View With a Grain of Sand by Wisława Szymborska We call it a grain of sand, but it calls itself neither grain nor sand. It does just fine, without a name, whether general, particular, permanent, passing, incorrect, or apt. Our glance, our touch means nothing to it. It doesn't feel itself seen and touched. And that it fell on the windowsill is only our experience, not its. For it, it is not different from falling on anything else with no assurance that it has finished falling or that it is falling still. The window has a wonderful view of a lake, but the view doesn't view itself. It exists in this world colorless, shapeless, soundless, odorless, and painless. The lake’s floor exists floorlessly, and its shore exists shorelessly. The water feels itself neither wet nor dry and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural. They splash, deaf to their own noise on pebbles neither large nor small. And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless in which the sun sets without setting at all and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud. The wind ruffles it, its only reason being that it blows. A second passes. A second, second. A third. But they’re three seconds only for us. Time has passed like courier with urgent news. But that’s just our simile. The character is inverted, his haste is make-believe, his news inhuman.
With gratitude toward my sangha-mate Martha Woodling-Young for introducing me to this poem and her interpretation, I’ll humbly attempt to convey the message in my own words for From the Pure Land readers. Let’s begin with a Buddhist story you’ve likely heard before. It’s told, I’m sure, in thousands of versions. Usually, a destitute person doesn’t know they have a precious jewel sewn into their clothing or buried under their shack. They realize they have enough wealth to meet their needs only after someone points out the jewel to them.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, one of my teachers, has a more modern version. Here’s my approximation of how he tells it:
A man is always late for work, doctor’s appointments, and meetings. He’s on the verge of getting fired and confides in a friend how his life is falling apart because he can’t get anywhere on time.
“Why don’t you check your watch?” the friend asks.
“A watch? What’s that? I don’t have one of those.”
“Of course you do,” says the friend. “It’s right there on your wrist.”
The man looks at his wrist and sees what he always thought was a bracelet. The friend explains that it’s a watch and how to use it.
The man keeps his job and lives a less-troubled life.
The point of these stories is that we have everything we need. We don’t need to look for it somewhere else. Our innate Buddha Nature is wise, compassionate, loving, and aware that we ultimately exist in a nondual reality. We can find our Buddha Nature and discover how to rest in it—to see the watch and learn how to read it.
However, none of those metaphors are accurate because they depend on words and concepts to describe a state of being that can only be experienced. In the Vajrayana Buddhism I practice, teachers use words, concepts, and “skillful means” to point the way. Then, it’s up to the students to get beyond the stories, words, and concepts, to experience the essence of their minds, and to find their inherent Buddha Nature.
While we can’t navigate the world we live in without words and concepts, we must learn to let them go to reach the Buddha within. That’s where the poem comes in. A grain of sand doesn’t need a name. It does just fine without one. A view doesn’t know it’s a view. Water doesn’t know it’s wet. We humans can’t resist naming and categorizing things. Wikipedia devotes more than 2,750 words to sand. Here are some of them:
Sand is a granular material composed of finely divided mineral particles. Sand has various compositions but is defined by its grain size. Sand grains are smaller than gravel and coarser than silt. Sand can also refer to a textural class of soil or soil type; i.e., a soil containing more than 85 percent sand-sized particles by mass.
And
The exact definition of sand varies. The scientific Unified Soil Classification System used in engineering and geology corresponds to US Standard Sieves, and defines sand as particles with a diameter of between 0.074 and 4.75 millimeters. By another definition, in terms of particle size as used by geologists, sand particles range in diameter from 0.0625 mm (or 1⁄16 mm) a volume of approximately 0.00012 cubic millimetres, to 2 mm, a volume of approximately 4.2 cubic millimetres, the difference in volumes being 34,688 measures difference. Any particle falling within this range of sizes is termed a sand grain.
Yes, I’m being snarky 👺 here. Wikipedia entries, concepts, words, numbers, and science are necessary in our world. So are poetry and stories that point us somewhere deeper.
Nothing needs a name in order to be. Poetry, stories, meditation, and spirituality can help us be more and put labels aside, at least for a while.
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Maybe words don’t mean a thing, either. What they need is swing. That could be a pointing-out instruction.