I didn’t start gardening to learn about karma. I did it to eat really good tomatoes. But I learned about karma anyway.
It’s no coincidence that farming is one of the most common metaphors in Buddhist teachings to explain cause and effect. As one often quoted saying goes: “If you plant beans, you’ll harvest beans. If you plan melons, you’ll harvest melons.” You reap what you sow.
I’ve used such metaphors a lot, too. When I was a Buddhist Sunday School teacher I drew countless white board sprouts with round radiating suns in the corner to illustrate cause and effect. Of course, I hadn’t grown a thing in my life. Three years ago when I decided to try, the first thing I learned was just how much I still had to learn.
My first real attempt at a garden yielded a grand total of a dozen beans, three cherry tomatoes, and two shriveled inch-long zucchinis.
The zucchini was the biggest surprise. I had been told how notoriously prolific they were. I was warned that a single plant would grow far more squash than I could eat, and that I would find myself baking loaf after loaf of zucchini bread and befriending my neighbors to unload my surplus. Thankfully, my two microsquash didn’t pose any such problems.
During that first spring I spent months trying to help my zucchini, armed with the faux-knowledge from my Sunday School diagram. If I wanted to bear fruit, I just needed to change the necessary causes and conditions. Right? Paying attention to watering, sunlight, and soil didn’t seem to help. I googled for more, but adding fertilizer, changing my water schedule, and self-pollination didn’t produce any better results.
It wasn’t until summer was winding down and it was time to prepare the bed for a fall garden that I pulled the zucchini plant and learned what as getting in the way: root-knot nematodes.
The zucchini’s blistered root system told the story of the barren summer: the plant had become infected with a tiny parasite that sapped its energy and stunted its growth. The causes and conditions affecting the plant weren’t the visible and clearly labeled water, soil, and sunlight from my diagram. They were concealed under the earth.
But my poor knotted zucchini plant was still a pretty good metaphor. After all, when trying to understand cause and effect, we usually start from what we can see and know. But when faced with a world we don’t understand or when we struggle to empathize with another’s choices, how often do we learn later that we were missing something? Something unknown, beneath the surface, shaping life just as much as what we can see.
In my second year I wanted to grow some flowers alongside my veggies. Without checking the weather, I cleared and seeded a bed just in time for an off-season storm. Heavy winds blew most of the seeds away, and a half inch of flooding took care of the rest.
I was disappointed, but my garden continued. I grew gailan, mustard, radishes, and cat grass. Then, almost six months later, without consideration or special care, one tuft of purple flowers sprouted from the still empty bed. At least one seed had been saved, and all it needed was time.
The seed waiting in the earth helped me understand that my perception of cause and effect had become warped. It could have been 22 minute sitcoms, video games, or classroom science experiments, but somewhere along the way I learned cause and effect as A plus B equals C, every time and all at once. But gardening helped me to understand this another way: when an effect takes time, it’s not because it’s happening slowly, it’s because it’s acting over time.
As a younger man, I’d never really understood the value of time in making change possible. I thought that time healed all wounds because of a dulling of memory. I had not yet lived enough to learn that the movement of conditions over time time can allow the same old causes to produce new effects. That the condition of time can instead create clarity.
I’ve learned a lot from my short time gardening. And I’ve experienced a lot of joy (not all of it tomato-related). Watching plants grow and caring for them has helped me learn more about the Big Stuff: cause and effect, how life works, and what the Buddha was talking about when he talked about karma.
But the Buddha didn’t teach using farming metaphors so that I could grow a few herbs and understand him better. The Buddha talked about farming because it was relatable to the everyday lives of the people he taught. It is only because of where and when I was born that I learned about Buddhism and gardening in the opposite order.
And while I don’t expect I’ll learn more old world skills to understand Buddhist teachings better (charioting will have to wait), it does make me think about the everyday understanding shared by many millennia of humans that has becomes easy to forget. That there are hidden things in the dark. That the stars in the sky are the same each night. And that we live together because it is dangerous to go alone.
Root knot image licensed under Creative Commons by Scot Nelson.
