Understanding One Thing is to Understand Everything

Although not always expressed the same way, here is an idea I heard reference to from time to time through the years I lived in Japan:

The Zen Perspective

The words above are attributed to Suzuki Shunryu, a Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States. In 1962 Suzuki (1904~71) founded the San Francisco Zen Center, which was the first Zen monastery outside Asia.

Suzuki was also the author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and last year the 50^th anniversary edition of that book was published.

Fifty years ago when I first heard the idea encapsulated in Suzuki’s words, I didn’t know they were rooted in a Zen concept. But perhaps that helps explain the use made of koans in Zen. To understand one thing, such as a koan, leads to satori (enlightenment), that is, understanding everything.

Granted, there are lingering problems here; still, it is an interesting perspective.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Perspective

I have long liked, and often quoted, the widely known words of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning:  

Seeing depth, or transcendence, in the ordinary is what Barrett Browning was emphasizing, and that is likely true for Suzuki also. The problem, and shame, is that there are so many who are content to just pluck blackberries, never seeing more than the obvious.

In this connection, I recently happened to read this important statement by Henri Nouwen: “. . . the whole of nature is a sacrament pointing to a reality far beyond itself” (Seeds of Hope, 1989, p. 100). Unfortunately, so many people don’t see the sacramental nature of the universe.

When we don’t fully see/understand “one thing,” we are unable to see/understand “everything.”

Gifty’s Perspective

Originally, I planned to write this whole blog article about Gifty, the precocious central character of Yaa Gyasi’s fascinating novel Transcendent Kingdom (2020). Gifty, like the author, was born to Ghanaian parents and grew up in Huntsville, Alabama.

But unlike author Gyasi (b. 1989), who has an MFA degree, Gifty is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction.

In her experiments on the brains of mice, Gifty realized that in the case of humans, at least, there is something more to human consciousness than just the physical brain.

For example, Gifty asks, “ . . . if the brain can’t account for things like reason and emotion, then what can? If the brain makes it possible for ‘us’ to feel and think then what is ‘us’?” (p. 197).

At the very end of the novel, Gifty says, “I’ve seen enough in a mouse to understand transcendence, holiness, redemption.”

Gifty likely didn’t know anything about Barrett Browning’s poems nor much, if anything, about Zen. But she seemed to intuit that to understand one thing is to understand everything.

What about us, now?