I just want to toss something out for discussion -- Zen teacher James Ford writes is commenting on another post that includes a quote from a Tricycle article. In the quote, Gil Fronsdal says,
"...the American Vipassana movement emphasizes interconnectedness when teaching anatta, or 'not-self.' This is emphasized so much that a person might get the idea that realizing interconnectedness is the ultimate goal of Buddhism. It's not; this is a very American emphasis. I think interconnectedness is inspiring to us as an antidote to American individualism and the pain of alienation it can cause."
If, by "interconnectedness," we're talking about Dependent Origination, that's certainly a traditional Buddhist teaching. But Dependent Origination goes deeper than just a notion that we're all connected.
I've heard Zen teachers say that each of us is the whole of existence, and this is illustrated sometimes by the example of holograms. I'm a little hazy on how this works, but as I understand it, laser beams are split and bounced off an object to make an inference pattern, which is recorded on film I have no idea how that is done, but there it is.
The inference pattern doesn't look like anything in particular until another laser or bright beam shines through it, and then a three-dimensional hologram of the original object appears. But if you cut the film in half and shine a light through it, you don't get two half-holograms. You get two complete holograms. And if you cut in the film into fourths, you get four complete holograms. The entire image is contained in every bit of the inference pattern.
Just so, we individuals are not just connected to everything else. We are everything else. James Ford mentions Indra's Net and also the Heart Sutra as illustrations. He also says,
...as Gil seems to have pointed out (I couldn't access the original interview, and so must rely upon the pull quote) interdependence has become a common term among we Buddhists in the West - in fact a sense of this may be characterized a one of the marks of an emerging "western" Buddhism.
I can't say that I've noticed an undue emphasis on "interconnectedness" in the West. But if there is such an emphasis, it might be coming out to address the West's (America's in particular) hyper-emphasis on individualism. Thoughts?
No comments:
Post a Comment