We Are One

Abstract

This chapter explains what it does, and does not, mean for a Zen Buddhist to say: “We are one.” It begins by relating the Zen teaching of the nonduality of self and others to Jesus’s teaching that you should love others as yourself. It then relates these to the idea of “the oneness of all life” found in the Hindu Upanishads. Debates between different schools of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy are briefly examined, and it is explained that the Zen experience of oneness should not be misunderstood in terms of an absorption into a homogeneous blob that denies the reality of differences. For Zen, individuals exist but not independently; to exist is to coexist. Zen’s teaching of nonduality, as a matter of “neither one nor two,” implies both unity and uniqueness, oneness and difference.