Roses and Garbage

Roses and Garbage
Thích Nhất Hạnh offers a deep teaching on the
futility of hate and discrimination, and on the insight
of interbeing and nonduality as the way to liberation
and non-fear.
T H Í C H N H ẤT H ẠN H

“Defiled or immaculate” and “dirty or pure” are
concepts we form in our mind. We see a beautiful rose in a vase and think it is immaculate. Its
fragrance is pure and fresh. It supports our idea
of purity. The opposite is a garbage can. It smells
horrible and is filled with rotten things. We identify
this as defiled. But if we look deeply at the concepts
of defiled and pure, we have a chance to touch the
insight of interbeing.
In just five or six days, the rose will become
part of the garbage. We do not need to wait five
days to see this. If we just look deeply at the rose,
we can see it now. And if we look deeply into the
garbage can, we see that in a few months its contents can be transformed into a rose.
If you are a good organic gardener, if you have
the eyes of a bodhisattva, looking at a rose you
can see the garbage, and looking at the garbage
you can see a rose. Roses and garbage inter-are.
Without a rose, we cannot have garbage; and without garbage, we cannot have a rose. The rose and
garbage are equally important. The garbage is just
as precious as the rose.
We are imprisoned by our ideas of good and evil.
We want only good, and we want to remove all
evil. But that is because we forget that good is
made of non-good elements. Suppose we hold a
lovely branch in our hand. When we look at it with
a nondiscriminating mind, we see a wonderful
branch. But as soon as we distinguish that one end
is the left and the other end is the right, we get into
trouble. We may say we want only the left, and we
do not want the right, and there is trouble right
away. Politically, if the right is not there, how can
you be on the left? Let us say that we do not want
the right end of this branch, that we only want the
left. So, we break off half of this wonderful reality
and throw it away. But as soon as we’ve done this,
the end that remains becomes the new right—
because as soon as the left is there, the right must
be there also. If we become frustrated and do it
again, breaking what remains of the branch in half,
we will still have a right and a left.
The same may be applied to good and evil.
You cannot have only good. You cannot hope to
Politically, if the right is not there, how can you be on the left?

remove evil completely, because thanks to evil,
good exists, and vice versa. When you put on a
play about a heroic figure, you have to provide
an antagonist in order for the hero to be a hero.
In Buddhism, the antagonist is named Māra, the
demon who attempted to distract the Buddha
from reaching enlightenment. The following story
about Buddha and Māra reflects the Buddhist
insight into the relationship between good and
evil.
One day the Buddha was in his cave, and Ānanda,
who was the Buddha’s attendant, was standing
outside near the door. Suddenly Ānanda saw Māra
coming. He was surprised. He didn’t want that, and
he wished Māra wouldn’t notice him and would
go away. But Māra walked straight up and asked
Ānanda to announce his arrival to the Buddha.
Ānanda said, “Why have you come here? Don’t
you remember that long ago you were defeated
by the Buddha under the bodhi tree? Aren’t you
ashamed to come here? Go away! The Buddha will
not see you. You are evil. You are his enemy.”
When Māra heard this, he began to laugh and
laugh. “Did you say your teacher has enemies?”
That made Ānanda very embarrassed. He knew
that his teacher had not said that he has enemies.
So Ānanda was defeated and had to go in and announce Māra, hoping that the Buddha would say,
“Go and tell him that I am not here. Tell him that I
am in a meeting.”
But the Buddha was very happy when he heard
that Māra, such a very old friend, had come to visit
him. “It’s Māra? Let him come in!” the Buddha
said. Ānanda was distressed. When Māra came in,
the Buddha stood up to greet him as if he were a
special guest, invited him to sit in a place of honor,
and took his hands in his in the warmest way. The
Buddha said, “Hello Māra! How are you? How have
you been? Is everything all right?”
The Buddha asked Ānanda to go and make
herbal tea for both of them. “I’m happy to make
tea for my master one hundred times a day, but
making even one cup of tea for Māra is miserable,”
Ānanda thought. But since this was the order of his
master, how could he refuse? So Ānanda went to
prepare some herbal tea for the Buddha and his
so-called guest, but while doing this he tried to
listen in on their conversation.
The Buddha repeated very warmly, “How have
you been? How are things with you?”
In international politics, each side pretends to be the rose
and calls the other side the garbage.

Mara said, “Things are not going well at all.
I am tired of being Māra. I want to be something
else—maybe someone like you. Wherever you
go you are welcome, people bow before you and
make offerings.”
Hearing this, Ānanda became very frightened.
Māra said, “You know, being a Māra is not a very
easy thing to do. If you talk, you have to talk in
riddles. If you do anything, you have to be tricky
and look evil. I am very tired of all that. But what I
cannot bear is my disciples. They are now talking
about social justice, peace, equality, liberation,
nonduality, nonviolence, all of that. Before, they
used to listen to everything I told them. Now they
are in revolt. The commanders of my army are demanding to do sitting meditation. Can you believe
it? They want to practice mindfulness, do walking
meditation, eat in silence, protect life, protect the
environment and the Earth. They are driving me
mad. I do not know who is influencing them. I have
had enough of it! I think that it would be better if I
hand them all over to you. I want to be something
else. Maybe we could change roles.”
At this, Ānanda began to shudder with fear.
Māra would become the Buddha, and the Buddha
would become Māra. It made him very sad.
The Buddha listened attentively and was filled
with compassion. Finally, he said in a quiet voice,
“Do you think it’s fun being a Buddha? You don’t
know what my disciples have done to me! They
put words into my mouth that I never said. They
build garish temples and put statues of me on altars in order to attract bananas and oranges and
sweet rice, just for themselves. And they package
me and make my teaching into an item of commerce. Māra, if you knew what it is really like to be
a Buddha, I am sure you wouldn’t want to be one.”
• • • • •
In the West, we have been struggling for many
years with the problem of evil. How is it possible
that evil exists? It seems difficult to understand.
But in the light of nonduality, there is no problem:
as soon as the idea of good is there, the idea of
evil is there. Buddha needs Māra in order to reveal
himself, and vice versa. Buddha is as empty as the
sheet of paper; Buddha is made of non-Buddha
elements. When you perceive reality in this way,
you will not discriminate against the garbage in
favor of the rose. You will cherish both.

For many years, the United States has been trying
to demonize other countries, from North Vietnam,
to the countries of the former Soviet Union, to Iran,
Iraq, and North Korea. Some Americans even have
the illusion that they can survive alone, without
these other countries. Other countries may believe
that they, too, can exist without the US. They call
the United States the American imperialists or the
infidels and believe the US must be eliminated for
happiness to be possible. But that is the dualistic
way of looking at things. It is the same as believing
that the right side can exist without the left side. If
you take sides, you are trying to eliminate half of
reality, which is impossible.
If we look at the US deeply, we see Iran. If we
look deeply at Iran, we see the US. In international
politics, each side pretends to be the rose and calls
the other side the garbage. Recently, a young person asked me, “Why do we give different names
to different things, since they’re really together,
they’re really one?” That was a very good question. I replied, “Names are at the root of so many
problems. We give places different names, like
America, Iran, and Iraq. But in fact they all belong
to the Earth. Israel and Palestine are two hands of
the same body.”
You have to work for the survival of the other
side if you want to survive yourself. Survival means
the survival of humankind as a whole, not just a
part of it. This is true not only for the United States
and the Middle East, but also for the East and
West, the North and South. If the southern nations
cannot survive, then the northern nations too will
crumble. If developing countries cannot pay their
debts, everyone will suffer. If we do not take care
of poorer countries, the well-being of richer countries is not going to last, and we will not be able to
continue living in the way we have been used to for
much longer. Only when we can touch the wisdom
of nondiscrimination in us can we all survive.
In the Majjhima Nikāya, one of the collections
of the Buddha’s discourses, there is a very short
passage on how the world has come to be. It is
very simple, very easy to understand, and yet very
deep: “This is, because that is. This is not, because
that is not. This is like this, because that is like
that.” This is the Buddhist teaching of Genesis.
Our lives are like this because other lives are
like that. The citizens of every country are human
beings. We cannot study and understand a human
being just through statistics. We can’t leave the job
to governments or political scientists alone. We
have to do it ourselves. If we arrive at an understanding of the fears and hopes of a citizen from
Iraq or Sudan, Afghanistan or Syria, then we can
understand our own fears and hopes. If we have
this very clear vision of reality, we do not have to
look very far to see what we have to do.
We are not separate. We are inextricably interrelated. The rose is the garbage, the soldier is the
civilian, the criminal is also the victim. The rich
man is the very poor woman, and the Buddhist is
the non-Buddhist. “This is like this, because that
is like that.” No one among us has clean hands.
None of us can claim that the situation is not our
responsibility. The child who is forced to work
as a prostitute is that way because of the way we
are. The refugees who are forced to live in camps
have to live like that because of the way we live.
The arms dealers do their business so that our
economies can continue to grow and they can
benefit. This helps to create that, and that helps
to create this. Wealth and poverty, the affluent
society and the poor society, inter-are. The wealth
of one society is made of the poverty of the other.
Wealth is made of non-wealth elements, and poverty is made of non-poverty elements.
We are responsible for everything that happens around us. If we look into ourselves with the
eyes of interbeing, we see the young prostitute,
the child soldier, the starving mother, and the
migrant worker; we bear their pain, and the pain of
the whole world. It is from this insight of interbeing that true compassion will be born in our hearts
and we will know what to do and what not to do to
help the situation.
This is an excerpt from The Other Shore by Thích Nhất
Hạnh, published by Parallax Press.

Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh is one of the most revered and influential
teachers in the world today. Born in Vietnam in 1926, he became a Zen
Buddhist monk at the age of sixteen. Over seven decades of teaching,
he published more than one hundred titles on meditation, mindfulness,
and Engaged Buddhism, as well as poems, children’s stories, and
commentaries on ancient Buddhist texts. After his exile from Vietnam
in 1966, he became a pioneer in bringing Buddhism to the West. He
founded the Plum Village tradition of meditation practice, which today
has ten monasteries and dozens of practice centers in the United
States, Asia, Australia, and Europe, as well as more than 1,500 local
mindfulness practice communities. He built a thriving community of
over seven hundred monks and nuns worldwide, who, together with his
tens of thousands of lay students, apply his teachings on mindfulness,
peacemaking, and community-building in schools, workplaces, prisons,
politics, and businesses throughout the world. Our beloved teacher
passed away peacefully on January 22, 2022, at Từ Hiếu Temple in
Huế, Vietnam, at the age of ninety-five.