This is a beautiful inspirational story from the Zen’s literature.
One Zen master, Hui Hai, was asked, ”What do you think about the inferior and the superior people?”
He said, ”Just outside my door there is a small rose bush and there is a big, one-hundred-foot-high, hundreds-of-years-old cedar, but I have never heard them talking about superiority or inferiority. The rose bush is a rose bush, the cedar is a cedar. Neither the cedar says, ‘Look! I am one hundred feet high and you are just a small bush. You don’t count. I will live for hundreds of more years; many like you will come and go,’ nor does the rose bush say to the cedar, ‘Although you are so huge and so big and so ancient, you have not been able to produce a single rose flower.
All your life is useless, meaningless. You have not created anything to give as an offering to existence. I am a small rose
bush but look at my flowers.’
”No, there has been no discussion. I have been hoping that someday the discussion will be there, but the rose bush is happy as it is, and the cedar is happy as it is, and there is no comparison because they are totally different. You cannot compare different things.”
In existence there are only unique things; no comparison is possible, no distinction is possible.
