BECAUSE THIS IS, THAT IS… The other night at dinner, (we were having Indian food), one of the diners commented on how wonderful the naan bread was.  It truly was delicious and the question arose, “Where did this wonderful naan come from?”  From that question, the discussion ensued about what the ingredients might be and what recipe was used to create this tasty morsel.  

   From that conversation among fledgling Buddhists developed a deeper discussion about this naan which brought in a concept that goes to the heart of Buddhist meditative practice. The short answer of course was that this was a wonderful cauliflower naan, prepared by a skillful chef from many ingredients, back in the kitchen of this restaurant.  The longer discussion was about how this naan came from sources too numerous to even consider.  The typical naan recipe includes wheat flour, water, yeast, cooking fat, yogurt, milk and then spices or flavorings.  And each of these ingredients has a history of its own.  Without the cows and their keepers, there would have been no milk or yogurt.  Without sunlight, water, earth and the labors of the farmers, distributors, truckers and the rest, there would be no wheat flour or many of the spices that went into the making of this wonderful naan. 

   Like anything else that we might consider, the naan on our table was an aggregate of countless, interconnected things, without which, it would not have come into being. In classical Buddhist teachings, this process is sometimes referred to as “dependent origination”, or, “This is, because that is”.  As Thich Nhat Hanh observes, the statement of “This is, because that is”, states the Buddhist genesis and the main tenets of Buddhist thought, including the teachings on impermanence and emptiness.

   Understanding ‘how things come together”, helps us to understand that what occurs in our inner and outer worlds is not a series of aimless accidents but rather the natural consequence of causes and conditions.  One might think of it like a snowstorm; the coming together of a certain temperature, a certain amount of precipitation, a certain amount of wind, thus co-creating a snow storm.  To look at a flower, and see more than the flower gives a much deeper meaning to all that is around and in us.  Again, Thich Nhat Hanh offers that when looking at the flower, we can see the sunshine, the earth, the water…all the elements that if absent, there would be no flower.  He calls them the non-flower elements.  But because all comes together, we see the flower; ”This is, because that is…”. So, as we chewed on our wonderful naan, we all sat and philosophically chewed on the deeper meanings of “dependent origination”; both nourishing us as they are meant to do.  Because of our meditation practice, we can look inwardly and more deeply and discover that it is impossible for something to be by itself, alone.  Nothing has a separate entity.  Nothing has a separate self.  “This is, because that is”.