Thoughts on Twenty-Eight

A central teaching of Buddhism is emphasized here: the selfless, birthless nature of all things. The understanding and accepting of this teaching produces more good in the worlds than monumental acts of material charity. That's what the Buddha says anyway. And even though the understanding of this teaching produces a lot of good, if a person holds onto this good, if a person holds onto the mental image of expected rewards, that person is not a bodhisattva at that moment. Holding onto and grasping at rewards negates to a large extent the merit produced by understanding and accepting emptiness.

A story about emptines. I read in a book by Osho(?) that Shakyamuni's inspiration for the selfless, birthless nature of all things was a dead leaf. He realized that the leaf really had no beginning since it was transformed from other elements (soil and sunlight) into its current state. In a similar way it has no end, because again it transforms into other constituents, such as soil particles. I would add to that that the leaf has no self-nature because it depends on many other things for its existence: the tree, the sun, the earth, the ecosystem, its ancestors, the ecosystems that came before, etc. We humans don't seem to have the gratitude for our current existence which is on the level of all these dependencies. Furthermore, there are so many more beings that will exist in the future, and we don't seem to care at all how we hand the planet to them. Why are their needs less important? especially since there are many more people in the future than have ever existed in the past. I admit that I am often cavalier about pollution and taking care of the environment, but I do think I have a moral responsibility to treat the planet kindly.

Wow, I kind of got distracted there. Maybe this shows that if we really accept that all of our self-natures in reality are not self-natures and interdepend in complex ways, then we really will gain more compassion for others, even those of the future and past. ta ta for now...