Thich Nhat Hanh

There is a story about a flower which is well known in the Zen circles. One day the 
Buddha held up a flower in front of an audience of 1250 monks and nuns. He did not 
say anything for quite a long time. The audience was perfectly silent. Everyone 
seemed to be thinking hard, trying to see the meaning behind the Buddha's gesture. 
Then, suddenly, the Buddha smiled. He smiled because someone in the audience 
smiled at him and at the flower. The name of the at monk was Mahakashyapa. He was 
the only person who smiled, and the Buddha smiled back and said, " I have a treasure 
of insight, and I have transmitted it to Mahakashyapa." The story has been discussed 
by many generations of Zen students, and people continue to look for its meaning. To 
me the meaning is quite simple. When someone holds up a flower and shows it to you. 
He want you to see it. If you keep thinking, you miss the follower. The person who 
was not thinking, who was just himself, was able to encounter the flower in depth, and 
he smiled.

That is the problem of life. If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, 
we miss everything. When a child presents himself to you with his smile, if you are 
not really there thinking about the future or the past, or preoccupied with other 
problems then the child is not really there for you. The technique of being alive is to 
go back to yourself in order for the child to appear like a marvelous reality. Then you 
can see him smile and you can embrace him in your arms.

I would like to share a poem with you, written by a friend of mine who died at the age 
of twenty-eight in Saigon, about thirty years ago. After he died, people found many 
beautiful poems he had written, and I was startled when I read this poem. It has just a 
few short lines, but it is very beautiful:

Standing quietly by the fence,
You smile your wondrous smile.
I am speechless, and my senses are filled
By the sounds of your beautiful song,
Beginingless and endless. 
I bow deeply to you

"You" refers to a flower, a dahlia. That morning as he passed by a fence, he saw that 
little flower very deeply and, struck by the sight of it, he stopped and wrote that poem.

I enjoy this poem very much. You might think that the poet was a mystic, because his 
way of looking and seeing things is very deep. But he was just an ordinary person like 
any one of us. I don't know how or why he was able to look and see like that, but it is 
exactly the way we practice mindfulness. We try to be in touch with life and look 
deeply as we drink our tea, walk, sit down, or arrange flowers. The secret of the 
success is that you are really yourself, and when you are really yourself, you can 
encounter life in the present moment.