A Story Of the Butterfly

One of the main tenets of Buddhism revolves around the belief that everything and everyone in the universe is interconnected and interdependent one on another. This concept of “dependant arising” or dependant origin states that at every level of circumstance and existence there exists a “mutually interdependent web of cause and effect.” Since the creation of Buddhism two thousand years ago this philosophy has been debated and called by many different names by those outside the teachings of Buddha. Most recently, the concept of the six degrees of separation has become a popular concept in Western civilization to illustrate the same idea, that everthing and thus everyone is connected to everthing and everyone else.

Scientists today generally accept the principle of the “Lorenz Butterfly” which presents the idea that the simple flapping of a butterflies wings in one part of the world create tiny changes in the atmosphere which can change or alter, prevent or delay, speedup or slow down the path or even the occurance of a tornado in another part of the world. The idea that climate in one part of the world can affect the climate in another part of the world, that the hurricanes which effect the southern coast of the United States begin as tropical waves off the coast of Africa, or that pollution from cars and coal in the United States effect the degree and speed at which ice is melting in Anartica , has been gererally accepted throughout the world. Accepting this principle of “dependant arising” brings the more interesting question ,had the butterfly not flapped its wings or had not existed entirely, would there have been a tornado?

To put a more human face on this concept consider this story. A young man living with his parents just outside New York City, graduates college a gets his dream job on Wall Street. After some time learning the in’s and out’s of this new job he gets an opportunity to advance and is sponsored by his employer to takes additional classes which will allow him to take the tests for mandatory federal licences which in turn will allow him to further advance his career. He and those in class complete those courses, take and pass the the required exams . To celebrate the all go out for an evening on the town. He arrives home, to his parents house very, very, late that evening and as a result of lets say, to much fun, gets up late the following morning. So late that he misses his regular train. There is however in this town two train lines which will take you into New York City. He rushes to the other train, and arrives in NewYork only about 15 minutes later than he normally would. He is about three blocks away from his work but actually six blocks from where he would usually stop to pick up coffee and a bagel before he went to his office. So he looks around and finds a coffee shop and goes into buy his coffee and bagel. There is a young girl behind the counter, she fumbles with his order, its her first day on the job. She arrived just the day before from Brazil. This is her uncle’s coffese shop. The young man never goes back to his other coffee shop, nor does he ever take any other train into work. A little more than a year later they were married. I made her, her engagement ring and their wedding bands and over the thirty years that I have been manufacturing jewelry I have dozens of stories just like this.

There are, of course, similar stories in everyone’s experience, in everyone’s life. Take this one from the martial arts. There was a teenager sitting home on a Saturday afternoon. He’s in the living room with his parents and grandmother. She was there every Saturday. He was waiting for the ballgame to come on, but it was raining and as was the style in those days, when the ballgame got rained out the T.V. station substituted a movie. They were usually action movies , westerns or war films were very popular in those days usually with stars like John Wayne or Errol Fynn , Randolph Scott or Joel McCrea, in the lead roles. Many were still in black and white, not color like today. That was the case on that Saturday. An old James Cagney film named “Blood on the Sun” played that day. Set in Japan, just before WWII, it is a film filled with intrigue, espionage and plenty of action. The action is pure judo and jujutsu. Cagney as it turns out was a real judoka and did all his own stunts. The teenager was absolutely enthralled and mesmerized by what he saw on the T.V., so much so that he talked about the movie with his father for much of the following week. The boy’s father, looking for something to keep his teenage son interested in for more than ten minutes at a time, looked in the local yellow pages, found a martial arts school reasonably close to where they were living and one evening took his son to watch a judo class. The judo class was actually finishing when they arrived but the owner of the school allowed them to watch the next class, a class of jujutsu. The teenager joined that very evening and within a year was allowed, even though he was quite young at the time, to join the jujutsu class. Some forty five years later he is still as excited to be in thoses classes as he was as a fourteen year old boy.

I never actually had a chance to thank Mr Cagney for making that movie or for giving me my first glimpse of the martial arts. I suppose I could have though. A few years after my father retired, he bough a fifty acre apple farm in upstate New York. Mr Cagney was our neighbor. He owned the farm next to us, butterflies and all.