“Are these your sunglasses?” the waiter in the café asked.
“Surely not,” was my initial response because I had not mislaid my sunglasses, as far as I knew. On closer inspection though, they were indeed my sunnies, complete with a distinctive scratch acquired the other day on one of the granite boulders hereabouts. The feeling was rather strange, receiving something which I didn’t know that I had lost.
This little episode seemed like a parable for the way most of us have lost touch with our true nature, our buddha nature. We don’t even realise that we have lost it.
However, the analogy is not ideal. At least with the sunglasses I still knew what sunglasses were and that I was supposed to have a pair. With our buddha nature the forgetfulness is usually much more thorough. Not only do we not realise we have lost something, we have also forgotten what it is that we have lost touch with.
Luckily though, somewhere deep inside each of us there is a tenacious little flame that won’t allow us to forget completely…
