In todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte today we present a short talk exploring impermanence and interconnectedness by Carunalaka titled: and#8220;Whatand#8217;s Love Got To Do With It?and#8221;
Dharmabytes from free buddhist audio
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. When I came in today, I was quite surprised at how many people were here, because I'd done a bit of a survey just to see who was coming, and everyone said they weren't. So, I was feeling quite relieved in a way, and of course I walked in and there's such a huge crowd, and I was speaking to someone over the counter downstairs, and he said to me, "Well, for your first talk, you've chosen a festival day to speak. Why couldn't you have just talked at a sanger day?" And of course, I hadn't thought about it. At a sanger night, I hadn't thought about it. And that's something that I tend to do, is sort of jump in the deep end, and it has some good results, and sometimes it's very terrifying. And I have this fixed view that I don't give talks. I'm not a person who gives talks, and I want to break that fixed view. I actually want to start giving talks. So, this is the inaugural talk, so I do hope you bear with me and are very kind to me. So, having said that, I am actually quite nervous, and I just want to give that as an example of what I'm going to talk about. So, my nervousness is an experience. We all have experiences. And the reason we have experiences is because of impermanence. We wouldn't have them without impermanence. And if we were to talk amongst ourselves right now, we'd find that we have many common experiences that are brought us here, together, today, in this room. And that's interconnectedness. And because of our common experience, and our sense of camaraderie, of all being here in this place together, with a similar feeling of goodwill towards one another, as a result of our practice, then we're experiencing matter or love. So, there's an example of impermanence means interconnectedness, means love, which is the basis of the talk. In this moment, a lot of this measure is directed towards me, and I'm really feeling that. So, even though I'm nervous, I'm just going to get on with giving this talk. So, just another, I just want to let you know that this talk sort of came out of a flow of consciousness, that lives as a result of a period of reflection, about a few words in a poem written by Vivian Marla. And there would actually be many ways to interpret the insight in this poem, and this is merely an offering, just one way of seeing it. So, what's love got to do with it? It's also subtitled Surprised by Joy, which was what I was originally going to call it, and that, hopefully, will be evident in the talk. So, the talk today is in celebration of Sanga Day. And I'll begin by reading you a part of this poem. The poem itself is dedicated to Amitabha, and Amitabha is the Buddha of Love, and I'm dedicating this talk also to Amitabha. "How can I learn to love like you?" I ask. Impermanence means interconnectedness, means love, comes the answer. You demand I reflect on this, as it reverberates like a mantra, over and over. Impermanence means interconnectedness, means love. "But how do I love that which I will lose?" I ask. "Ah, how can you lose that which is everywhere?" you say with a smile. I hear a bird song outside the shrine room, just a bird singing, but it is everything. The world becomes beautiful. Now, impermanence. Impermanence is a truth about the way things are, that is possibly the most obvious and readily accessible truth to all human beings. There's no human or being on this earth that escapes the experience of impermanence. We all experience it, moment to moment, from the moment we're born. So this talk aims to explore how through impermanence we experience the truth of interconnectedness and through deeply understanding interconnectedness, through really taking it on board, we can tap into a natural inclination of love or concern or care towards all beings. The Buddha taught us the truth of impermanence. He said that all things in samsara are conditioned. They're affected by conditions, they're dependent upon the arising and the falling of conditions. And all things conditioned are impermanence, insubstantial, and have no fixed self, no selfhood, no eye. He taught that there are no exceptions in samsara, not for a millisecond, does anything stay the same? Not even a diamond stays the same. Everything is dependent on conditions, and conditions change constantly without exception. Nothing stays still. Not an object, not a painting of an object, not a photo of an object. Everything is continually coming into being and fading away depending on conditions that are influencing it. There's nothing in samsara that can be relied upon as permanent or substantial or real. And everything is influenced by everything else without exception. And this is where interconnectedness comes in. And to illustrate this point, I'd like to read your part of a song by Tian Tong, who is a teacher or master to the Zen Master Dogan. It's called Plum Blossoms. Tian Tong's first phase of midwinter. Old plum tree bent and gnarled. All at once opens one blossom, two blossoms, three, four, five blossoms, both blossoms, uncountable blossoms. Not proud of purity, not proud of fragrance. Spreading, becoming spring, blowing over grass and trees, balding the head of a patch robed monk, whirling, changing into wind, wild rain, falling, snow all over the earth. The old plum tree is boundless, a hard cold rubs the nostrils. This poem is from Moon in a Dew Drop, where Dogan goes on to say that this old plum tree is boundless. All at once it blossoms open, and itself the fruit is born. And of itself the fruit is born. It forms spring, it forms winter. It arouses wind and wild rain. It is the head of a patch robed monk. It is the eyeball of an ancient Buddha. It becomes grass and trees. It becomes pure fragrance. Its whirling, miraculous transformation has no limit. Furthermore, the tree-ness of the great earth, high sky, bright sun and clear moon, derives from the tree-ness of the old plum tree. They have always been entangled, vine with vine. So, as human beings, we have a myriad of responses to the truth of impermanence, and it usually depends on how attached we are. How much we want to hold on to something, or how much we want to let it go. Even make it go away. And whether or not we care about it at all. So, more often than not, when we are not aware of something, it doesn't appear to affect us. So, the impermanence that someone else is experiencing, we may not experience ourselves as affecting us. So, what may be important or important to or affecting one person is not seemingly affecting another. At least, it is not important in the consciousness or the awareness of another. And this, to its extreme, is the way we delude ourselves by thinking that we are not connected, not involved with other beings and other things. Which can lead to exploitation, to abuse, or just simply not caring. And at its most extreme, this can be the case, even though those who are closest to us, our family and friends, work, colleagues and partners, they may be experiencing things and we are just not aware of it. We just see ourselves as completely separate beings. In this way, we can't, we won't even see how we affect others and how they affect us. And for the most part, we know by our closest relationships that what we say and do can affect them. But we don't look far beyond this to see what else we affect. So, just taking a step back to impermanence. One of the greatest things about impermanence is that everything changes. Without impermanence, we couldn't breathe, speak, think, move and so on. Impermanence creates the space in which movement happens. Without impermanence, everything would be static. There'd be no life, there'd be no experience of life, no relationships, no change, no movement at all. And some people will say, well that's true, but surely some things must stay the same. They must be constant and reliable and always there. But why? Why is that necessary? What would be the point? And who would get to decide what would be impermanence and what wouldn't or what should be impermanence and what shouldn't? Especially when one being's desire is another being's downfall. Some would want certain things to be permanent, while others would say, no, this can't stay the same. Some people's heaven is another person's hell. So impermanence means that things arise and fall on conditions, everything. Wars, famines, burns, forests, deserts, rivers and so on. And that includes human beings and all beings in Sanxara. Human beings are made up of six elements according to the Buddha. And these elements in innumerable combinations make up all of known existence. They're common to both humans and non-humans. They exist in everything around us. It's either the presence or the absence of the elements that makes all phenomena what it is. These elements, earth, water, fire, air, space and consciousness. For the purpose of this talk, I'll focus on the first five. So we're made up of the earth element of bones and skin and teeth and hair and nails and muscle tissue, the water element, blood, pus, urine, saliva, sweat, the fire element, body heat, air element, wind, gas, air and so on. And space, space is an interesting one. These other elements couldn't exist without space. They occupy space. They come together in space. They move through space. And all of these elements are common to everything that exists. And when one of these elements is present or absent, the degree to which it is shaped, the degree to which it is present or absent shapes the form and the texture and the quality of that thing just by its very presence or absence. Even water, as we experience it, contains some degree of all the other elements. As does fire, earth and air. We don't experience it in its pure form, necessarily. So you might be starting to wonder where this is all heading. I'm going to backtrack a bit. So what I'm talking about here is an aspect of impermanence. Because all of these elements are constantly interacting and changing. There's never a moment when they're not. We constantly eat, drink to stay alive, seek warmth, cut fingernails, shed skin, sweat, breathe in and out, inhale, defecate and so on. In fact, we completely renew our bodies. Our eyes, ears, nose, tongues, bones, organs, blood, every seven years. And after seven years, there's not one part of us that exists as it did seven years before. I think that's DNA that remembers what we were like and reproduced something similar, but it's never the same. So hence, the aging process and the growing process and the healing and the shrinking and the changing process. Constantly, we're taking in, using and shedding these elements of earth, water, air, fire and space. Everybody, everybody without exception is doing that. And because of impermanence, every single one of us will die. Every being alive on this planet will be dead in about 100 years, not from disaster, not from the natural process of impermanence, but from the natural process of impermanence, sorry. So the human race might continue, but it will be in the hands of another few billion people, not this few billion people. And quoting Shanti Deva, which is verse 16 from the chapter on vigilance, "Although today I am healthy, well-nourished and unafflicted, life is momentary and deceptive. The body is like an object on loan, but for a minute." So what on earth does this have to do with love and joy, you might be asking yourself, well, we're all deluded and we're all in this together. There's not another being in samsara that can escape the grip of impermanence, and everything is dependent on specific conditions. Nothing can exist independently from its own side, as it were. Everything depends on everything else, and in a sense contains everything else. The Hawaiian thinkers develop this vision in terms of mutual interpenetration of everything. The universe is imagined as a wondrous net of jewels, in which each jewel reflects every other jewel in an infinite play of light. And I'm going to read a poem by an American man called David Kervine, hence the American references, but because of interconnectedness, it can probably all relate. It's called the jeweled net of Indra. You might want to close your eyes for this and try and imagine this poem. Driving down the freeway, remembering Hindu mythology, Indra's nets, each intersecting weave holding a jewel reflecting every other facet of every other jewel infinitely. Suddenly, I see the hands that paint the white lines that lay the black ash felt, hands of a man joyous or lost soap scrubbing his body clean for dinner and beer, for the wife who loves him, hands that hold their tickets to London to see the grandmother, the hard-drinking pub matron whose body bore children in building rubble when the Nazi bombing relented. And if not for that war, would I be driving now, hands on the wheel, listening to the radio, recount the birth of the child named Sanami after the storm that drove her mother into the hills? With the meager dollars I send to rebuild a village, minted with the Rosa Christian eye above the pyramid, dreamed by this country's founders, as the all-seeing vision of a world where not a sparrow falls that we don't know about. Would I have known to send it, if not for the hands that flew the kite, that drew electricity from the skies, that made its way to the flat screen box, that unveils this jewel-linked world 24 hours of every gleaming day, weaving news with advertisements for clothes made by hands in China, nimbly sowing a dream of Hollywood and iPod and offering their bodies one by one for a better future. While the coal that fumes the electricity that plunges the needle, drifts in air that circles a globe that warms the ice-cats, that melt into sea, that shifts the current, that loves the wind, that swirls from heaven to earth, stirring one storm after another, blowing its diaphanous passion over New Orleans, like a trumpet sinking the heart so low with blue notes that flood is a dark cure for what burns this illusion that anyone stands alone, stranded on the roofs of our swollen houses, mouthing save me to a world whose millions of hands can turn up the volume loud enough to finally hear, or flick, flick with a single click, the entire interconnected vision of it all off. So it makes you wonder what's the point of maintaining our separateness. Why do we strive to invest in and hold dear our separateness? Do we really want to switch it all off? Knowing the truth of interconnectedness, really getting in touch with this can lead to an empathy with all beings, an empathy with this planet and with the universe. And with empathy for all, we're less likely to flick with a single click the entire interconnected vision of it all off. Understanding interconnectedness can bring us in touch with the need to care for one another and for the planet, not to add to the suffering of others, but to enhance the quality of life for all, even if it is just by being ethical and aware and not causing any more damage that is unavoidable. This love and care for one another based on the truth of impermanence and interconnectedness leads to joy, and this joy comes a surprise because the very thing that we run away from, which is impermanence, can lead us to the very thing we need to co-exist in harmony and to help one another grow and break through greed, hatred and delusion, and that thing is love, better. If we can really feel connected to all that lives on the planet, we'll want to be generous, we'll want to share and to take only what we need. The joy that arises from the understanding that leads to this way of being is the joy of freedom, the joy of release, the joy of knowing that nothing exists in isolation. We can then honour the natural tendency that arises towards sharing and generosity, replacing greed, caring and love, replacing aversion, understanding and wisdom, replacing delusion. In other words, we're going to want to operate in the creative mode, which is born of and leads to all-pervading, loving-kindness or matter. When we start to truly understand impermanence, we loosen our grip on or craving for existence because we know that it of itself is never really going to satisfy us. Our hearts turn towards the meaningful and to the joy of boundless love. I'm just going to finish with a palm, a small palm. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life, but to feel the affection that comes from those we do not know is something still greater and more beautiful. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donny. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]