flower sermon

After his enlightenment, Gautam Buddha became a great teacher. For over forty years he taught, gave discourses, answered questions. He had many followers, many disciples, monks who hoped to attain enlightenment for themselves. In all his teachings though, one discourse stands out from the rest, and for me it is the most beautiful. It is the flower sermon.

One day, when his followers were gathered together expecting another probing discourse from Gautama, he came carrying a flower. And he simply held up the flower without saying a word. One of the crowd laughed at this, and the Buddha handed the flower to this man. That was the flower sermon. Not a word was said. Not a word was needed.

Since then, people like me have been talking about this flower sermon, commenting on it, trying to explain it. But we are fools to do so, for explaining this simple act is like explaining a joke: either you get the joke or you don’t. And in explaining a joke it loses its funniness, it loses its point, its purpose. Similarly with this flower sermon, if you get its meaning then no commentary is needed.

The man who laughed, he understood. He understood something from the Buddha’s action. No words were needed for him, and so the buddha could pass the flower to him. Life is like this. We can feel it directly. We can have an intuitive understanding without words. We can respond to it without words. And yet, we are so often tangled up with our thoughts, with the words in the mind, and with chit-chat. With the flower sermon, the buddha tried something different: a transmission without words. Some centuries later, Buddhism met Taoism in China, and Zen Buddhism was born. But from the Buddhist side, Zen can trace its roots back to this one simple act of the Buddha, holding up a flower without saying a word. And we can learn from this simple action. To attend to life directly, in simple ways, without recourse to words and thoughts, without needing so much speech. We too can touch each other through simple actions, like holding up a flower.