Probably Not a Rose
Dear Friends,
With apologies to Gertrude Stein, today's rose is possibly not a rose, probably not a rose, not a rose at all. We're shifting for a moment to a flower that has done, in Zen Buddhism, some of the work that the rose has done in the West for millennia.
I mean the flower held up in Buddha's "Flower Sermon," a kind of origin story for Zen Buddhism. It's a simple tale. The Buddha gathers his followers for a sermon. Instead of speaking, though, he silently holds up a single flower. In some versions, he twirls it. One disciple, Kashyapa, understands and smiles.
That's it. There may be symbolism to the flower itself -- possibly an udumbara blossom (too rare for me to picture above; I've substituted the other possible blossom, a lotus). The event of holding up the flower was certainly a form of communication, speech if you like, but not in words or normal concepts. And it has to do with joy (Kashyapa's smile).
The udumbara mythically blooms only once every 3000 years. Such extreme rarity points toward what Duns Scotus (1265-1308) called "thisness" or the unique inner quality of each thing and moment.
So the Buddha's raised flower served, at least in part, as De Niro's raised bullet: "See this, Stanley? This is this." We want to listen to the flower's call to come into the specific place, the historical time, the company, and the activity in which we actually do find ourselves -- not 3,000 years rare, but infinitely rare.
Wait a minute. As Annie Dillard wrote, "I never saw a tree that was no tree in particular." If it's not a rose, and only maybe a lotus or an udumbara, aren't we contradicting the supposed importance of specificity? We're not even settling on what kind of flower! In the vague or generic description of the flower, the whole point of the incident seems to be lost -- the whole "be here now," "be in the moment," "be riveted by unique thisness."
For the time being, I want to leave this contradiction with only a partial solution, and claim that the point of the Flower Sermon is not the flower at all, but the momentary awareness of Kashyapa. The ill-named Parable of the Sower, too, is not about the vegetable matter sown or the guy sowing, but about the receptive characteristics of the soil.
wishing you joy in all you do,
Michael
