NZ visual diary - entry 25

mother and child - Fo Guang Shan Temple

Auckland is home to the largest Buddhist temple in the country, the Fo Guang Shan Temple. Last year, Dolph and I, along with some close friends, spent a day at the temple. Our visit remains quite memorable.

The temple's website states that the mission of the temple is "to promote Humanistic Buddhism."

Among the many photographs I captured during our visit, the photograph displayed above is especially significant for me.

A core tenant of the religions I have studied, and for me a marker of what imbues those religions with their essential spirituality, is a set of relationship propositions.

In acknowledging a relationship with a transcendent being, an individual ought to recognise and accept that the first order "I-Thou" relationship, to borrow Martin Buber's memorable phrase, necessitates a second order relationship, "I-We."

I endow the "we' with expansive breadth, the stuff that would have some label me a pantheist. I accept the claim.

If the One is everything and we enter into that relationship, then it ought to follow that we are connected to all things.

In the moment I captured the image of mother and child, a moment in which a small child, with the countenance of attendant deities, wished to express her sense of oneness with another, and by extension all things, I knew that no other expression of connection and unity, not even the grandeur of the temple compound, could as adequately and completely convey a sense of the ineffable.