All in One, One in All

One Japanese anime I have been privileged to watch, the "remake" of Fullmetal Alchemist known as Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which follows the now-completed manga to an unusually faithful degree, has one segment which has distinct Zen overtones.

While still relatively young children, the two brothers at the heart of the story are given a test by the woman they wish to study under to learn the driving force of the show, Alchemy. The two are placed on an uninhabited island in the center of a lake and are to survive for one month, and come back with the meaning to a cryptic phrase: "One, and All."

The would-be teacher had no actual intention of leaving the children truly unattended, placing an employee at her husband-and-wife store on the island to "supervise" and act as a masked marauder making life more difficult for the children (while offering subtle clues as to how they might survive the ordeal). Forced by starvation to learn how to live off the land, the hard realization strikes them that if they die, they will simply return to the soil like everything else; the world will move on without their lives. They are not separate from the world around them; as the old English poem states, "No man is an island."

This also led to another thought: both of them were also part of the world. They had every bit as much right to live as other living beings. They used plants for shelter and firewood. They ate ants, caught fish, and apologized to the next cute bunny they caught before regretfully killing it for food. The brothers knew from experience that if they did not eat, something else would: a fox caught a rabbit that got away, feeding it to her own young. That is the way of nature.

At the end of the month, the would-be sensei's boat returned, and the two had their answer.

The first said, "All is the World!"

The second said, "One is Me!"

The sensei blinked, laughed heartily, revealed the employee sent to see that they did not actually starve to death, and finally accepted the pair as her apprentices.

This is the lesson the brothers learned, adapted to English syntax:

We are a part of the world, and the world is part of us.

Alas, as any viewer knows, the brothers' knowledge was not complete; they still thought fate could be cheated and were cursed for their blasphemy against the cycle of life, doing many good and great deeds in their search for redemption and restoration, but always reminded that there are still limits to human power. Their journey ended with both stronger, and humbler, than they began.

Our journey continues.

Article first published as All in One, One in All on Technorati.

Zen Flower Power

Zen began with a flower.

Siddhārtha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism and regarded as the Supreme Buddha, once ascended to a teaching dais bearing a flower, said to be a lotus flower. Without saying a word, he raised the flower to his followers.

The net effect was to leave the lot of them staring dumbfounded, except for Maha Kashyapa, who would become the most revered of the Buddha's early disciples, who made a subtle smile.

What had the others expected? They were focusing on what the meaning of the flower must have been, what it represented, what kind of deeper truth it must have held for the Buddha to have focused such attention on it.

Let me begin with a simple proposition.

Sometimes a flower is just a flower.

In the context of Buddhist talk of the impermanence of happy things and the staying power of unhappy things from which we need liberation, and talk of reality as perceived by our eyes and minds being just an illusion, it's easy to dismiss a flower as irrelevant. That, really, was the Buddha's point: people expected rational creeds: analysis, scholasticism, doctrine, and intellectualism. The idea of communicating through the visual image of a flower's beauty was lost on people.

In fact, it wasn't really communicating through the image. It was communicating the image itself.

In other words, the flower's beauty wasn't the messenger; it was the message.

This leads me to my second proposition:

There is Truth in flowers.

I am not referring to our perception created by light rays hitting the back wall of our eyeballs, activating receptors that give a heads up to the brain. I am referring to the flower existing and being part of the natural world.

Many people spend a great deal of time rejecting what they don't like about the modern world; that is, the world humans build. Humans, however, did not build the natural world. The beauty of a flower is a wonder that we did not create. It exists apart from the structures invented and developed by our rational minds.

The world is bad enough as it is; we do not need to harden our hearts to simple, natural beauty that brings joy and tranquility, however fleeting, to our spirits. We do not need to quantify or qualify natural beauty; we need simply appreciate nature for what it is, and be grateful that we can experience it at all.

Thus, there is a noble quality to flowers. They contain an element of Truth, for they show us what exists beyond the chains of our own minds.

Our challenge is to open our minds and let the Truth in.

Article first published as Zen Flower Power on Technorati.