The boundless inquiry into our difference + unity is “How do we honor and appreciate ‘All beings throughout space and time,’ particularly in our relationships with people as they express diverse identities, histories, and experiences?”

Gender, race, ethnic, political, and religious identities are just a few of the many ways we seek to simultaneously identify and differentiate ourselves. We long for a unique expression of ourselves and a sense of belonging.

Zen insight frames these contradictory needs as but two facets of our multidimensional being. In the teaching poem, “Merging of Difference and Unity,” 8th-century Chinese Chan (Japanese, “Zen”) teacher Shitou wrote:

Right in light there is darkness,
but don’t confront it as darkness.
Right in darkness there is light,
but don’t see it as light.
Light and dark are relative to one another
like forward and backward steps.
All things have their function.
It is a matter of use in the appropriate situation.

Shitou says that seeming opposites of light and dark are inextricably woven together. He uses “light” to mean our everyday experience of myriad things differentiated by our senses, and “darkness” as the unified nature of things. Each being exists as a unique expression and as completely interdependent with others. Dogen points to our experience of ourselves:

To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away.

When we look intimately into our experience of self, not our ideas about ourself, we find the myriad elements that have flowed together to give rise to our particular being: our parents, friends, society, food, water, air, earth, sun. Thich Nhat Hanh calls this “inter-being”:

This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also, so we can say that everything is in here in this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here—time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything coexists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. To be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is. Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source.

So, again, our question is “How can we honor and appreciate–not merely tolerate–differences without forgetting that we ‘inter-are’ with all beings?” Of course, we know this is often, but not always easy, when we are with loving friends and family. What about when we feel some conflict with a loved one, let alone with strangers or the many non-human beings we find on this planet? The Buddha pointed to the best model he knew of to practice in such a way:

Even as a mother at the risk of her own life, watches over and protects her only child, so, with a boundless mind should one cherish all living things, suffusing love over the entire world, above, below, and all around.

However, we can’t merely abandon our perceptions for the sake of an idealized unity, either. As Shitou says, “It is a matter of use in the appropriate situation.” We have to seek a response appropriate to the situations we find ourselves in. Can we, even in an unresolved conflictual relationship, take care of ourselves and the other without forgetting our inherent unity nor erasing our differences?