Love of plants

Tell me what you love, and I will tell you how far your morality goes.

Love develops in these stages:

• loving only yourself; such a person has only one place to go, hell
• loving your family
• loving your relatives
• loving your neighbors and friends
• loving your coworkers
• loving your comrades, fellow believers and teammates in the same group
• loving your country
• loving humanity
• loving animals, at which point it is right to become vegetarian
• and finally loving plants.

Everyone thinks plants are without feeling, unable to know pain or joy or to think, like stones and soil, so there is no need to love them. Only those with great refinement, deep wisdom and boundless morality can love plants.

Plants have a powerful vitality of their own, and many live a thousand years, far longer than people. That vitality creates the living environment for other animals. Humans, the peak of life, do not realize they walk on the life of plants. Plants cradled and brought forth human life. So anyone who understands life must cherish their cradle and their source, which is plants.

Plants take the glaring sun to shelter us, and turn the sun's energy into matter that stores it for millions of years for later generations. The summer is fiercely hot, but walk through a forest and the air cools at once. The plants have taken the heat on themselves to shade everything else.

Roots reach deep into the ground and draw water up to the surface so that living things can multiply and thrive. Because of trees we have ponds, lakes, rivers and streams. Many planets hold a great store of water underground, but with no roots to draw it up, they have no life. Earth has forests, so it has water near the surface for life to pour forth.

Each shape of a tree, each branch, each leaf is a beautiful work of art by heaven and earth. And that is before we speak of how lovely a tree is when it bursts into bloom. Trees bear fruit, and most of it can be eaten by people and animals. Where fruit cannot be eaten, it surely has special medicinal properties that can cure otherwise incurable illnesses.

When the wind blows, trees sway their branches and leaves as if joining in the fun with people. In a storm, trees bend and slow the wind to protect us. In a flood, they slow the current to make it less dangerous. What plants have given people is without limit.

There is no need to say more. Anyone who feels that the life of trees is bound up with their own has morality and wisdom. A few trees casting shade across the yard are enough to make us happy inside. A green lawn under our feet, cradling Vietnamese feet, is a simple joy. A few yellow leaves falling from a branch are so beautiful. A petal carried off by the wind is a line of imperishable poetry. A young bird chirping on a branch is heaven and earth singing together.

Whoever can love plants has great morality, especially now, when forests are being cut down so brutally. Planting many trees around our home is a small act that sows merit. And whoever has the means to plant and protect a hundred hectares of forest will, by the law of cause and effect, have a long life that is free from terrible accidents.

The saints, for their part, sense that plants have a simple kind of consciousness, so they would never harm a tree or a blade of grass. Whoever can love every green leaf is no ordinary person.