Title? Does a trip need a title?
Well, more like a theme. The three (or four, or five--not sure how many) of us who are coming along will travel together, practice together, stay together (more or less--accommodations are still in "don't know" mode). Jo Potter will join us in Barcelona on June 3.
We will be meeting literally hundreds of people, both new Zen students and seasoned practitioners. Many of them will not be able to speak our language, nor we theirs. Some of our ancestors actually fought wars against some of theirs.
From the official web site of the 2011 Whole World is a Single Flower Conference:
Two thousand five hundred years ago on Vulture Peak in India, the Buddha picked up a lotus flower and demonstrated universal truth.
At the end of World War II, Zen Master Man Gong took a petal from the leaf of the Korean national flower, dipped it in ink, and wrote a rough calligraphy that read: "The Whole World is a Single Flower."
This means equality, harmony and peace. It means that you and I, the sun and moon, earth and sky, air and water, are fundamentally not separate or different. We each have the same root.
It was the great hope of Zen Master Man Gong that all human beings return to this common root, our original substance, and from the root, a single beautiful world flower of equality, harmony, and peace might again appear.
Zen Master Seung Sahn founded the Whole World is a Single Flower (WWSF) conference as a way to bring people from many different countries and traditions together in the spirit of unity and harmony.
How appropriate that this trip should take place in the months leading up to the 2008 WWSF conference (beginning October 16).
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