The Flower is Present Now
The universe is elegant. And there is a harmony in it. We see that the Earth is beautiful, that the beings in it are beautiful. In the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Buddha described the universe to be like one single flower. The cosmos is like a bank of flowers. We we see the planet as a beautiful flower, and each of us is also a beautiful flower. No matter what age we are we are very beautiful. That is the insight of the Buddha in the Avatamsaka sutra. The cosmos is a kind of treasure. Each being on the planet is a flower.
The flower is present now. That is the first insight. Flower means beauty. But we also learn that there is a true flower and a fake flower.
There are also untruthful garlands of flowers. We have to be careful not to be carried away by them. There are many flowers that are appealing, but are fake. So there are true flowers and false flowers. We need to know that a flower is impermanent and we should cherish it. We glide like a leaf that falls.
We travel to space and look at the earth. It is so dark in space, but when we look back we see how Earth is so beautiful. If we look deeply, we can see the billions of people and what they are doing to each other. Sometimes we need to go far away to see the value. This is what some astronauts have said upon return.
How do we treasure that person? How do we treasure the planet? That picture from space can be a bell of mindfulness. To understand and to see. To wake up.
- Thich Nhat Hahn
from a recent Dharma talk
Shelley Frankling
