Buddha Twirling a Flower 🌸 Revealing a World of Bliss
© Doris Mitsch
''All things merge, mix, create, and liberate each other. Nothing is separate and alone. This is how things are. This is compassion – not merely an extra something one of us feels for another, but existence itself. Being is by its nature sharing and loving. And we realize this not as a teaching a concept or a method we can work at and finally grasp, but through our mutual recognition, our mutual shared awakening.''
© Doris Mitsch
''Buddha's Dharma talk on Vulture Peak includes no words. He holds up a flower and twirls it. This is his talk, – his demonstration of Suchness.
A commentary to the koan says that Mahakashyapa and the Buddha smiled one smile: between them there was one smile. They had perfect accord, perfect harmony, perfect relationship, perfect trust. Essentially, there were not two of them.''
© Doris Mitsch
''You have to hold up a flower. There really isn't a teacher and a student- and at the same time we have to have these relationships and all that goes with them. This is how we activate the One Great Causal Condition of compassion and love. And we must activate it; this is our human obligation, our role, our task, and our joy.''
https://tricycle.org/magazine/twirling-a-flower/
By Norman Fischer, Artwork by Doris Mitsch
WINTER 2006
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Outside my window, plum blossoms,
Just on the verge of unfurling, contain the spring;
The clear moon is held in the cup-like petals
Of the beautiful flower I pick and twirl.
Dōgen
I first encountered this koan in Mumonkan, or The Gateless Gate. This one and "Abandon Words and Speaking" (or however it's translated) appealed to me strongly.
I saw and felt that flower twirling. I heard those "birds sing among innumerable kinds of fragrant flowers."
It helped that I have forever been a nature photographer, and experience that every possible day.
Basically they deal with non-duality. However we express it, it is the connectedness of all things. So many of our troubles stem from the doctrine of duality, the faulty stories we tell ourselves.
The article leads to the Lotus Sutra, as my own wanderings led me.
I'll let the article speak more eloquently than I can, but to me, the Lotus Sutra transforms our purpose from victims to liberators, our differences from flaws to unique expressions of the life of the universe, enemies into friends, our stumbles and struggles into skillful means, and poison into medicine.
This sums it up
(People) enter deeply into erroneous views,
hoping to shed suffering through greater suffering.
For the sake of these living beings
I summon up a mind of great compassion.
Compassion is the beginning and "end" of enlightenment. They are one.
The temple bell stops
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.
- Matsuo Basho
