Existence

A long time ago, a monk was sitting below a great tree in what was known as the Lumbini Gardens.
He was approached by a traveller, who bowed respectfully to the monk as he stepped closer.

The monk, who had been sitting in meditation, now looked up at the traveller and smiled.

“Dear monk, said the traveller, I have walked far today in the heat of the sun, can I sit beside you for a little while in the cool shade of this tree?”

The traveller sat down, wiping the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.
“If I may ask, are you from around here, and if not, where are you heading?” asked the traveller.

“Yes, please do”, said the monk and gestated his hand to the grass at his side.

“I can answer your questions in two ways”, said the monk, “one way is simpler and one is truer.”

“I would like to hear the truer answers then”, said the traveller while fetching some water from his packing, offering it to the monk, who kindly declined, before himself drinking with great thirst.

“Very well”, replied the monk, “I come from nowhere and nowhere am I going.”

The traveller’s eyes widened. He looked over at the monk who only smiled back warmly.

“I wonder, who are you?” asked the traveller, “Although I am not from around here, if you tell me your name, I might have heard of a monk such as yourself.”

“Do you want the smaller answer or the greater answer?” replied the monk.

The traveller paused before answering. Then urged by his curiosity, said, “The greater answer.”

“Very well”, said the monk, “I am nameless.”

The traveller could sense that the monk was not making a fool of him.
“Dear monk, can you explain what you mean by that?”

“Yes”, said the monk, “what you see when you look at me is but a temporary manifestation upon a long stream of appearances and transformations.”

The traveller could feel his curiosity increase with every word the monk said.

The monk spoke again, “I can sense you have more questions to ask.
I will answer five more of your heart’s most burning questions, then I must resume my contemplation.”

The traveller savoured the taste of a gulp of water in his mouth, as he thought about what questions to ask the monk.

After a few minutes the traveller spoke up and said,
“Dear monk, I will ask you this, how can I overcome my fear of getting mortally injured and dying on my path before I reach my destination?”

“By realising that nonexistence does not exist and that you are an inextricable part of that which is existence”, said the monk,
“but you must recognise this within yourself.
Your body is precious and a part of you, so you are alive and therefore never immune to changes which occur in life.
But just as your body is part of you, you are part of something greater.
Your being is part of being in itself. Your innate being is without limits and not confined by life, nor subject to death – which is, how ever, the last destination of any path in this life.
Still it is of no use to worry about things which is out of our hands. There are circumstances of being alive which we all must come to accept.
One who is alive cannot avoid the destiny of dying, of bodily death, that is a fact, just as the fact that death cannot avoid the life which came before it and death cannot avoid the continuation of life itself.
The path you walk in life is yours to decide, there is always choice if you are conscious and aware, that is the fate which is still in your hands.”

“Thank you, kind monk. Please, can you tell me more about how I am supposed to be an ‘inextricable part’ of existence?”

“The lineage of your own being, of your own existence, is indefinite, and just as the sky is not subject to the changing nature of the cloud, the quintessence of your being extends back to time immemorial and even far past concept of time, or beginning and end.
As there is no beginning and no end to a perfect circle, such is the true nature of being.
This is the space in which your life has taken roots.

“Your body arrived upon the tide of life and now dwells for a while in the house of a lifetime, before life, then, leaves the body, as a hermit crab leaves the shell it found on the beach to return by the ebb to the sea.

“Life is contained as though a great coral reef within the sea of existence, and it is here life continues to unfold in its countless of ways, it is here, on the butterfly wing of a current, that we meet this very moment.
And just as this moment does not go anywhere by itself, so existence does not go away, it is us that move through the space of existence and call this passing, the passing of time – and thus, the passing of our lives.”

The traveller was startled by the monks candid expression and before he thought twice, another question had surfaced, which he could not suppress,
“What is change then, wise monk, if existence in itself is not changing, then what is?”

“I will provide you with the greater and truer answer”, said the monk,
“Part of the nature of life is change, so all of life is subject to change.
Just as the turn of the seasons makes the leaves of the trees change colour, or makes them appear as buds in spring and by the cold of winter, make the leaves fall out of appearance, or form, and then reappear as new leaves.
The new leaves are a continuation of the old leaves and are as such, inseparable, as they have sprung forth from deep in the roots of the trees which were nourished by the old leaves that eventually returned to the soul and the roots of all the Earth.

“The tree is said to be greater than its leaves and it is, yet life’s own nature is to grow and wither in an unbroken ebb and flow. But life moves within existence”, continued the monk,
“and although life must eventually leave the body, as an inhalation of air must eventually bring about an exhalation of air – although it appears that we must leave life behind, existence does not leave life, nor does it leave us when we exit life or enter us when we enter life. We cannot exit from existence.

“But change is inescapable within life because the nature of life is to be ever-moving in a series of immediate and ripple-effect interactions between the elements, some of which are invisible to us, but which always take place in us, as though currents that move in the river,-
the torrents of the world, the actions and reactions of ourselves in the world, with the world and to the world – with all its sentient beings, and the world with, in and to ourselves, are all part of each other, as the beads of the waves on the strings and spools of the sea. Life and the world of life is conjoined, as is the mind and the body.

“If the flow of life froze to ice, then it would not be life anymore. The flow is ceaseless and the flow is the very pulse of life.
Even when we sit completely still and with complete stillness of mind, we are moving, ageing, living organic beings, and the elements are moving through and within our bodies.”

~*~

They sat silently for a while.
The day seemed to have stopped mid-afternoon, as if it were an old train in a station, waiting for its passengers to board, the steam rising and sinking in the sky.
Some birds in the treetops which they sat below were singing their sweet evergreens into the passing breeze, the same old songs that were the sound of lullabies to the traveller, many years ago.

The traveller, who had been staring partly into the wavy blur of the distance and partly on a patch of yellow-green grass before him, for a while, now looked up and turned back toward the monk.

They smiled at each other.
The traveller felt how the words of the monk had soaked through his thoughts, as sunlit drops of rain on dry skin, and were now reverberating within him.
He could feel the formless rising in the body of his mind, and now another question was resting in his hand.

The traveller folded his hands, saying,
“Kind monk, how come we are so different, you and me?
You are wise beyond your years and I am just a passerby. Unsure of my destination, each day I take to the road with doubts clouding my mind.
You must be able to see the great difference between you and myself.”

The monk seized the look of the traveller, and answered,
“There are only minor differences between us and they are all but matters of sensory experience and appearances.
The word insight, or in-sight, points to the fact that seeing in-depth requires one to see inside. That experiencing deeper truth means looking within.

“When we look only with our eyes we see only the surface of things and then it’s easy to get blindsided by appearances, as when you look on the surface of the ocean and get blinded by the sun reflecting on the water and so, cannot see the dimension of depth which is right below the surface.
Yet, it takes only the gentle dip of a finger to pierce through that sky-mirroring veil and know of the deep vast sea underneath.

“We are all unique through our experiences, perceptions and abilities, but if we gaze deeper into ourselves, our understanding simultaneously deepens, and as we peel away more and more layers of misunderstanding, notions of difference past the surface level begin to gradually dissolve, revealing the true heart of existence which is our inter-existence and that which makes all hearts beat in incorruptible equanimity and unison within this moment, within us all, this shared moment, which is the ageless face of forever, without a single wrinkle. Here is a sameness and a space which we all share and to which, we all belong.

“Even now, sitting here, we are travelling, as if on the back of a great blue whale, we are traveling on Earth together, through space, in the very same compartment, now, in the shade of this tree.
Wherever you are, a part of me exists. Wherever I am, a part of you are.
But even though I am here with you, as evident to your eyes by my appearance, and to your ears by the words I speak, I am also nowhere to be found.

“How so, you may ask?
As you can see the words “now” and “here” in the word Nowhere. The word Myself consists of “my” and “self”.
My Self, which is to say, a separate, unconnected Now of my own, does not exist as other than a reflection on the surface of the self-reflecting mind, which then would appear to be separate and rootless from the moment in which we dwell.

“Now, which is ever-present and therefore goes nowhere. The presence of the present is everywhere, at once and always, it is every moment, present and existing, just as the subconscious mind is present whether we are conscious or not.
So this moment in itself would more accurately define myself, and define us, not as merely “you” and “I”, which are limited conceptions, but limitlessly, as a clear sky when you look up.

“Try to let this cloud over there represent me, and this cloud over here represent you.
If that is how we see ourselves, then we appear as separate and alone, floating apart in a vast blue void.
But the sky is what contains the clouds.
The sky is as our common being, existence in itself, in which appears a patchwork of all the elements and all that which is subject to change.

“The sky, how ever, does not change, though it be night or day, or whether thunder, sunshine or rainbows display upon it, the sky in itself remains the same,- unshaken and uncracked by lightning or quaking clouds.
The sky represents our inner being, which is interconnected.
We, that is, our togethernesses, our shared aliveness, which is without the biases of “you” and “me”, this form or that form.
The sky is one sky, though it contains many horizons, whereupon the sun and the moon dawns and sets.
In a similar way, life contains many lives, but is one life nonetheless.”

The monk ceased to speak and he smiled.

“Meritorious and benevolent monk”, said the traveller bowing his head, “What is this sameness and togetherness to which we all belong?
Please inform me.”

“Our sameness is our point of origin in every moment,” said the monk, “it is our eternal home in the present, it is our interconnected existence and it is the gathering point where everything connects.
There is but air between us, yet even the air is as a meal shared between us, as siblings, with every breath, equally and seamlessly.

“We are of the Earth with its Woods and its Mounts, and the Sea with its Waves and its Tides, and the Sky with the Sun and the Moon, which are all facets of the same infinite, brilliant gem of existence.
We are one kind. Life’s kind.

“The life in you cannot be separated from the life in me. Your life and my life is one life. You are life in another form than mine, but our difference in form is but a temporal mirage.
The same underlaying and overarching existence embrace us all, embraces all life, as the sky embraces all the planet, and the same air moves in and around us at all times.
Your breath and my breath is truly inseparable.”

The monk smiled again, in a soulful way, carefree and sorrowless, with an almost touchable aura of ease and grace, as if he had never experienced the devastating agonies of life.
And as he smiled, sensed the traveller, he smiled not only with his lips and through the warmth of his eyes, but with his whole body, he smiled with his entire being.
And the traveller smiled back, forgetting all about his many worries and expectations, he felt the need for a destination fall away, effortlessly as a fall-leaf.
In his mind there was now peace, and nourished by this peace, a feeling of freedom rose up from in his heart and opened in wave upon wave before his inner vision.

The traveller thought about how far he had journeyed and how he was a stranger on this unfamiliar land, yet how he had been received as a guest of honour below the tree, by the monk.

At this time, gratitude welled up in the traveller’s heart and he was just about to express his deep appreciation for having met a man of such kindness, who, without receiving anything in return, had given of his time to a stranger, while also sharing so generously from his yield of insights, such blossoms of light from his own mind and heart.

Right at this moment, as the traveller had gathered his thoughts of gratitude in a bouquet which he was about to voice, the monk gently placed his hand on the traveller’s shoulder with a bright smile, then turned to him and looked him in the eyes with a warm yet piercing gaze.
The traveller felt as if the monk had already received his words of praise before he had given voice to his thoughts. Then the monk spoke and said,
“My old friend, you have travelled far and so you have forgotten me, you do not recognise me anymore, and this I know, because much life has passed and I have inevitably changed in appearance many times, as have you.
I have been travelling far, just as you have, and I have drifted in and out of form.
I too have forgotten the faces of the centuries that came and went, the risings and fallings of a thousand years, but in this moment, in this beautiful moment, I remember you, my friend.
Look deep into your own heart and you will know me as well.” ♡

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Written by Thomas Skov Olsen. © 💛