Zen Q and A: Seeds and the Whole Mind
By Lisa Bright
February 3, 2011
Question: I accept that the mind should not “abide in forms,” as the Sutras say, but I don’t understand where else the mind could abide! Zen teachers often talk of “no mind” or “big mind,” but as a practical matter, it’s not clear to me what these terms have to do with my own mind, in the usual sense of that term.
Answer: I’ll reply by way of a story about seeds. I forage for seeds in forests and meadows, and along rivers and streams in different times of the year. All the seeds appear so self-contained—from heavy, meaty fruits like acorns and walnuts, to the tiny, dusty speckles of grasses and wildflowers. It’s wonderful to think that the entire set of genetic instructions for the whole living organism is contained in there! A seed can travel a great distance, or wait a long time, before acting on those instructions. But even as it ripens, this apparently self-contained little thing is reaching out into a broad network of activity.
When seeds begin to ripen on the tree, birds and other animals begin to feed on them. For example, acorns, hickory nuts, and hazelnuts are favorites of grey squirrels. One day last September, I was watching a whole family of grey squirrels harvesting nuts in a great old hickory growing along the shore of a lake. The squirrels kept breaking the twigs and many of the nuts were falling into the water below. All this was very exciting for the squirrels, who were chattering loudly at each other. The commotion caused a couple of turtles, who were sunning themselves on the bank, to trundle back into the water.
For seed-eating animals, fall is a feasting time—and time to prepare for the fast of winter. Squirrels, and chipmunks too, bury nuts in various hiding places—but more often than not, they forget where they put them and at least a few of them sprout in the spring, often far from their mother tree. Birds disperse seed even farther. In early September, I watch for birds pecking on pine cones, even before the cones begin to open. Then I know it’s time to start collecting the cones. On the ground, ants and slugs carry seeds around too. And of course, a lot of seed is dispersed by the winds, without any animal help.
Some trees like to grow in groups along the edge of the water—river birch, American elm, and black willow do this. Their seeds are very light; when they fall into a stream, they float along until they lodge themselves on a bank. A few weeks later, they sprout. Many kinds of seeds, from vines and shrubs to canopy trees, travel down streams and rivers like that. As for all the seed-eaters—they are not terribly good at their jobs. They lose as many seeds as they manage to eat. And the seeds that are embedded in fruits or berries aren’t usually digested anyway—they just pass right through the seed-eater’s gut.
So all this seed-eating actually helps the forest regenerate. But most seeds never become plants. In a good year, a single mature oak will drop thousands of acorns. Yet, often, hardly any oak seedlings appear near the mother tree. Most of those meaty seeds are eaten or they rot into topsoil. Combined with fallen leaves and twigs and dead insects, and maybe other dead animals too, they are enriching the soil, becoming soil.
If a seed is lucky enough to sprout, it works on its root system first. A typical oak or hickory seedling will push its root straight down for a foot or more. Then the root starts to get fat and form juicy knobs before its finer root-threads travel horizontally in all directions. The seedling is storing moisture and nutrient in that knobby root lump; it will draw on that reserve when the dry time inevitably arrives. If the spot where the seedling sprouted receives enough sunlight, the seedling has a chance to survive. Sometimes, young Virginia pine seedlings in dense pine groves don’t survive because they cannot tolerate the shade. But an oak seedling that sprouts in that same pine grove has a good chance of survival because broad-leaf tree seedlings, like oak seedlings, are usually happy in the shade. So slowly, the pine grove gives way to oaks and hickories, and a new hardwood forest takes a root.
But for any one little seedling, the progress is rarely so smooth. Maybe its stem gets nibbled by a rabbit. If it survives the rabbits, then maybe it gets nibbled by deer. Once it loses its top bud, it begins to produce side stems, and each of those will try to become a new main stem. The seedling’s leaves may feed lots of other creatures, like caterpillars, who munch along the leaf edge until only a leafstalk is left hanging. If things go really badly, the seedling may die back to its root; it withdraws its life into its root and waits for a better time.
When a plant begins to flower, another riot of activity is unleashed. Say it flowers in summer. Summer is a very busy time in our woods and meadows. Already a host of spring flowers have come and gone. The green stems of the flowering plant may be covered by aphids, or maybe an army of ants is ceaselessly climbing up and down the stems. Butterflies and bees are flying from flower to flower; larvae of other insects are well hidden underneath the leaves. Tiny tree frogs sit midway up the stem, looking for insects to snap up. Box turtles wander around below, looking for bugs and earthworms. And under every half-decayed fallen log, beetles have laid their eggs. Hawks perched high on the edge of the wood, or soaring along the woodland edge, are watching the ground intently for rabbits or field mice.
Bright-colored skipper butterflies, fattened grasshoppers, and katydids navigate the grasslands nearby. In the marsh, beavers are repairing their dam, leaving behind a row of sharply cut sweetgum stumps like soldiers at attention. When the dusk arrives, bats swirl in the air, vacuuming up moths and other insects. A raccoon ventures out with its youngster in tow near the edge of a stream. By the evening, the flowers of that plant may already be fertilized and losing their petals. Within those flowers, new seeds are already quietly taking shape.
That’s a long story but the answer to your question is everywhere within it. Can you see it? Let’s explore together.
A seemingly self-contained seed cannot do much by itself. It needs the sun, water, and soil. Maybe it needs birds or other animals to disperse it, or maybe it needs the wind. And it will need the bees or butterflies to pollinate its own flowers if it survives and grows. It is in a binding relationship with all these other beings. And unlike us, it does not have a narrative of its life as distinct from those relationships, as somehow above or beyond them. It just lives in each passing moment.
But the real story is not about the individual seedling—it’s about that complex network of relationships. Nothing in nature exists outside of that network. You could say that this network is really all there is—a vast, rich, and constantly changing web of relationships. The lives that we see are nothing but the convergence of thousands and thousands of relationships of one kind or another. Even the DNA in those seeds—that’s just a kind of chemical result of all those relationships, repeating themselves over and over again, for many thousands of generations.
Seeds, trees, birds, turtles, you name it—they are all just nodes in that network, coming into existence when conditions require, and passing away when conditions change again. They’re not an illusion, but they’re not really separate things either. The same is true of us. Do you understand? If you do, there’s your answer.