Since the recent passing of the great teacher and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (who wrote about washing dishes mindfully - subject of a recent post), I have thought often of the time I was able to attend a talk he gave when touring the U.S. a number of years ago. Even in an auditorium with several hundred people, his serene, gentle demeanor suffused the entire building, so that there was a still silence through which his quiet voice was able to reach all in attendance. What I remember most from that evening was a brief demonstration he did with a piece of paper, as it exemplified so well how he was able to teach on such apparently esoteric subjects with such simple language and examples. I find this particular teaching of great value in putting even the most difficult circumstances into a broader perspective, as well as illustrative of how science and spirituality/religion can be seen as complementary rather than contradictory.
He began by holding up an ordinary sheet of paper and asking us all to look at it. Could we see clouds in the paper? At first, that seemed a somewhat ridiculous question. But he then asked us to look not at the surface of the paper, but to look deeply, as in a meditation. If one looks deeply, he said, one can see that the paper was made of pulp from trees. The trees depended on rain for their growth in order for this pulp to be produced. The rain came from clouds, so if one looked deeply enough, one could see the clouds were inherently part of the sheet of paper, as it could not have come into being without them.
He then asked if we could look deeply and see the sunshine in the paper. This time, it didn’t seem so ridiculous, as looking deeply, the sunshine was just as necessary for the trees from which the paper’s primary raw material came as the clouds, rain, the fact that the earth’s atmosphere is composed just how it is, the soil has all its necessary balance of constituents, etc. From these sorts of examples, followed the conclusion that if one looks deeply enough, one can see the entire cosmos in the sheet of paper, as indeed nothing is really so separate from everything else, and all things interdependent for their existence, even if our usual way of making sense of “things” is to cut them apart conceptually into separate things. In the process, it is easy to forget that they aren’t really separate, just that it’s easier to keep track of and think about things using these nice neat mental categories with which to perceive the world. This looking deeply, then, is a nice way to attempt to undo that mental cutting apart habit of thinking in order to see things more as they really are - what Buddhists call “inter-being”.
After a silent moment for us all to contemplate this and take it in, he then took a match and lit the paper on fire. He silently held it for a moment before dropping the burning sheet of paper into a bowl to finish burning until there was a small plume of smoke rising from the bowl. He then asked where the paper is now. If one looks on the surface, he said, one would say the paper is gone. But if one looks deeply, the paper isn’t gone - it has transformed. It is in the heat emanating into the room and warming some of the people in the front row a bit. It is in the ashes left in the bowl, and in the smoke and gases from the combustion rising into the air.
Again, after giving the completely silent audience a moment to contemplate what we had just seen and heard, he continued by asking where we were before our parents were born. On the surface, we were nowhere - we didn’t exist before our parents were born. But looking deeply, of course we were always there - in our grandparents’ DNA, in all the atoms that now make up the material components of our bodies, but also in the traditions, stories, songs, dances, values, and ideas they have passed along through our parents to us, etc. Just as the piece of paper has the entire cosmos in it, so does each of us, but with the interpersonal things that get passed along as well.
He then asked where we would be after we die. On a physical level, just like the sheet of paper, we will not be gone, just transformed - into nutrients in the soil to nurture new lives to come, just as the CO2 we breathe out is breathed in by plants to help them grow (so our breath is in the paper as well!) and their O2 they “breathe out” allows us to live as we inter-be with them…. But we will also be there in a non-physical way just as our grandparents are with us, with all the people with whom we interacted and had an impact upon, some more than others, who will pass on or were transformed by our values, or our stories, or our kindnesses, etc. in ways large and small. The sheet of paper then, is similar to us in that its boundaries in time and space are more conceptual than real. If we look deeply, we don’t have a beginning or end, except in the limited ways we might choose to tell the story of ourselves. We could also say that we (and everything else) is always, at every moment, beginning and ending, as old cells are dying and getting sloughed off constantly to make way for new ones, on the purely physical plane. At the same time, new ideas, emotions, thoughts, are also constantly coming into being while others go, as there is constant transformation on that plane as well.
Looked at in this “looking deeply” way, I can’t help but think there was no one more at peace with the idea of dying than Thich Nhat Hanh was. It is also very clear that he was correct about living on through one’s deeds and relationships, as so many are continuing to be touched by his life and teaching, as exemplified by the way in which the one evening of my life I spent in an auditorium listening to his teaching has had an impact on me, and in turn on others with whom I have shared his words.
Thich Nhat Hanh did a somewhat similar teaching in this video talk: No Birth, No Death