Hiromi_X

I grew up Buddhist, but I'm not knowledgeable about it. Not being religious, I didn't really get into studying Buddhist doctrine while growing up. However, nowadays, I'm getting more interested in Buddhism again because I think it'll help me formulate my personal unified theory of sobriety.

I watched The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill some years ago because I love parrots and expected to see something heartwarming and simple and good (which I did - it's a great little film). I didn't expect a nugget of Buddhist wisdom, and it was lovely and so stuck with me. Mark Bittman, the central figure in the documentary who studied and cared for the titular wild parrots, paraphrased and interpreted a quote by Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen priest, who visited Yosemite National Park and was struck by the waterfalls. I mistakenly remembered the quote as being from D.T. Suzuki; this is a different Suzuki. Bittman doesn't quote Suzuki completely in the movie, tailoring the quote specifically for his relationship with the parrots, but here is the actual quote from Suzuki's book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (edited for length), which I took from this site:

I went to Yosemite National Park, and I saw some huge waterfalls. The highest one there is 1,340 feet high, and from it the water comes down like a curtain thrown from the top of the mountain. It does not seem to come down swiftly, as you might expect; it seems to come down very slowly because of the distance. And the water does not come down as one stream, but is separated into many tiny streams. From a distance it looks like a curtain. And I thought it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. It takes time, you know, a long time, for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human lives may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our lives. But at the same time, I thought, the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river. Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. It is as if the water does not have any feeling when it is one whole river. Only when separated into many drops can it begin to have or to express some feeling.

[...]

Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called "mind-only," or "essence from this oneness"; as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life.

If you want to know more, the above link contains the entire book, I believe. If that stops working, I imagine the book's available at bookstores or libraries. I don't know how good the rest of the book is, however, but I love that quote. It contains elements of a central tenet in Buddhism: Don't become attached to ephemeral or transient things. This is a principle that should help me in my sobriety; I can't depend on changeable things for happiness, whether money, jobs, or relationships. My serenity must come from a steady, certain source from within.

If you're curious, and really into animal rights and whatnot, here is Bittman's take on the waterfall metaphor, taken from www.wildparrotsfilm.com/PressKit.doc:

"In Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki-roshi tells a story about a trip he took to Yosemite. While there, he stopped to watch a waterfall. It was one of the very tall ones, and he noted that when the stream at the top of the ridge hit the cliff, it split into many individual droplets on its way to the bottom. There, the individual droplets came back together in one stream. I'd read that story many times without comprehending his point. It's simple: There is one river until it hits that cliff which is life. The one river then breaks up into many individual living beings—humans, animals, and plants—until we hit the bottom of the cliff and become one river again. Each droplet loses only its identity as a single drop. But nothing is really lost. It's all still there. I'd encountered this idea in different ways many times over the years, but I'd never grasped it. It's an elementary idea, and not so difficult to understand. But my problem was that I'd been thinking about consciousness solely in human terms. It wasn't until I considered the minds of the parrots that my outlook broadened. So my problem was not with anthropomorphism; rather, it was with anthropocentrism, which is seeing human beings as the center of the universe. The parrots broke through that illusion. The understanding that ultimately came to me from looking in the parrots' eyes was that their consciousness is one with mine. We are all one consciousness, and each finite being embodies a little piece of it. This is the preciousness of all that lives."

Years ago, I might have scoffed at Bittman's use of Buddhism, dismissing it as inauthentic and self-indulgent. But religion is more than mere doctrine; it's a living resource that people use in their lives. So who's to say what is and is not authentic, and on what grounds?