my budhist blog number 90

Hi Everybody,

I just want to say a huge thank you to all the people who've taken the trouble to read this blog, and all those people who've said some really encouraging things about the book, that it's interesting and even inspiring and hugely accessible and easy to read and immensely informative about both Buddhism and science.....and so on.....the sort of feedback that every writer would love to receive. So a zillion thank you's from my heart.

Right, well we're in the middle of this section about the fundamental Buddhist principle of the interconnectedness of all things, and we've just had that wonderful quote from that truly great Kenyan lady Wangerei Maathai in which she talks about all human beings who have ever lived on the planet coming from the same stem that originated in East Africa. That's where we pick it up.

' So that is the powerful bond that Buddhism and now modern science, ask us to understand, binds us all so closely to everyone on Earth. And remarkably it doesn't stop there. Because the very materials of which we are made connect us intimately to every rock, every planet, every galaxy spinning out ther eon the edge of darkness. We are that is made of the very same atoms and molecules. It is simply impossible to conceive how a young man livin gin Northern India all those years ago, and seeking desperately to understand the nature of reality, could possibly have perceived such a level of connectedness, but we are indeed, connected across the universe down to the level of the atom and the molecule.

' ...all matter is the same...the modern particle physicist explains to us,...the matter of ehich the stars are made is known to be the same as the matter on earth...there are the same kinds of atoms there as on earth. The same kinds of atoms appear to be in living creatures as in non-living creatures...'

And let's be clear what we have here. We have a radical modern theoretical physicist coming suprisingly, astoundingly close to the way in which fully 700 years earlier, the young Buddhist social revolutionary Nichiren Daishonin sought to transmit to us, Shakyamuni's understanding of of the closeness of our connection to everything in our environment. So he writes,

' Life at each moment encompasses the body and mind and self and environment of all sentient beings in the Ten Worlds as well as all insentient beings..including plants, sky, earth, and even the minutest particles of dust. Life at each moment permeates the entire realm of phenomena and is revealed in all phenomena..''

Body mind and self, sentient and insentient beings, and plants and sky and earth and dust. Nothing is excluded. Both Buddhism and science it would seem are at one in explaining to us that we live out our lives as part of a totally joined up world. And, I would argue, the more we can grasp and internalise that truth, the more profoundly it is likely to influence our behaviour.

But it poses a huge question for us...what difference does it make? And that might well be the most important question we can ask ourselves. What real difference does all that theoretical stuff make to our daily lives? '

And that's where we go next week to answer that question head on.
Thanks for reading. If you know anyone who might conceivably be interested in reading this you would be doing them a huge favour if you were to pass it on to them.

See you next time,
William
The book The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon  and Kindle.