Two Fingers Pointing to the Moon

A complete grasp of non-duality is beyond limited beings such as ourselves. This is why Dōgen wrote “when one side is illumined, the other is dark.” Even in satori, we only have hints at and intimations of the undivided wholeness that we call “reality.” There is always a greater understanding of that undivided reality to be be had, but never a complete understanding.

Words too, when skillfully used, can also point towards an understanding of nonduality, however incomplete. They can never take us all the way there, but sometimes part of the way is all we can do. The Flower Garland Sutra’s metaphor of Indra’s Net is one such skillful use of words, and Dogen’s endlessly playful permutations and inversions of phrases and sentences are another.

I am thinking today about two stories that can act as metaphors for nonduality. The first is about the role of causation in the assassination of President Lincoln, and the second is a spatial metaphor about points in a circle.

The Lincoln Assassination

If we ask what caused Abraham Lincoln to die on April 14, 1965, one short-hand answer is that he was shot by John Wilkes Booth. It seems reasonable to say that John Wilkes Booth caused his death. But how many other factors also contributed to that moment in history? For example, if Lincoln had never been elected president, or if the Civil War had never occurred, or if Junius Brutus Booth and Mary Ann Holmes had never given birth to John Wilkes, the assassination  never would have occurred. If the United States had not become a nation in 1776, or if the South had not depended on slave labor, it never would have occurred.  If the Greeks hadn’t invented theater and then if John Ford hadn’t renovated the First Baptist Church of Washington, D.C. to turn it into a theater, it never would have occurred. If firearms hadn’t been invented, it never would have occurred. If Lincoln’s guard had been at his post that night, or if General and Mrs. Grant had accompanied Lincoln as originally planned, things might have gone differently.  If Lincoln had caught a cold the day before and cancelled his trip to the theater, it wouldn’t have occurred—so even viruses get implicated in this event. All of the events we describe presuppose the evolution of homo sapiens, and the formation of a star and planet on which homo sapiens could evolve, bringing the laws of physics and the Big Bang into play. We can go on in this manner endlessly. In the end, there is no preceding event that is not, in some way, implicated in Lincoln’s assassination. The whole universe cooperated to make it happen.

But it is not this way only for major events; it is equally true for trivial events. All the world is also implicated in your next inbreath. Think of everything that had to happen for you to be alive, to be where you are right now at this point in your life and in this location, and to be breathing in the particular air molecules you are breathing in. So we can look at this present moment and anything occurring within this moment as a cooperative co-production of everything else in the world. And it is this way, moment after moment. The next step you take, the next thing you say. is the cooperative co-production of everything. The next time you sit zazen, imagine the whole world with all of its past leading up to the present completely involved with each inbreath and outbreath.

Points in a Circle

We can spatially schematize this idea to devise a variant of Indra’s web.  Imagine the area of a circle divided into an infinite number of points, each point representing a thing, process, or event.  Let’s pick out one of these points at random and imagine that there are arrows pointing to that point originating from every other point in the circle.  We can say that these arrows represent causation, or contribution, but we could also say they represent attention or caring, so that the whole universe of points causes, contributes to, attends to, or cares about that one infinitesimal point. We can then shift our attention to any other point within the circle and see that it too has an infinite number of arrows pointing to it that originate in every other point within the circle. In this image, every point is influenced by, attended to, and cared for by every other point. Even if you are infinitesimally small, you are always the focal point of the universe, but so is every other point.

The Lincoln story was a story about time and how things lead to or co-create each other. The points in the circle story is a story about space and how things are interrelated outside of time. They both point to the same thing, however, which is the infinitely intricate inter-relatedness of all things with each other.

Both images have the significant limitation, however, that here are no such things as disconnected zero-dimensional “points” or separate entities called “Lincoln,” “John Wilkes Booth” and “Ford’s Theater.” We create stories to illustrate how separate things are related, but ultimately, these things are not “interrelated,” but “inter-are” from the start.

Why is this important? Biology is stuck with the problem of how the 30,000,000 cells of the human body cooperate to make one “you.” How do embryonic cells “know” to differentiate and migrate where they need to go in a developing embryo? What are the feedback loops between the brain and autoimmune system? How do kinesins transport vesicles, organelles, and mitochondria along microtubules to exactly where they are needed within cells? We understand bits and pieces of how these processes work, but not the whole picture of how they all cooperate together—a picture that is too intricate and complex and always reorganizing itself as it adapts to changing conditions. The question of “how do these all cooperate” is already the wrong question because the body, from its time as a fertilized egg on, is always a unity, always one process we mentally break down into allegedly separate processes. And even that is wrong, because the body, from the start, is already one process together with the whole evolution of the species and with its interaction with its environment. Embryonic cells are processes that turn the environment into themselves as they grow from pinpoint specks to beings weighing over a hundred pounds, and that simultaneously spew out parts of themselves and return them to the environment.

Neither of these metaphors is perfect—no metaphor could be— but I think each points us in the direction of a greater apprehension of nonduality, a pair of fingers pointing to the moon.