Understanding, Thich Nhat Hanh explains that while we’d prefer a rose over garbage, a rose also decomposes into garbage, which in turn creates fertiliser for roses. The rose doesn’t exist without garbage, they are two sides of the same coin.
In the same way, north doesn’t exist without south, up without down, and birth without death. Thich Nhat Hanh extends this to some other difficult truths: wealth doesn’t exist without poverty, the left party without the right, the United States without Iran.
One of our most important readings is Identity of Relative and Absolute, an 8th century text by Sekito Kisen. It has many other names, including Harmony of Difference and Sameness. In the context of this sutra, lightness describes differentiation and form, and darkness describes unity and emptiness:
In the very midst of light, there is darkness,
Don’t meet another in the darkness.
In the very midst of darkness, there is light,
Don’t view another in the light.
Light and darkness complement each other, like stepping forward and stepping back.
The sutra describes a truth about the world that is also found in Taoism, some Western Philosophy and art. The most well-known of these is Yin and Yang: opposing forces that are complementary to one another, turning everything in cycles.
When I was a child, my family would often visit our family friends originally from Holland. Their lounge walls had prints of the Dutch artist Escher, who made optical illusions and mathematical patterns into art. I used to look at these pictures, sometimes focussing on the details, sometimes standing back to see the whole view. They were fascinating because of the paradoxes in them: hands drawing each other, endless waterfall loops, and patterns twisting from one form into another. A Zen student might work on paradoxes in words, but Escher would draw them in pictures.
Source: WikiArt, Fair Use
Often the artworks blend natural elements with geometric shapes called tessellations, usually showing different animals forming a type of interlocking pattern, in a way that is reminiscent of the Yin and Yang symbol.
In Day and Night, birds emerge from a pattern in the fields, heading left or right. One might prefer the black birds or the white birds, but you can’t have one without the other. Standing back, there is a whole complete pattern. Focussing in, each bird is different. Neither perspective is fully true, it just depends on how you look at it. Unity and differentiation are complementary to each other, they don’t exist alone.
Source: WikiArt, Fair Use
These days, I get worried when looking at the online news. People are angrier, billionaires are wealthier, politicians more powerful, and the environment weaker. I’m troubled and confused by these things. However, I also know this perspective is limited because things online are not the full picture.
What’s the opposite perspective? Maybe it’s peacefulness: I can take a walk outside after the rain, with birds, frogs, crickets, native grasses (and mosquitos). Or it could be happiness: I can take a walk at the shops, where toddlers and families are crowding by the ice cream store.
What’s the wider perspective? It might be overall patterns in the world, and things running in cycles. Actions have equal and opposite reactions, creating big ebbs and flows that aren’t always visible. Chaos may be an inevitable and necessary part of change that occurs in ways that can’t be known or understood.
So from one perspective, we’re all different. We follow the precepts, taking ethical steps to reduce harm. From a wider perspective, we’re all the same. We humans fall into patterns, and we can identify within us the capacity to bear suffering and to create suffering. Neither perspective is fully true, it just depends on how you look at it.
Shunryu Suzuki’s other book, Branching Streams Flowing through the Darkness, is written about Identity of Relative and Absolute, and says:
Good or bad is not arrived at by some standard of evaluation…because each thing is different, each thing has its own value. That value is absolute.
The mountain is not more valuable because it is high; the river is not less valuable because it is low…. The quality of the mountain and the quality of the river are completely different; because they are different they have equal value; and equal value means absolute value.