4.  Buddha, the Universal Life.

Zen conceives Buddha as a Being, who moves, stirs, inspires, enlivens, and vitalizes everything.  Accordingly, we may call Him the Universal Life in the sense that He is the source of all lives in the universe.  This Universal Life, according to Zen, pillars the heaven, supports the earth, glorifies the sun and moon, gives voice to thunder, tinges clouds, adorns the pasture with flowers, enriches the field with harvest, gives animals beauty and strength.  Therefore, Zen declares even a dead clod of earth to be imbued with the divine life, just as Lowell expresses a similar idea when he says: 

“Every clod feels a stir of might,
An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
And groping blindly above it for light,
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.”

One of our contemporary Zenists wittily observed that ’vegetables are the children of earth, that animals which feed on vegetables are the grand-children of earth, and that men who subsist on animals are the great-grand-children of earth.’  If there be no life in earth, how could life come out of it?  If there be no life, the same as the animal’s life in the vegetables, how could animals sustain their lives feeding on vegetables?  If there be no life similar to ours in animals, how could we sustain our life by subsisting on them?  The poet must be in the right, not only in his esthetic, but in his scientific point of view, in saying-

“I must
Confess that I am only dust. 
But once a rose within me grew;
Its rootlets shot, its flowerets flew;
And all rose’s sweetness rolled
Throughout the texture of my mould;
And so it is that I impart
Perfume to them, whoever thou art.”

As we men live and act, so do our arteries; so does blood; so do corpuscles.  As cells and protoplasm live and act, so do elements, molecules, and atoms.  As elements and atoms live and act, so do clouds; so does the earth; so does the ocean, the Milky Way, and the Solar System.  What is this life which pervades the grandest as well as the minutest works of Nature, and which may fitly be said ’greater than the greatest and smaller than the smallest?’ It cannot be defined.  It cannot be subjected to exact analysis.  But it is directly experienced and recognized within us, just as the beauty of the rose is to be perceived and enjoyed, but not reduced to exact analysis.  At any rate, it is something stirring, moving, acting and reacting continually.  This something which can be experienced and felt and enjoyed directly by every one of us.  This life of living principle in the microcosmos is identical with that of the macrocosmos, and the Universal Life of the macrocosmos is the common source of all lives.  Therefore, the Mahaparinirvana-sutra says: 

“Tathagata (another name for Buddha) gives life to all beings, just as the lake Anavatapta gives rise to the four great rivers.”  “Tathagata,” says the same sutra, “divides his own body into innumerable bodies, and also restores an infinite number of bodies to one body.  Now be becomes cities, villages, houses, mountains, rivers, and trees; now he has a large body; now he has a small body; now he becomes men, women, boys, and girls.”