Another Fishy Story

Other fish taught me another dharma lesson years before I started study of the dharma.  Most Buddhist stories don't start 30 feet underwater, but this one happened in the mid-1990s while I was engaged in that most bourgeois of past times, scuba diving.  

My partner at that time, a red-headed flight attendant named Beth, and I were on a scuba trip down in the Florida Keys.  We were with a rather large group, and by the second day we were getting pretty sick and tired of following the school of divers around, swimming around in all of the turbidity and reduced visibility they were kicking up from the seafloor, and were starting to suspect they were scaring away a lot of the sea life as well.

If you've ever been on a large diving expedition, everybody dives into the water at about the same time, and then follows either the dive leader or the dive plan around, swimming from coral head to coral head, or from anchor line to wreck, and once at the wreck from bow to stern and back again, relentlessly exploring and swimming around to see what's around the next corner.  We suspected that in all of that frantic swimming around, they were missing something, possibly a lot.

So Beth and I came up with another idea.  Once everybody got in the water and swam past the first coral head and on to the next attraction, we dumped all of the air out of out BCs and sank to the bottom.  You can't really sit cross-legged on the sea floor with the dive fins you wear, but we knelt down next to the coral head and watched it, just to see what happens after all of the divers had passed.

Nothing much in particular happened for the first minute or two, but then it got pretty spectacular.  As we had suspected, the horde of divers had scared the majority of sea life into hiding, but once they passed, several small fish, and then larger fish, and then even larger fish, came out of hiding from the seemingly endless number of nooks and crannies and hidey-holes in the coral head.  What's more, the coral polyps themselves emerged from the rock, looking like a fast-motion film of flowers blooming. Sea anemone blossomed, too.  The whole reef started coming to life in an incredible display of the complex web of life and the food chain of the shallow ocean. 

As we continued to kneel and watch, more fish approached the coral head; everything we had seen so far was coming from the reef, not toward it.  The complexity and biodiversity was pretty amazing, and there were more potential interactions, both commensal and adverse, than we could possibly fathom.  

So the first and obvious lesson here is similar to the catfish lesson - sometimes you can experience more by being still and letting the world unfold in front of you than you can frantically rushing from one place to another as your distracted mind keeps seeking the immediate gratification of what it thinks might be interesting right now.  But there was a deeper lesson here, too.

As we watched the complex biodiversity in the coral before us, I got a profound sense that I was looking not at individual organisms but at life itself.  Should that tight little school of fish over there really be considered a bunch of individuals, or just one living thing?  Each fish was so small and seemed so insignificant compared to the school, and I knew that without the presence of the larger school, no individual member would survive long.  So was I looking at individual fish  gathered into a school, or a school composed of individual fish?

And what about the coral itself?  Was each little branch waving in the current a separate living thing, like a colony of individual bees or apartment dwellers in a large, high-rise building, or was it all one life form with several branches, like a tree?  The more I watched, the more it all seemed to merge into one living organism, crossing species boundaries as well as individual entities.  The fish, the coral, the anemone, even the rock, all started to seem like one solitary, living, individual thing.  I wasn't looking at a lot of separate beings, I was observing life itself.

It was not hard to extrapolate that experience from the coral head to terrestrial environments, including cities full of people.  Yes, you can identify individual fish and polyps and flora, and individual people in their urban environment, but they could also be observed as parts of a larger, interconnected entity.  

It's all just how you look at it, and years later I learned that the Buddha taught that everything is all part of a single, interconnected whole and that it's the mind that separates out one thing from another.

Then we swam back to the boat and later that night drank margaritas while watching the sunset.