from the greenhouse

no one to see

a cold sun rising

****

It is a cold morning in Southeast Texas. The temperature went down to 49 degrees F overnight. For the gulf coast, that feels cold. A weather front came through last evening and brought the cold north wind with it. Tomorrow morning may be even colder. As I stood in the doorway of our greenhouse, I watched the sun rise. It prompted me to write a haiku about it. I wanted to express what I was seeing and feeling and ended up trying several different ways of saying it. The haiku above is what I finally came up with.

First I tried, “I see” a cold sun rising. But then I started thinking about the Buddhist doctrine of non-self. Buddhism says there is no self. To explain, (and keep in mind here that I don’t claim to be a Buddhist and am not an expert on Buddhist doctrine) Buddhism says that everything changes, all the time and therefore there is nothing about a person that one can pinpoint as a permanent, unchanging self, and therefore, there is no self. Simple, right? This is one of the hardest Buddhist ideas to grasp, even for Buddhists. The idea that everything changes all the time isn’t just a Buddhist doctrine, it’s actually scientifically proven. The molecules that make up our bodies are in constant motion so technically, you are different at any one moment than you were a moment ago. Also, everything breaks down, ages, deteriorates, and dies, so, everything changes. Keep in mind that this idea was realized by Buddhists more than 2600 years ago, long before science discovered atoms and molecules.

So with that in mind, how do I write a haiku about the sun rising when there is no one (no self) to see it. A ha! A moment of clarity. There is no one to see it! That’s how this haiku came about. If you’re not an aspiring Buddhist, and even if you are, I wouldn’t get too worked up about understanding the whole non-self idea, but it is interesting to think about. There really isn’t a permanent self if our bodies are constantly changing, and yet, we know we exist because we are experiencing our lives at every moment. It was the philosopher Rene Descartes who said, “I think, therefore, I am”, which makes sense because if you can think then you know you’re alive. Buddhism asks, who is it that’s doing the thinking? Who knows, if we finally grasp the idea, maybe we’ll just disappear!