Leaves in the Hand

The skyline is covered in a mist, obscuring many of the buildings in Toronto’s downtown core. The CN tower looks like a candle that has burned into a stump-like base. Walking along the lakeshore toward Old Mill, I am reminded of many things. The fallen branches from trees are the reminders of yesterday’s heavy rains. The waters of Lake Ontario bring in bits of fallen tree branches, floating among bits of decayed plants and debris. The lake starts to look more like cold brown soup as it passes through the bridge toward Old Mill.

Fallen branches make me think of a story in Buddha’s time about the Buddha grabbing a handful of leaves and asking: what is more precious, the leaves in the hand or those found in the whole forest? The question is a kind of puzzle. It reminds me of the vastness of the universe, but also the fact that we only live in one moment at a time. No matter what a person chooses to do with her life, opportunities to do other things will be lost. And no matter what a person tries to do, it all ends in impermanence. A hand can only cover whatever it can in the moment. Of course, the obverse is: does grasping reality in the hand give a picture of the whole?  I think one thing I reflect on is: there is no complete, perfect knowledge. There are only moments where a person sincerely tries to act on what is loving and humane, based on the skills and experience one has. But it seems important to understand that the handful is only a handful. This awareness gives me the humility to understand that there may be other leaves with their own unique textures, and no two handfuls of leaves are the same. In this way, I need to let go of the illusion (all too dominant in North American culture) that we can be all knowing in some area of life.

Does this mean that one should be pessimistic and not cultivate any ambitions or goals? On the contrary, I think it means that life consists of delicate balances. I often mistakenly believe that a good result is simply coming from applying myself to something diligently, but experience suggests otherwise. There are many minute conditions that go into the making of a result. Many people contribute to a single success in life. I suspect that a lot of what results in life is coming from good merits that have ripened from the past.  Another factor is the kinds of ‘luck’ that arise from our care for other people. Caring for others in some way, be it listening or simply loving someone as they are, already creates a positive life experience. These forms of care don’t necessarily result from ‘hard work’ or ‘building knowledge’, but there does seem to be a connection with being fully present with someone. And this form of being present is a skill. In a funny way, it is also a skill to let go of the sense of time altogether, when others’ needs require that one suspend the sense of chronologic time.

The other day, I was in the Thursday evening meditation session, and the leader was discussing some key distinctions between Mahayana and Theravadin Buddhism with a practitioner. The discussion was supposed to end at around 9 pm, but, in fact, the discussion became quite intense and involved. I could see the instructor intensely trying to reach the practitioner and to show her a fresh way to look at her practice. I decided to allow their conversation to continue in spite of the fact that, as a time-keeper, I need to keep control  of the session time. It turns out that the clock on my phone read 10:37 pm when I next take stock of the time…almost two hours of conversation. And still, I decided that interrupting the moment might not be such a good idea. The moment seemed more precious and crucial than taking stock of the time.

Of course, when I told the instructor about the time, he looked visibly ruffled. “Oh my gosh, I’m in trouble,” he said, realizing that he had to inform his cousin’s wife that he will be late for his evening’s rest in their home. Yet, somehow, it felt important for me to allow the teacher to speak from his heart,  for however long we could possibly stay in the meditation room.

I think that I knew not to interrupt the flow of the conversation, because experience tells me there are more important things than keeping track of time. Sometimes, the most important moments in life don’t have any time assigned to them. And they happen when I have released all expectation that there should be a special time for anything. Another example of this happened to me this morning as I was doing moving meditation exercise with a visiting Fashi. Though a full fifty minutes had passed through the whole exercise, it really didn’t feel that long at all. I had released my sense that the moving exercise is only a preliminary to the ‘real’ practice of sitting. I saw that this moment is always the moment when mind is manifesting. In letting go of that sense of ‘the real thing happens in one hour’, I was able to experience the unique quality of each moment.

I think that all life is cobbled together from the materials of the moment. Even this blog is the same: choppy, soupy, inconsistent, and makeshift. Sometimes I write about books I read, while other times I write about walks. Does it have to be consistent? It happens to be what I can grasp in this given moment.