MindYourBuddha

In this story the Buddha speaking to Kashyapa says,

Suppose, in the three-thousand-great-thousandfold world there are growing on the mountains, along the rivers, and streams, in the valleys and on the land, plants, trees, thickets, forests, and medicinal herbs of various and numerous kinds, with names and colors all different.  A dense cloud, spreading over and everywhere covering the whole three-thousand-great-thousandfold world, pours down its rain equally at the same time.  Its moisture universally fertilizes the plants, trees, thickets, forests, and medicinal herbs, with their tiny roots, tiny stalks, tiny twigs, tiny leaves, their medium roots, medium stalks, medium twigs, medium leaves, their big roots, big stalks, big twigs, big leaves; every tree big or little, according to its superior, middle or lower capacity, receives its share.  From the rain of the one cloud, each according to the nature of its kind acquires its development, opening its blossoms and bearing its fruit.  Though produced in one soil and moistened by the same rain, yet these plants and trees are all different.

The parable reinforces the theme that there is but one truth the Buddha gives equally to all, yet we are nourished to the extent of our individual capacity.  As we continue our practice, we spiritually mature and partake of the truth to greater degrees.

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In Buddhism For Today our companion study guide for The Threefold Lotus Sutra, our founder Nokkyo Niwano's commentary on this parable describe the parts of the tree as a metaphor for spiritual maturity.  Roots, stalks, twigs, and leaves indicate faith, precepts, meditation and wisdom.  Our faith is the most important part, because without it we cannot grow spiritually.  One cannot keep the precepts without faith.  Because of keeping the precepts, one can enter into the mental state of meditation and can also obtain wisdom.  Wisdom being defined as the ability to understand and hold in mind equally both differences and similarities.

Just as that great cloud, raining on all the plants, trees, thickets, forests, and medicinal herbs, and according to the nature of their seed perfectly fertilizing them so that each grows and develops, [so] the Law preached by the Tathagata is of one form (1) and flavor (2), that is to say, deliverance (3), abandonment (4), extinction (5), and finally the attainment of perfect knowledge (6).
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The Tathagata knows this unitary essential Law, that is to say, deliverance, abandonment, extinction, final nirvana of eternal tranquility, ending in return to the void.

I was particularly struck by the phrase "return to the void", because I suddenly understood that we began in the void and that to contemplate the reality of all things, as is our purpose in meditation, is to try and experience our beginning.  The void is one of those eastern metaphysical terms with no easy relateable definition for a western audience.  In this one phrase, I came to recognize that the void is not the emptiness of things, for something cannot come from nothing.  Far from it, the void is only apparently empty because when we suspend our thinking mind we are confronted with silence, an apparent emptiness, but only because we are so used too being bombarded by our thoughts that our threshold is too high to sense the subtler forms of consciousness that are present all the time.  Its like being instantly transported from the front row of a rock concert to a church confessional, at first you can't hear anything, but gradually your senses attune to the ambient noise.   When we die, so I have read, our spirit subsumes back into a universal spirit and awaits the next cycle of rebirth.  The act of meditating, opens a window to this universal consciousness, unfettered by our ego, and allows us to experience something not confined by the limitations of our thinking mind.

Up until this point I also could not reconcile the concept of meditative void with the concept of void or the formlessness of nature as taught in Buddhism.  How I understood formlessness or non-form was by imaging that we turn the heat up on the world such that everything is reduced to either a gas or a melted blob of goo.  There are no longer are any structures, people, cars, roads, plants, mountains, etc., just gas and a layer of liquid goo.  Now, no matter if its a gas or liquid its easier to see that everything is just some combination of elements from the periodic chart that we learned in high school chemistry.  And from that perspective its easy to drill down to everything being made up of atoms and sub-atomic particles.  Particle physicists know that the space between the particles we know of, is orders of magnitude larger in volume that the particles account for.  And the space, or void, is not empty.  In fact, like little kids, we smash things together to see what's inside.  The only reason why we think its empty space is because our instruments are not refined enough to see into it.   Similarly our mind is not a sufficiently enough refined instrument to explore other states of consciousness.  I believe now, that these two voids are one and the same. 

You can't avoid drawing parallels between the strangeness of quantum physics and the strangeness of everyday unexplained phenomena.  In quantum physics light particles have a property of non-locality, that is they can exist at two places at the same time.  Could this also be the mechanism by which two people half a world apart experience the very same thought at the same time.   This may support an argument that consciousness and matter are the same.

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1 "One form" means that all forms or appearances are manifestations of reality.
2 "One flavor" is interpreted as the One-vehicle Law, or the Law of Equality.
3 Deliverance from mortality.
4 Abandonment of attachments or abandonment of the view that nirvana means total extinction.
5 Extinction here means the Middle Path, that is, neither mortal existence nor total extinction.
6 Perfect knowledge is the wisdom concerning all seeds.