A Blade of Grass

Ajahn Sumedho

Each one of us is a blade of grass. We want all the blades of grass on the planet to be healthy, but it can seem overwhelming.

There have never been this many people on this planet in the known history of human civilization. The mind boggles; it can’t cope with so many blades. But this one blade of grass is something I have some control over. This one conscious being is something I can work with. We each reflect the potential for all human beings to become Buddhas. We each reflect the potential for all human beings to live in a state of awakened awareness, channelling the brahmavihāras through our human forms, acting with compassion and expressing love and joy.

We’ve seen this potential for awakening realized in various teachers, in people we know or in people we’ve heard about through the ages – the saints and bodhisattvas, the sādhus and enlightened beings, human beings like ourselves who have realized their natural purity to become channels of compassion. I’ve experienced it with my own teacher, Ajahn Chah, an ordinary monk from a remote corner of Thailand.

He wasn’t a prince or an aristocrat but a man from a rice-growing peasant family. Through his own faith and efforts, he was able to free his mind from selfish intention and delusion, revealing the potential we all have as human beings. Yet he wasn’t living in an ivory tower: he was a very realistic, practical person, aware of injustice, corruption and social problems. His response was always one of compassion to the suffering of others. Through the power of mettā, karuṇā, muditā and upekkhā he affected millions of people.

Those of us who grew up during the Second World War were certainly aware of genocide and slaughter. We thought once the war was over that we were going to have peace. But the conflict keeps on going, doesn’t it? We still experience the effects of hundreds of years of indignation, anger and resentment and a whole list of wrongs to which each side in the conflict clings. Where does it end? Where can it end?

There are meetings, conferences and formal forgiveness ceremonies, but hatred is still latent within the hearts of human beings. We’re culturally conditioned; we acquire the biases of our own ethnic groups. I’ve never been to any place where there hasn’t been somebody to hate, some group at the bottom of the pile. ‘They’re the stupid ones!’ ‘They’re the country cousins!’ ‘They’re the evil empire!’ The tendency of the human mind, the conditioning of the mind is to blame our suffering on another group.

The Buddha’s teaching points to the realization of the pure mind beyond cultural or religious conditioning. The simple act of living in awakened awareness is very powerful and worthy of great respect. And this power is universal. By learning to let go of our conditioned reactions to violence and hatred, all of us can learn to respond with the natural purity of the mind.

Awakening our minds allows us to get beyond the conventions of race, religion or culture and our tendencies to blame and react with violence, so that the power of love and compassion can arise unimpeded and spread.

It’s up to us to realize this, to try it out, to begin to awaken ourselves to this realization.

This reflection by Ajahn Sumedho is from the book, Ajahn Sumedho Anthology—Volume Five, The Wheel of Truth, (pdf) pp. 53-55.

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