Our daily lives, our very survival, are largely based on the making of distinctions. We separate this from that, night from day, animal from mineral, dog from cat, self from not self. All the multifarious different languages which we have evolved in order to communicate, and in which, indeed, we think, are designed to do just that.

And yet, because I am ignorant, if you were to ask me what is the one, underlying principle of Buddhism, I would give you an answer.

It is the title of this talk.

Some years ago, floating as I do on the peripheries of Buddhism, I distilled, out of the little I knew, what I thought were the five fundamental concepts of what I see as basic Buddhism.

These five were emptiness, illusion, interdependent origination, impermanence, and the unity of all that is and is not.

These seemed to me to provide a useful way of approaching the world in which one appeared to live.

To these I added three ideals to help in the actual living of that life.

These three were Encounter, Non-attachment, and Doing for the Doing. Like all ideals, they are, by their very nature, unattainable, and yet, however abject the failure, to come as near as possible to achieving them seemed to me to be good way to try to live one's life.

I am a man of no beliefs, and all these eight are, in their own different ways, no more than hypotheses, an attempt to glimpse the context out of which the Pure Land faith of Shin Buddhism has arisen and to relate that to some of what is known of the world we see about us.

Yet here I am seemingly, having posited the unity of all that is, already, and as usual, busy making distinctions. Indeed, I think that I have actually given a separate talk, here in the Temple, on almost every one of them, despite the fact that the making of distinctions was something which, according to the Vagrakkhedikā or Diamond Cutter Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha found abhorrent
and constantly inveighed against.

It seems to me, however, that all five hypotheses, in fact, boil down to one and the same thing; are only apparently distinct, and the same is true of the three associated ideals in the conduct of daily life.

Starting with emptiness about which, despite my ignorance, I gave a talk twelve years ago, I began by quoting Professor Shimoda's statement that emptiness "constitutes the foundation of Buddhist philosophy."

In the words of the Larger Prajñāpāramitāhridaya Sūtra, commonly known as The Heart Sutra, "Emptiness is not different from form, form is not different from emptiness. What is form that is emptiness, what is emptiness that is form."

This seemingly rather difficult formulation and the passages that follow, flow quite straightforwardly from Shakyamuni Buddha's constant assertion, as is reported time and again in the Diamond Cutter Sutra, that a Bodhisattva should not believe in objects or the qualities of objects (Ch. IV) or have (Ch. XIV) "any idea of a self, any idea of a being, of a living being, or a person," ideas, of course, essentially consisting of distinctions.

In short, nothing is separate; all is one in the unity of all that is and is not.

For us, who are so bound up in ourselves, in the fiction, or illusion of a separate, continuous self that we build up from day to day, the fact that there is no such thing is particularly hard to swallow.

Yet already in the mid eighteenth century the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, could find in himself no enduring identity, only a bundle of sensations, humans being nothing but a collection of perceptions which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual state of flux.

Moreover, if nothing has a self, a distinct, continuing, individual being, it follows by definition, that nothing can have a distinct and separate origin.

And here, at the very beginning of discussing such things we have again been sliding inevitably towards the overriding concept of the unity of all that is and is not.

Emptiness is inseparable from the awareness that we live in a world of illusion in which there is no enduring, separate self, and that implicitly involves both impermanence and the realisation that nothing can come into being except as a result of interdependent origination.

As I spoke to you in 1999 about Early Buddhism and Modern Science and nine years later on Modern Science and Fundamental Buddhist Thought, I could not resist adding this talk, well after I had handed over the typescript to the long-suffering, ever-patient Taira for translation, the opening sentence of an article in the July 2014 issue of a popular scientific journal, The New Scientist, which said that

“It is hard to imagine a more pervasive idea new in modern science than interdependence for understanding all kinds of systems — especially living ones such as an ecosystem.”

To understand, in simple terms what this means, a prime example is the now common or garden brazil nut that is sold in almost every supermarket or local fruiterer.

The gigantic Amazonian Brazil nut tree, which reaches a height of fifty metres or so, is, like every tree in the whole forest, dependent on a symbiotic relationship with underground mycelia, which consist of a network of white fungal filaments that attach themselves to its roots and synthesise an indispensable part of its nourishment.

But that is no more than the beginning of a complex network of interdependent origination.

The individual nut is part of a package of twelve to twenty-five or so, enclosed in an outer shell like that of a coconut and so much harder that only a single, large rodent, the agouti, has teeth that are sharp enough and strong enough to cut their way in.

But since, when finally it has succeeded, it cannot eat all the nuts in one go, it carries the majority off into the forest for future consumption and buries them under the leaf litter, which it then carefully rearranges so as to leave no sign of what it has just done, and in doing so provides, for those that it never in fact retrieves, a perfect place for germination.

Such dissemination by one means or another is vital for the survival of most of the trees in the rain forest, since every member of each species is prey to highly specialised pests, which can only be escaped by growing up surrounded by other types of trees, each with their own particular groups of attackers to which a neighbouring tree of a different kind is not of the slightest interest.

But that again is little more than a beginning.

Each Brazil nut tree is host to a sort of orchid which is visited by the small male of a certain kind of bee that rubs from its flower a particular scent to attract a mate and so bring to the tree the much larger female, which feeds on nothing but the nectar within the blossoms of the tree itself. The latter, however, have evolved in such a way that she is the only insect strong enough to enter and in the process be covered in the pollen that alone can fertilise a neighbouring Brazil nut tree, which she, and only she, has therefore any reason for visiting when its flowers are in bloom.

And so, this particular cycle of interdependent origination is completed when the agouti, far below on the forest floor, unknowingly, like all the other elements in the complex, interactive pattern does its work, and elsewhere in the forest plants the seeds for the succeeding generation of Brazil nut trees, many of them sufficiently far from the next one to begin their growth in relative safety.

But it is important to remember that what I have presented, for simplicity’s sake, as a linear sequence, is actually the result of all the originating elements existing simultaneously, and each continuously, and with no knowledge of the outcome of their activities, doing their own thing.

Yet every member of this interdependent system is ephemeral, impermanent, empty, subject in each detail of its continued existence to every kind of ever-changing ecological, climatic or geological circumstance.

Indeed, for ancient Buddhists and for modern scientists alike, all living things are impermanent and the latter are now beginning to recognise the fundamental importance of symbiosis, the relationship between two or more living organisms in close physical association with each other to their mutual advantage.

In fact, beginning with the micro-organisms invisible to the naked eye, and consequently unknown to the early Buddhists, and little known to Darwin in their richness and complexity, there is now emerging an awareness that symbiogenesis, the emergence of new life forms out of symbiotic relationships, plays an important part in the history of evolution, and indeed of life itself, alongside the competitive, all against all, survival of the fittest, which has completely dominated scientific thinking since the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859.

The realisation of the significance of symbiosis in no way conflicts with the essential role of the Darwinian concept of evolution. It simply adds, at a fundamental level, an understanding of the part that interspecies cooperation plays in the battle for survival through its contribution to the success of new, complex and in many cases extraordinarily successful and enduring life forms.

Indeed, it was Charles Darwin and his contemporary, Alfred Wallace, who independently established that all living things are indeed related to each other, a big step in the direction of a realisation in scientific terms of the early Buddhist concept of the unity of all that is.

Let us now turn from Brazil nut trees and the other trees in the forest, which, as I have mentioned, owe their survival to the fungal filaments with which their roots exchange essential nutriments, to the humble lichen, which is more familiar to most of us.

Immediately, we find, perhaps to your surprise, and certainly to mine, that it is a highly complex organism, a fungus dependent for its life on the photosynthetic cells of the algae or of the cyanobacteria which it contains, the latter being, as it happens, among the very earliest forms of life on earth.

The seaweeds that we buy and eat are larger and more complex algae, but anyone who follows the controversies and dire predictions relating to global warming knows that the polyps which build the world's great coral reefs depend entirely on the photosynthetic powers of the single-celled algae that they contain.

On land, all the world's greenery derives from the plants of every kind that use their leaves for photosynthesis, the process, mostly involving the pigment chlorophyll, which uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into nutrients and, alongside the marine algae, gives off all of the oxygen that we and other animals breathe.

Not only is photosynthesis essential to the actual plants, but every herbivore which lives upon green leaves and grasses is also dependent on it, and this in turn leads on to other layers of symbiosis and of symbiogenesis, since many herbivores depend upon bacteria to help them to digest the otherwise indigestible cellulose of which their food is largely composed.

We too, though most of us are hardly to be classed as herbivores, depend both for the digestion of many of the foods on which we depend, and also for many aspects of our general health, not only on the presence of, but on the actual balance between, the endless varieties of bacteria which we harbour and somewhat delicately refer to as our intestinal flora.

It seems, indeed, that the present great increase in allergies and of a range of chronic diseases may well be due to the disturbance of this balance by excessive hygiene in infancy and the overuse of antibiotics, which lead to the underdevelopment or disturbance of the immune system.

More strikingly still, all animals including homo sapiens, whose wisdom seems to me to be in serious doubt, depend on mitochondria, the special microscopic structures present in large numbers in each cell, which carry out the biochemical processes responsible for respiration and energy production.

By now, it will hardly come as a surprise if I remind you that there is convincing evidence that both the mitochondria in you and I, and the chloroplasts, which play a similar role in plants, were once, some two billion years ago, primitive bacteria which, round about a half a billion years later, entered into a symbiotic relationship with, and were subsumed in, the more complex cells on which all multicellular living organisms now depend.

Similarly, researchers are only now beginning to understand just how much of the human genome, and how much of the development of all forms of complex life, are owed to viruses.

Modern science has indeed added a new dimension and given a new factual meaning to the ancient Buddhist concept of interdependent origination.

Throughout this Talk the translation of the Sanskrit term pratītia-samutpāda as interdependent origination has been preferred to the more common dependent origination because what is involved is very often not a simple sequence in which multiple causes are followed by a cascade of effects, but a reciprocating system in which an effect can alter its own cause, either instantaneously, as when the blade of a weak chisel in chipping a hard rock is blunted by the very act of doing so, or over time as when the act of giving birth affects a woman in many ways.

Indeed, in human terms it is an inescapable fact that every action changes the actor.

As I said in a poem which I read to you nine years ago, in a talk on Amida Buddha's Eighteenth Primal Vow, we are all of us, not single entities, but complex, interdependent ecosystems, constantly interacting with other similar systems.

In spite of this, most of us who have thought about it at all, and that includes most scientists, have tended to concentrate on the things which distinguish and separate us from the microbes that can, in each handful of woodland soil, by far outnumber the whole human population of the earth, and likewise from all the insects living in astronomical numbers in every hectare or square mile of land.

To give just a single example, it has long been thought that recognising faces was a complex, highly advanced intellectual capability only achieved by certain mammals, notably primates such as ourselves, but this is by no means the case.

Certain kinds of wasps, sharing a nest with descendants of different queens, which they must therefore be able to recognise as members of the nest's cooperating group, can not only distinguish one individual wasp from the next, but if shown the side and front views of different human faces, can, with singularly little training, consistently recognise and distinguish between individual faces even when they are rotated by thirty degrees or so into near three-quarter views.

This naturally brings me on to slime moulds!

These are collections of single celled, amoeba-like organisms, which evolved at least six hundred million years ago, and can, without having a brain of any kind, move off as a body, whenever they need to, to find a new source of food.

Whereas human beings can quickly find their way through a not too complicated maze, only retracing their footsteps once or twice, a slime mould is able, albeit much more slowly, as one might expect, to do the same thing, except that it never once deviates from the shortest route to a food source placed at the exit.

Such feats call into question what exactly is meant by intelligence, and from the simplest of single celled organisms to ants and bees and termites; to the prides of lions to which I referred some years ago, and indeed to our own species, cooperation between individuals, and even altruism, within a species, play a significant role in the detailed outcome of what happens in the all-embracing evolutionary battle for survival, quite apart from actual symbiotic relationships between species.

Turning from such broad topics to the part which cooperation can, or should play in the practical aspects of our own individual, human lives, escape from the fictional, independent 'self, the illusion which we create from day to day, is central to the true meaning of encounter in the Buddhist sense of the term, which is far removed from the confrontational and even hostile implications of the word in everyday usage.

For there to be a true encounter between two persons, each must escape as far as possible from the prison of the self, and from any single-minded concentration on what it is that they want to say or do, and enter, as far as possible, into the mind of the other; to see things, not from their own, but from the other's point of view, and also to sense the latter's underlying causes.

In as far as both do that, there is indeed encounter in the deepest meaning of a term in which emptiness and illusion are both involved; the distinction between self and other fades away.

What is more, the escape from the tyranny of the self, which is central to the meaning of encounter, opens the door to unconditional love and, in a world so full of misery and suffering, to an all-encompassing compassion.

Implicit in the unity of all that is and is not, is the lack of distinctions of any kind, no focus for attraction or repulsion, delight or disgust; in short all-encompassing non-attachment.

It is because of this direct dependence, that I have not defined non-attachment as one of the five basic principles, but thought of it as the second of the three ideals to aid in the actual living of our life.

In practical, everyday terms, it is clearly an aspect of emptiness.

To be deeply, even inextricably, attached to what seem to be individual, independent entities is clearly nonsensical when there are no such things; when each object of our dependency is as empty as we ourselves are, and as subject to interdependent origination and impermanence in the world of illusion to which our five senses and our very thoughts are attuned.

That, in its turn, leads on to the third and final practical ideal, that of doing for the doing, which flows out of, or is, if you like, an aspect of non-attachment; non-attachment not merely to objects, but to ambitions and desires, to the acquisition of riches or fame; the accumulation of merit, or personal reward of any kind.

To do for the doing in any absolute sense is yet another unattainable ideal. However close we may think we have come to achieving it in our conscious lives, there will always be a self-seeking motive hidden somewhere in the subconscious ‘ self ‘which controls so much of every decision that we make and of everything that we do.

As you well know, I am no philosopher. Indeed, I find much philosophical argument almost impenetrable and, in many cases, irrelevant as far as the lives that we actually live are concerned.

Yet it is often not too difficult to find commonplace, everyday analogies, which are not entirely misleading, for seemingly very abstruse philosophical statements.

You may perhaps have wondered why the title of this talk is not simply The unity of all that is, and how the 'and is not' got in.

In abstract terms, it arises from the absence of all distinctions, but any good Zen Garden, with not too many rocks, and even the one at Three Wheels, will give you the answer.

An empty space is the starting point in the creation of all such gardens and, and subsequently, as is easy to see, the spaces between the rocks in the finished garden are at least as important for the final effect as are the rocks themselves.

It is, however, essential to realise that in all discussions such as this, it is only too easy to become confused about the implications of the words which we are forced to use.

For instance, just as the illusion of 'self' can only exist if 'not-self' also exists, so 'is' is impossible without ‘is not’, and this may lead us to forget that the juxtaposition of 'illusion' with its opposite, an underlying 'reality', is a less straightforward matter, since it does not, in any way, imply that we should necessarily know what that 'reality' actually is.

To take the simplest of analogies, when a conjuror or illusionist is invited to a party, the essence of a successful trick is that we should, on the one hand, be fully aware that what we see is an illusion and, on the other, have no idea at all how the trick was done.

Even a solid table-top is an illusion in the sense that we never can see the molecules on which its chemistry is based, much less the swarms of atoms whirling in otherwise empty space of which the latter are seemingly composed, and even then we have still only moved a couple of small steps on the journey towards an unattainable ultimate reality.

Indeed, it is fair to say that "all is illusion", in that everything which we can experience directly by means of our five senses, as they have developed in the evolutionary battle for survival, is not, in any fundamental sense, just what it seems to be.

It is also obvious that this nonetheless wonderful world of illusion in which we are all imprisoned, and which is the only reality that we, as human animals, can perceive, though closely related in many ways, is not the same as the world experienced by other animals or insects, or by bacteria or slime moulds.

However, to return for a moment to the subject of 'is' and 'is not', we should also remember that, as Nāgãrjuna, and as Mahāyāna buddhists long before him, believed, form and the void are one and the same; there is no duality, all dualities being transcended by ultimate reality.

This idea is encapsulated in an English waka referring to Three Wheels, which Taira translated and which was published in The Breath in the Flute in 2001.

This
is the garden

of being
and not being,

of rocks
and no rocks.

Here,
when you enter
and are,

is and is not
are equal.

What is true of a small Zen garden is true of the cosmos as a whole in which the almost inconceivable spaces, hundreds and even billions of light years in extent, and possibly seething with virtual particles coming into and out of existence in an instant, are at least as important in the structure of the universe as the galaxies themselves, the solid objects, the rocks, on which, for the most part, we tend to concentrate and at which our telescopes have, up until recently mostly been aimed.

All the machinery of modern science is, indeed, an attempt to escape, as far as it is possible to do so, from our natural perceptual and intellectual limitations.

Although it is from the non- or pre-scientific world of the sutras and of early Buddhism, and of Hinduism and the Upanishads of the Rig Veda, that each of the five concepts in what I think of as basic Buddhism derives, they are not like flies embalmed in the amber of a distant past.

They are increasingly becoming central to the world of modern science, which even in the short span of the last twelve years has made extraordinary advances in the directions of which I then spoke.

Today, tens of thousands of mathematicians and physicists are devoting their whole lives to struggling with the equations and the physical properties from which they hope to construct what is called, in modern terms, 'a theory of everything', a scientific counterpart of the Buddhist unity of all that is and is not.

Unfortunately, they still have a long way to go when quantum physics, which deals with the microcosm, the minute, and the equations of relativity, which deal with the macrocosm, the vast expanses of space and time, are in direct conflict; when something like ninety-five percent of the content of the universe is still unknown, and no one has any idea what gravity actually is.

At present, the equations which describe the workings of the universe will only work if you insert an arbitrary cosmic constant, together with inflation, which is unexplained as yet, and two unknowns, dark matter and dark energy, for which a frantic search is now in progress.

More unfortunately still, science, like all human constructs, is subject to basic limitations. It can ask, and increasingly answer, in ever more exciting ways, questions concerning 'what' and ‘how', but never ‘why’ in any all-embracing sense.

There may or may not have been a big bang, though what is actually no more than a theory or hypothesis based on a multiplicity of untested or untestable assumptions, is often taken for a fact, but why such things as the universe came into being in the first place lies, and always will lie, outside the scientific remit.

It just is; and true Buddhists and the wiser scientists simply leave it at that.

I cannot help recalling that splendid passage in the Rig Veda of three or more thousand years ago which I quoted once before in the talk on Buddhism and the Bhagavad Gita.

"Whence this creation has arisen --- perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not --- the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows --- or perhaps he does not know."

As far as that is concerned, we have come a long way and spent a long time getting nowhere.

Nevertheless, I think that what has happened and is now happening in modern science, and our ever more rapidly increasing knowledge of so many aspects of the world in which we live, and of the universe in which we play so insignificant a role, do enable us to flesh out and give fresh meaning to the somewhat abstract concepts of emptiness, illusion, interdependent origination and impermanence, which blend so seamlessly within the unity of all that is and is not.

I thought, therefore, that such a weighty, high-flown topic deserved a suitably serious conclusion, and so, some two years ago, I started at the end, and summed it up in a haiku which I subsequently christened The Atomic Cookbook, and which goes like this:-

When
you think of it,

galaxies
and rice pudding

are much
the same stuff.