The One-Straw Revolution - Multiworld India

that this rice, because it possesses the full joyousness of life, does notknow the sorrow of death?The same thing that happens to rice and barley goes on continuouslywithin the human body. Day by day hair and nails grow, tens ofthousands of cells die, tens of thousands more are born; the blood in thebody a month ago is not the same blood today. When you think that yourown characteristics will be propagated in the bodies of your children andgrandchildren, you could say that you are dying and being reborn eachday, and yet will live on for many generations after death.If participation in this cycle can be experienced and savored eachday, nothing more is necessary. But most people are not able to enjoy lifeas it passes and changes from day to day. They cling to life as they havealready experienced it, and this habitual attachment brings fear of death.Paying attention only to the past, which has already gone, or to thefuture, which has yet to come, they forget that they are living on the earthhere and now. Struggling in confusion, they watch their lives pass as in adream.“If life and death are realities, isn’t human suffering inescapable?”“There is no life or death.”“How can you say that?”The world itself is a unity of matter within the flow of experience,but people’s minds divide phenomena into dualities such as life anddeath, yin and yang, being and emptiness. The mind comes to believe inthe absolute validity of what the senses perceive and then, for the firsttime, matter as it is turns into objects as human beings normally perceivethem.The forms of the material world, concepts of life and death, healthand disease, joy and sorrow, all originate in the human mind. In the sutra,when Buddha said that all is void, he was not only denying intrinsic162