A. The Buddha said that everything is imaginary like dreams and not real. Even scientists say that all things are different from each other and that there are not two things that are the same, adding that we just imagine there are things that are the same. When we say, for example, “I have three cups that are the same”, the three cups, although appearing the same in colour, size, price and weight, are actually different from each other, for example, in the number of molecules and the time when each of them was produced. However, we use numbers as if there are many things that are the same; ten pencils and one hundred cups, imagining that they are the same.
In the same way, an ordinary life is also a kind of imaginary concept, not an absolutely concrete concept, and what it is like varies depending on beholders’ perspectives. This is why what seems to be an ordinary life to you can appear to be extraordinary, or special to others. For example, the life that the middle-class people in developed countries such as the United States, Great Britain and Japan think of as an ordinary life can be quite different from the life that the middle-class people of extremely poor countries regard as an ordinary life.
The root of the ordinary and the special is Emptiness.
©Boo Ahm
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway
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