Sighting the Morning Star

The Tricycle Book Club is discussing Lin Jensen’s Deep Down Things: The Earth in Celebration and Dismay! Look for daily excerpts from the book on the Tricycle Blog to inspire the conversation, which is happening here.

From Deep Down Things:

“It is told that sitting meditation in the predawn hours of the morning the Buddha looked up and saw the morning star, a sight that occasioned his enlightenment. With the sun crawling up from the eastern mountains, he called out into the dawn, crying, “I am awakened together with the whole of the great earth and all its beings.” All who follow the Buddha Way have read of that moment, seeing in the Buddha’s pronouncement whatever registers in their own hearts. But for me his spontaneous outcry on sight of the morning star was the first and perhaps most penetrating revelation of the deep ecology that permeates Buddhist life, for the Buddha’s enlightenment was itself a realization that he, the star, and the whole of the earth were manifestations of one being. He saw that the surface of his skin was not the termination of self and that the “I” for which he could no longer discern beginning or ending was as wide as the universe and as long as forever. The eye with which he looked upon the morning star was the one great organ of sight that awakens all our dawns. ”

Have something to say? Visit the Tricycle Community Book Club to discuss Deep Down Things!

Image: From the Flickr photostream of joeflintham