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Standing as a sentinel at the foot of my drive, I took this photograph of a bitter dock, a common weed in NH. The Bitter Dock is foreign to our state and, like many other immigrants, is considered to be an invasive pest; however, in the more-than-human world, it is held in high esteem by both birds and animals, who hanker after its seeds.
At first glance, my photograph only captures a moment, as Claude Monet set out to do with his paintings. But his work has become more than that: Revealing a depth revered by people all over the world.1
In terms of my own life, my bitter dock picture is equally profound.
When I took this shot, I meant only to document the bitter dock’s colorful autumn garb. But the longer I looked at it, the more memories it brought back, starting when I was a little boy of six. That’s when the loggers came to clear-cut the majestic stand of white pines adjacent to my home, changing the whole ecology of my personal landscape.
Cutting these massive trees opened up a clear view of the sky, inviting in a smorgasbord of sunshine-seeking species, including bitter docks and high-bush blueberries. After a few years, my mother and I were able to go there berry-picking, gaining access to the land through the same gap in the stonewall where the bitter dock now guards my driveway.
It was a different time.
When those white pines were harvested around 1950, timber had monetary value, while land in rural NH had virtually none. A few years later, this allowed my father to buy the land under the trees for the princely sum of one hundred dollars—land that soon would become mine.
Over the years, mixed hardwoods grew back where the pines once stood, gradually shading out the blueberry bushes and restricting the bitter dock to a roadside plant. For the last fifty years, I have shared this land with the maples, oaks, and birches, cutting their wood to feed my woodstove. I am aware that, as a human being, I am so much more of an ecological threat than my little bitter dock plant could ever be.
While many consider this little plant to be a pesky weed, for me, it represents a higher truth. It reminds me of Buddha’s Flower Sermon, a wordless talk he gave to his disciples by holding up a white flower.2 Only one person understood his message, signaling his approval by smiling.
Within Buddhism, the Flower Sermon signifies the direct transmission of wisdom without words; it is based on first-hand experience rather than rational creeds, intellectualism, or analysis.3
The photo I took of this bitter dock is my wordless transmission of t his truth: It represents the primordial cycles of nature, grounded in my real-life experience during the short span of my 78 years on Earth.
I honor this wordless transmission by smiling.
xxx
1 comment:
“The Flower Sermon itself doesn’t appear in the Pali Canon, which is the oldest written record of the Buddha’s teachings. It is thought to have originated in China, which raises the question of why anyone would want to invent an incident in the life of the Buddha which didn’t actually happen.
The reason that the Chinese sources who first came up with the Flower Sermon would have attributed it to the Buddha was to give it a sense of authority and legitimacy, so that it appears to be rooted in the teachings of the historical Buddha. On one level this is clearly a false legitimacy, since it is a made-up story. However, there is a truth to the Flower Sermon as well, in that the teaching has in fact been passed on since the time of the Buddha, right down to the present day, whether or not it happened in exactly the way described, and whether or not all the names are correct. At least one person in each generation must have passed on the teaching, and not just as a library or a series of teachings, but as a living tradition. The Life of the Buddha always has to be lived, and attributing this story to the Buddha himself is a skilful means that helps people to take this teaching seriously, and to engage with it sincerely.”
From zen Buddhism in the east midlands.
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