Sunday, June 2, 2013

Call me a tree hugger....please!


Two Zen masters, friends for many years, visited one another in the monastery garden.  They strolled together among the stones, ponds, and trees.  They sat together in silence for several hours with no need for words.  Suddenly, one Zen master broke the conversation of silence as he began to chuckle softly.  He pointed towards the blossoming form before them and remarked with simple insight to his friend: “They call that a tree”.

I heard this story a long time ago, but I can’t recall the source.  It stuck with me.

And something also stuck with me that I heard at a dharma discussion I participate in at a Zen Center:  “There is a difference between the map and the terrain.”  This was given in response to a question regarding how much “truth” or “authority” to we (as Zen students) should ascribe to Zen writings, commentaries, and koans.  In Zen training, what is more important is our direct experience, not how well we can intellectualize the scriptures.

I assert that the same is true of Christianity and our practice as followers of Christ.  Scripture is one thing, experience is another.  The bible is a map, not the terrain itself.  It is important not to confuse the two.  It is equally important not to elevate the scripture above the level of that to which the scripture describes or points.  Our Christian injunction is to follow; to love and to serve; to walk the spiritual path, not to get lost in over intellectualizing the details of the map.  This is the teaching implicit in the parable of the “Good Samaritan.” 

So I sometimes share with people that there is just as much to learn from a flower, a beetle, a blade of grass, or a tree as there is from any religious scripture.  (This, after all, is how the tradition of Ch’an or Zen Buddhism came to be!).  The trick is to practice our spirituality in such a way that we are open and receptive to what a tree has to tell us.

This is what I learned from an Oak tree once…

Most people are afraid of change.  Some people seem to be afraid of diversity and think of seemingly perpetual differentiation as a worrisome or problematic trend.  And most people seem to be oblivious or resistant to the real and natural processes of life and death…they are afraid of impermanence.

Part of what makes an oak tree an oak tree is the magnificence of its beautifully fractillated, ever-branching complexity.  Germinating from a single acorn, this tree spends decades growing and branching into its unique form.  This form is determined by both genetics as well as by external events such as weather, disease, animals, and other natural and un-natural events.  But throughout this growth process, the oak tree naturally continues to branch in every available direction, each branch sprouting and budding left, right, up and down, in an almost endless process of bifurcation.  New acorns are produced and given to the earth, each containing its own explosive potential to become a fully grown oak tree.  The mature oak tree provides shade and habitat for other life forms.  It gives of itself, never questioning its truth, but always demonstrating its abundance and inherent oak-tree-ness.  And it never tries to be anything other than a fully bifurcated, magnificent oak tree, leaves of each branch lovingly supporting the life of the whole.  At the end of its life, the oak tree, like all living things, succumbs to the natural events of death and decay and surrenders its form to the earth from which it came.



What worries me is the way persons who are unable to hear or perceive what an oak tree has to say or who have failed to integrated these lessons, seem to insist on a world-view in which diversity is resisted, inclusivity is spurned, the reality of life and death is denied.  As if somehow they hold the secret “truth” that diversity, inclusivity, and impermanence are "wrong"; that what is best for the oak tree is to become a comparatively monolithic, eternally static cactus….without too much diversity, without deciduous change; for the oak tree to revert to a "simpler" form that is eternal and unmoving, upright and unbending.  I believe the religious term for this is “fundamentalism”.



Diversity is natural and good.  An oak tree by it's very nature is diverse.  It is impossible for an oak tree to be fundamentalist.

Cacti have spines…I’d much rather hug an oak tree.

fr. Scott+