“Dear Buddha, are you a living being?” We want the Buddha to confirm the notion we have of him. But he looks at us, smiles, and says, “A human being is not a human being. That is why we can say that he is a human being.” These are the dialectics of the Diamond Sutra. “A is not A. That is why it is truly A.” A flower is not a flower. It is made only of non-flower elements — sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners, and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe. If we return any one of these non-flower elements to its source, there will be no flower. That is why we can
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