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BUDDHIST SYMBOLISM 39
Take a number designated 5. 5 is not just 5. It is organically related to the rest of the series. 5 is 5 because of its being related to all the other numbers as units and also to the series as a whole. Without this 5 the whole is no more a whole, nor can all the other units (6, 4, 7, 8, 9, etc.) be considered belonging to the series. 5, then, not only contains in it all the rest of the numbers in the infinite series; it is also the series itself. It is in this sense when the Buddhist philosophy states that all is one and one is all, or that the one is the many and the many the one.
Basho's haiku of "the old pond" now becomes perhaps more intelligible. The old pond with the frog jumping into it and producing a sound, which not only spatially but temporally reaches the end of the world, is in the haiku by no means the ordinary pond we find everywhere in Japan, and the frog, too, is no common "green frog" of the springtime. To the author of the haiku "I" am the old pond, "I" am the frog, "I" am the sound, "I" am reality itself, including all these separate individual units of existence. Basho at this moment of spiritual exaltation is the universe itself; nay, he is God Himself, Who uttered the fiat, "Let there be light." The fiat corresponds to "the sound of the water," for it is from this "sound" that the whole world takes its rise.
This being so, do we call "the old pond" or the water's sound or the leaping frog a symbol for the ultimate reality? In Buddhist philosophy there is nothing behind the old pond, because it is complete in itself and does not point to anything behind or beyond or outside itself. The old pond (or the water or the frog) itself is reality.
If the old pond is to be called a symbol because of its being an object of sense, intellectually speaking, then the frog is a symbol, the sound is a symbol, the pen with which I write this is a symbol, the paper is a symbol, the writer is a symbol; indeed, the whole world is a symbol, including what we designate "reality." Symbolism may thus go on indefinitely.
Buddhist symbolism would therefore declare that everything is symbolic, it carries meaning with it, it has values of its own, it exists by its own right pointing to no reality other than itself. Fowls of the air and lilies of the field are the divine glory itself.