Contemplating Circles

In my Religion in Asia class today we watched a film called "The Land of the Disappearing Buddha," in which the narrator, who looks like an older businessman, wanders around Japan to different temples asking almost childlike, yet extremely pertinent questions of the religions he encounters. gazing at the lavish gardens of a Zen monastery, he asks that for being a form of Buddhism, where is the Buddha in Zen, and how does meditation, as a form of personal enlightenment, fit in with the Buddhist concept of saving all beings. After laughing, the Zen monk says that in Zen, everything is the Buddha, by doing zazen you recognize that there is no distinction between you and all the other things in reality. Consequently one can go about your day helping others with this enlightened perspective.

(As an aside, the psychological benefits of meditation are now being charted by science: "Over time, brains develop what is known as a ‘set point’. If a person's set point is tilted to the left then the tendency is for lots of activity in the left frontal cortex, making for a happy person. If it is tilted to the right the opposite occurs. But the set point can change: volunteers who undertook a short course of Buddhist-style meditation moved their set point to the left." [Times Online via Digg])



This identification with the whole is best illustrated by the Zen calligraphic practice of drawing a circle. You may think you are an individual point, but really you are part of a continuum that contains everything, and furthermore that circle of everything is really just an illusion, containing nothing. I recalled that my most intense and true spiritual experiences have centered around that recognition of being part of everything, and that the reality of which I am a part is often little but a flimsy mask, like a soap bubble. I left the class and wandered through the rain, feeling joyous, at ease, smiling at everyone with that secret that there is no distinction between us, and it was all a pleasant, fleeting, dream.