宗博季刊第116期

28 we will be able to live from the spiritual core of our being, which leads to a life of happiness and fulfillment. What is happiness? I live in the USA, a country which defines the “Pursuit of Happiness” as one of the cornerstones of its constitution. But what we pursue is often an illusory, hedonistic (pleasure-centered) form of happiness: namely our obsession with material wealth and comfort, with power, status and image. We only have to look at the social media to see how much they are a window for our narcissism, for the time consuming occupation with ourselves. This prevents us from really seeing the suffering in the world, and from earnestly wanting to do something about it. That kind of hedonistic happiness is a treadmill that ultimately leads us to failure, because we can never have enough and will always want more. The Buddha has given us a very clear analysis of the illusory kind of happiness that is tied to our occupation with the egoic Self. He calls it “Dukkha” – dis-satisfactoriness. “Dukkha” literally means a wheel that is not centered correctly on its hub and always rubs against something. When we see the small I as the center of the universe, there is always something that goes against and threatens it, something that makes us unhappy, unable to simply take things as they are. True Well-being, true happiness or “Sukkha” is something that frees us from our self-occupation. It is something that can be learned and cultivated through meditation. There is no secret to meditation – it only requires constant practice. True happiness is found not in aggrandizing the Self, but in “Forgetting the Self and being actualized in the myriad things,” as Zen Master Dogen put it. In other words, true happiness is a state of being, a state of human flourishing, in which the separation between Self and others, the separation between myself here and the world out there has been completely seen trough as an illusion. The Realization that the myriad things and I are not separate, that we are deeply interconnected, that we are one existence, is that which opens up wide the power of love that is the core of our being as well as the core of the universe. It is that power of love that is true happiness. The Avatamsaka Sutra gives us a beautiful image of this interconnectedness in the image of Indra’s net, which covers the entire universe. Each knob of the net contains a shining jewel, and if you look into one of the jewels, you see the entirety of all the other jewels reflected in that one jewel. That one shining jewel is your own heart and mind, the spiritual core of your being. So far I have spoken of goodness, beauty, gratitude, responsibility, happiness, interconnectedness and love as those values that can help us address the environmental crisis at this time at which we are also still reeling from the Covid 19 global pandemic. Allow me to say a word about the expression “environment.” The word literally implies that there is something, us humans, at the center, and that everything else is out there surrounding us. But as I have just explained, this perception is self-centered and illusory. In the language of the Avatamsaka Sutra, each Jewel is the totality of all other jewels – there is no separate center and nothing surrounding it. We are not separate from our so-called environment. Therefore it is more correct to speak about the eco-system, or ecology, and to know that we are an intricate part of that ecosystem, not something or somebody detached from it or surrounded by it. Once we clearly wake up to the fact of our interconnectedness with everything else on this Earth, we deeply understand that our lives, our choices, affect the totality of all other lives in this universe. During Covid, our global interconnectedness has become very apparent and clear. It is one of the important lessons of Covid, the virus that knows of no barriers. All of us have felt the pain of separation from loved ones, the anxiety and uncertainty, the closing of our schools, playgrounds and houses of worship. And more importantly, so many of us beheld and shared the pain of those who lost their health, their loved ones or their entire livelihoods to the pandemic, and also witnessed heroic acts of solidarity and generosity that we are capable of when the situation calls for it. But we also painfully witnessed injustice, violence and death, in the killing of George Floyd by a police officer on May 23, which has sparked protest movements in every city here in the US and throughout the world. After being isolated for so long by the virus, people of all ages, ethnicities and skin colors have come out in solidarity, marching together to speak out against and break the barriers of separation, racism, injustice and violence that are 國際交流

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