Good morning!
We can enjoy relatively good weather surrounded by flowers inside and out with
birds’ singing and butterflies’ visiting, while heat waves, wild fires, droughts, etc.
are at other places. It is especially good to sit and serve for the buddhas and
bodhisattvas together with old-timers, mid-timers, and new-timers,
while the world stray and seek matters and powers in disasters.
We offer flowers to the Buddhas, which was the origin of Ikebana (flower
arrangement, lit. letting flowers live). I ordered three books on Ikebana for us,
two of which seem not quite good for offering the Buddhas. Zen in the Art of
Flower Arrangement by Gustie Herrrigel, consort of Eugen Herrigel who wrote
Zen in the Art of Archery, is good to learn its way.
The book says, “Of the ten virtues, the first requisite is union with the flower’s heart
(hana-no-kokoro) and the ‘universal heart…by listening to the flower heart and
taking into his own heart, he communicates freely…a current of love runs from the
flower heart to the human heart, to the universal heart and back again.” We must
become flowers’ hearts in the field and the life itself.
I forwarded the video info of the presentations and the presenters’ panel discussion
commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Club of Rome’s Limit to Growth at
Smithsonian Institution to the Global System Ethic elist, etc. The presenters talked a
bout our overshoot of the mass production, consumption, the disasters due to the
climate change, mass extinctions, etc.
Lester Brown said that if something like the heat wave that happened in Russia with
deaths and fires last year took place in Chicago the consequences would be the
global devastation and recommended his Plan B, replacing the business as usual of
Plan A. They said that we must redefine ‘security’ from more dangerous militarism
to more safe and sustainable life system.
Toothpaste is for the health of tooth. The health of tooth must come
first and last. The security of the global life system comes first and last, not the
military power which causes more danger of ABC weapons and wars, loss of
resources and trust, etc. Life and heart must come first before power and matter.
The former are the prerequisite and paramount for the latter.
We must not mistake roots for leaves, means for ends, holiness (wholesome whole)
for sinfulness (separated self), King Mirror’s mind for blind men’s manners. This
sitting in serenity and satisfaction is the way of neither mistake nor misconduct, but
unity of means and ends, functioning in freedom and fullness, limitlessness of life
and heart, and ambrosia of immortality and joy.
7/21/13
