The lotus
My initial interest in discussing Buddhism was to go after a long deep dive in to one specific area. That was as far as I planned to go. Entire bookstore sections dedicated this area of study if one wanted to go any further. The more I thought about this, especially while watched the Little Buddha extras and commentary, I shifted that position some.
As I watched the movie family go through losing their house my extended family was going through the same thing. The next chapter is about my thoughts on dealing with loss and duḥkha. The section came to me in a similar fashion as one of the shows I viewed on the life of Prince Siddhartha. On one of the TV shows on his beginnings the Prince was so overcome by the discovery of suffering that he lost track of everything around him. He constantly walked right past the people he knew like they weren’t even there and said that the riches of his kingdom now “suffocated him.”
I identified with this. Memories of loss in my own life became so clear that trying to concentrate on the day to day tasks become impossible until I could get it all down on a page. In the next chapter I think through my own personal ideas on the Buddhist teachings of duḥkha as they have occurred in my life. It also has the purpose of comparing and contrasting with the chapter purpose.
While likely haven’t thought of it this way a talk on poetry I listened to said that many poets saw the good and the bad as two sides of the same coin. My reading this year of No Mud, No Lotus reinforced this point. I forgot the significance of the lotus in Buddhist symbolism. The beautiful flower has to grow in the mud. If you set it on marble it won’t grow. The good parts of life come through the hard times not in spite of them. I hope that this section will give you some new considerations on the difficult parts of life that you may have not considered before.
