Just a couple of weekends ago I lay outdoors in silent meditation, just looking at the open sky without any focal point or scanning, just open eyes and open sky. Over the course of about an hour I witnessed several small, thin clouds spontaneously appearing and disappearing as they slowly passed. So their existence and non-existence seemed to depend on the basic elements of air (space, wind), water (vapor), heat (sun), earth (gravity and source of vapor) and time and timing; the time elapsed over the generations-decomposition actionof the clouds and timing of my observation. Had I not looked up would the clouds appear, disappear, and reappear? Of course! But since I looked up and witnessed these cloudsappear, disappear, and reappear they very act of witnessing meant a subject-object relationship played out. (For all I know, these clouds may have had a conversation that they saw a person appear and disappear in broad daylight!) They very fact the clouds "appeared" meant that the water vapor became dense enough for me to see the vapor as "clouds" (existent) and when the clouds "disappeared" the vapor was simply too thin for my eyes to see a "cloud" (non-existence). Just as clouds appear and disappear in the sky, so, too, waves appear and disappear in the ocean, a lake, or even your bathtub; clouds and waves are "relative" expressions of the "absolute" sky and body of water, expressions made possible by action. But if we look at a cloud, the sky, body of water, or a wave through a microscope down to a molecule of water or wave of energy do we still have a "cloud" or the "ocean. Yes, no, and maybe? So under what conditions do "clouds" in the "sky" and "waves" in the "ocean" exist? When they "look" like a match with our shared understanding of the words sky, cloud, ocean, and wave? I guess it depends . . . on one's understanding of dependent origination.
On May 29, 2021 Viên Äạo wrote :