(Click to enlarge.)
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In such a simple tableau it would be remiss to overlook any of its subjects. I have yet to mention the tree above and the paving stones below. I have taken them, together with the bench, as suggesting a city park. Their indifference, however, is as ever much in evidence as that of the birds; perhaps more so in that we expect it of them even more than of more sentient beings. So let us also bring them into our unifying embrace. Let us find that sense in which all these elements, including this couple, are the same and unite them to form a oneness. But we, too, are this couple—can we see ourselves in this one tableau of indifference and harmonize with it?
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When the carpenter Shi dismissed the worthiness of an immense tree because it was useless to his purposes, the tree appeared to him in a dream and said, “Who are you, a mere man about to die, to judge me (who have lived for many hundreds of years)? Are we not in any case both members of the same class, namely beings?” In realizing this both Shi and we will experience the non-contingent worthiness of all things, not to the diminishing of our own, but rather to its unfathomable increase.
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The proto-Daoist Shen Dao exhorted, “Realize the indifference of an insentient thing. A clump of earth never strays from the Dao.” His detractors said this was a dao for the dead, not the living, but they had yet to realize how life and death form a single body. These paving stones shout this liberating message the loudest of all, if only we have ears to hear.
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What is of Nature and what is of Humanity? This park bench is both. It invites us to understand human artifice in its equivalence to that of a hive of bees. We cannot stray from Dao, even as we naturally do.
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We are ever invited to realize a higher view, and in that “bask everything in the broad daylight of Heaven.”