Tonight I would like to speak about meditative awareness and Zen practice in terms of an article, a recent article by Michael Pollan about plant intelligence, which seems like a contradiction. But recent scientific research by botanists have brought up the question of what is plant awareness or intelligence? And I think this has to do with how, well, part of this has to do with how we see awareness. What does intelligence mean? So maybe we could say intelligence in quotes.

[01:10]

What does intelligence mean? And in our meditative practice, what is intelligence? What is awareness? So a lot of our Zen practice is about widening our view of awareness. opening our capacity for awareness, and seeing the possibilities for the beneficial use of awareness. So in current plant science, there's a controversy about plant intelligence, and largely this has to do with how do we define intelligence. And I think in Zen practice, this is also an issue. What does intelligence mean? So I want to go through this article.

[02:14]

Michael Pollan is a very interesting writer. He's written a number of really interesting books, The Botany of Desire. one I'm most familiar with, but he's written quite a lot about plants and humans and our relationship and how that relationship is not so obvious. So, one thing he says is that Part of the difference is the time factor. It is only human arrogance and the fact that the lives of plants unfold in what amounts to a much slower dimension of time that keep us from appreciating plants' intelligence and consequent success. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing 99% of the biomass on Earth.

[03:16]

By comparison, humans and all the other animals are, in the words of one plant neurobiologist, just traces. So he also mentions early on in the article a science fiction story in which there's an alien race that lands, and compared to humans, they move very, very quickly. So to them, humans seem like this very dull, almost immobile event. And that's how plants seem to us. So we don't necessarily see what plants do. But the question is about how we interpret. And so he says, the controversy is less about the remarkable discoveries of recent plant science than about how to interpret and name them. So the question is about definitions. Whether behaviors observed in plants which look very much like learning

[04:23]

memory, decision-making, and intelligence deserve to be called by those terms or whether those words should be reserved exclusively for creatures with brains. So we think of intelligence having to do with brains and nervous systems and so forth. But plants exhibit what we might call learning and memory and decision-making. but not in the way that we think of them as what he calls later cerebrocentric creatures. So he talks about how plants have 15 or 20 distinct senses, including analogs of R5, smell and taste, and so forth. So they sense and respond to chemicals in the air or in their bodies. He talks about plants. One of the scientists, a man named Mancuso, who he talks about a lot,

[05:31]

found that plant roots would seek out a buried pipe through which water was flowing, even if the exterior of the pipe was dry, suggesting that plants did not hear the sound of flowing water. So there's a lot of interesting current observations that are part of the data in this article. He also talks about Charles Darwin, who wrote a book that I didn't know about called The Power of Movement in Plants. So along with the origin of species and all his work on gravity, Darwin was interested in plants and Darwin talked about roots. He said it's hardly an exaggeration to say that root tips have the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts and act like the brain of one of the lower animals. The brain is being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense organs and directing several movements. So Darwin thought of the plant as a kind of upside down animal.

[06:39]

with its main sensory organs and brain on the bottom, underground, and its sexual organs on top, so leaves and flowers. So all of these ways of looking at plants actually really can change our way of thinking about awareness and life itself. If, for example, Root's about to encounter an impenetrable obstacle or a toxic substance, change course before they make contact with it. So what's going on there? How does a Root know before it encounters an obstacle or a toxic substance? So there's some kind of awareness there. So one thing I want to suggest is that what we usually think of as intelligence that we think of instead as awareness.

[07:42]

He also talks about plant signaling. Since the early 1980s, it has been known that when a plant's leaves are infected or chewed by insects, they emit volatile chemicals that signal other leaves to mount a defense. Sometimes this warning signal contains information about the identity of the insect gleaned from the taste of its saliva. But actually, somehow it informs other leaves and other plants in the area about the attacker. So there's some kind of communication. For example, when antelopes browse acacia trees, the leaves produce tannins that make them unappetizing and difficult to digest. When food is scarce and acacias are over-browsed, trees produce sufficient amounts of toxins to kill the animals even. So there's some kind of communication going on. There's some kind of awareness. So, you know, we prize intelligence.

[08:44]

And yet, part of what our Zen practice is about, so I don't, you know, we have in our sangha many very, very intelligent people. I'm not knocking intelligence. and not knocking rationality. This can be a wonderful tool, but part of what Zazen teaches us is that the intelligence and awareness that we learn through our rationality, through our brains and neurons, is only one way of knowing. So this practice we do of sitting upright, of being present, of paying attention to facing the wall and just being present and upright and relaxed and aware in the middle of whatever's going on on our cushion.

[09:47]

Whether it happens that in a particular evening or a morning or whenever we're sitting that we're feeling confused, or upset, or angry, or sleepy, or whatever's going on here now, or discomfort in our knees, or whatever phenomena is appearing on our cushion. To be present and aware is a different kind of, we could say a kind of intelligence, but it's not the same kind of intelligence as necessarily as the intelligence that happens through, anyway, through our usual understanding of intelligence. And it has a kind of, well, a usefulness from the point of view of the point of Zen practice, which is to help foster kindness and awareness and awakening.

[10:53]

for ourselves and everybody else. So I think this question of plant so-called intelligence is very interesting and useful for us as Zen students. What is it that is happening for us on our cushions? What is it that happens What other kinds of awareness are there? How can we widen our sense of how we know what's going on in our life and in our world? One of the scientists involved in studying plant behavior and problem solving and so forth concluded by suggesting that brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning.

[11:56]

There is some unifying mechanism across living systems that can process information and learn. So there are other ways besides brains and neurons of processing information and learning. This is part of what we can learn from looking at how plants function. So part of this that relates very directly to Zen has to do with what some plant scientists are even calling plant neurobiology. And of course, other plant scientists are outraged at this term. Plant neurobiology. So, Michael Pollan says, scientists are often uncomfortable talking about the role of metaphor and imagination in their work.

[13:04]

Yet scientific progress often depends on both. Metaphors help stimulate the investigative imagination of good scientists. The British plant scientist Anthony Joavis wrote in a spirited response to a letter denouncing plant neurobiology. Quote, plant neurobiology, unquote, is obviously a metaphor. Plants don't possess the type of excitable communicative cells we call neurons. Yet the introduction of the term has raised a series of questions and inspired a set of experiments that promise to deepen our understanding not only of plants, but potentially also of brains. Well, OK, metaphor and imagination are key to Zen discourse. How Zen poetry, Zen koans, The Mahayana Sutras that are the background of Zen all work by encouraging imagination and by using metaphor. So a lot of the great Zen writers use nature metaphors, for example.

[14:09]

So we talk about the moon and we talk about the mountains and rivers and all of this kind of Zen poetry talks about the natural world as a way of talking about our awareness, as a way of talking about how we awaken. So plant neurobiology. Interesting. And of course, Zen also employs plant metaphors quite a bit. But there's a grounding for this in the actual reality of plants. One of these scientists estimates that a plant has 3,000 chemicals in its vocabulary in which it responds to what's going on in the world, while the average student has only 700 words in his vocabulary.

[15:12]

So a lot of this has to do with how we define intelligence. And again, I think part of this has to do with how we define intelligence, and then I would throw in there the word awareness and awakening. But intelligence as we think of it usually in terms of humans has to do with qualities of the brain. So most definitions of intelligence fall into one of two categories. The first is worded so that intelligence requires a brain. So many definitions of intelligence assume a brain. This definition refers to intrinsic mental qualities such as reason, judgment, and abstract thought. So I think we're used to that way of thinking about intelligence, making judgments, using reason, making distinctions.

[16:32]

This is, in Sanskrit, discriminating consciousness, abstractions, abstract thoughts. The second category is less brain-bound and is metaphysical and stresses behavior. defining intelligence as the ability to respond in optimal ways to the challenges presented by one's environment and circumstances. Not surprisingly, plant neurobiologists jumped into the second camp. But I would suggest that this is also what a Bodhisattva definition of Well, I don't know. The Mahayana sutras don't talk about intelligence so much. But of skillful means and skillful behavior, bodhisattva activity is about this second quality. It may be more metaphysical, but talking about behavior, right conduct.

[17:37]

defining this in terms of the ability to respond in optimal, helpful ways to the challenges presented by one's environment and circumstances, how to adapt and adjust and respond, rather than reacting, as I sometimes say, helpfully to our environment. So, Mancuso says that intelligence is the ability to solve problems. In place of a brain, what I'm looking for is a distributed sort of intelligence, as we see in the swarming of birds. In a flock, each bird has only to follow a few simple rules, such as maintaining prescribed distance from its neighbor. Yet the collective effect of a great many birds executing a simple algorithm is a complex and supremely well-coordinated behavior." This idea of swarming of birds or a distributed sort of intelligence is interesting.

[18:41]

So he mentions also swarming of bees or behavior of ants, well, that's maybe a collective intelligence. It's not what we're used to thinking of as intelligence in the sense of an intelligent individual. And later on, he talks about, and I'll come back to this, networks. But I think there's a metaphor that's used in the sutras a lot for the activity of bodhisattvas, which compares it to plants. So the metaphor of the lotus, the dharma flowering, and solving problems through distributed intelligence. So the swarming of birds is a lot like the activity of sangha. how to work together to solve problems, how to cooperate rather than compete. So our very individualistic, competitive, consumerist society based on individual intelligence and individualism prizes individual intelligence.

[19:50]

But I don't know if that's such an intelligent response to the problems of our environment, actually. The reality flowering, the Bodhisattva way flowering, awakening flowering, it might be more useful to have a network of distributed intelligence to respond more effectively to problems of the environment. So he says that this kind of swarming of birds, something as similar as at work in plants, with the thousands of root tips playing the role of individual birds gathering and assessing data from the environment, responding in local but coordinated ways that benefit the entire organism. So... This is a long article, and there's a lot that's really fascinating in it.

[21:06]

But I wanted to pick up on a few major points. So the hypothesis that intelligent behavior in plants may be an emergent property of cells exchanging signals in a network might sound far-fetched, yet the way that intelligence emerges from a network of neurons may not be very different. And he talks about a leaderless network. So again, this idea of cooperation rather than competition, that is one way of talking about a kind of Sangha-based intelligence, is characteristic of what he's calling plant intelligence. And he talks about ways to store information biologically that don't require neurons. In plants it has long been known that experiences such as stress can alter the molecular wrapping around the chromosomes.

[22:15]

This in turn determines which genes will be silenced and which expressed. So anyway, there's a lot in this new science about plants that's really fascinating. Oh yeah. And again, in terms of what we might call intelligence, there's some evidence that plants make a low clicking sound as their cells elongate. It's possible that they can sense the reflections of those sounds. So it seems like As a practical example, a bean plant that's looking for a metal pole to grow its vine around knows where it is long before it makes contact with it, that they can actually search out a bean plant waste.

[23:24]

So they've done experiments with a time-lapse photography that shows that the bean plant doesn't waste time or energy looking for some pole to grow around, but that actually it can sense the direction in which there's a pole. Somehow it knows where there's a pole to grow around. This is really, I mean, that's not how we usually think about things, but how does the bean plant know where the pole is? It's not based on any, you know, of ours kinds of senses. But according to, you know, from looking at time-lapse photography, as soon as contact is made, also the plant appears to relax. Its clenched leaves begin to flutter mildly. to watch this video is to feel momentarily like one of the aliens in the science fiction story, and to see that there's something else going on.

[24:28]

So again, what is consciousness? So the question is, what is consciousness? What is awareness? And again, a big part of Buddhism historically is the study of consciousness, of awareness. And again, not just as an abstract theoretical study, but how to use our awareness and consciousness beneficially to be more aware and informed ourselves, but for the benefit of you know, everyone of all beings. So this is about universal liberation. It's not about just which individuals are going to do better, but how do we support each other? So in this sense, maybe this kind of consciousness and awareness

[25:29]

Not that we should become plants, obviously. We're animals. We're human beings. We do have brains. But part of what we learn in meditation is a different way of using our consciousness, of being informed in our awareness. What is awakening? What is awareness? How do we practice with that? So, what is plant consciousness? If consciousness is defined as inward awareness of oneself experiencing reality, then maybe plants also are aware. If we define intelligence simply as the state of being awake and aware of one's environment, online, as the neuroscientists say, then plants may qualify as conscious beings just as much as we are.

[26:44]

Beings know exactly what is in the environment around them. So, there's all kinds of implications to all of this. Again, I'm bringing this up because I think this is important to think about and to be aware of in exploring our own sense of awareness, widening our view of our own capacity to be aware. How can we use our own awareness more beneficially? So just sitting here for a half hour or so, as we just did, even if you felt if your mind was busy and distracted, even if your mind was sort of groggy and sleepy, as mine was, I confess, something's going on. There's a different level of awareness than the intelligence

[27:51]

of the cognitive mind solving some, so-called solving some problem. There's a different kind of problem solving that might be going on. Insights arise out of a concentrated, focused awareness. This is axiomatic in Zen. The Sixth Ancestor in the Platform Sutra talks about the oneness of samadhi and prajna. When we're concentrated, when we're focused, insights arise. So I think this controversy in current plant science about the question about how to define intelligence is also a kind of issue for us as Zen students. And there are ethical implications in terms of our relationships to plants and all of this. Oh, so just a couple of other things from the article.

[28:55]

To talk about intelligent behavior. rather than intelligence in terms of some rational process. One definition of intelligent behavior is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. And so instead of a brain, to think of a network. The central issue dividing the plant neurobiologists from their critics would appear to be this, do capabilities such as intelligence, pain perception, learning and memory require the existence of a brain, as the critics contend, or can they be detached from their neurobiological moorings? The question is as much philosophical as it is scientific, and I would say spiritual as scientific, since the ancestor's answer depends on how these terms get defined.

[30:03]

Opponents of plant intelligence argue that traditional definitions of these terms are anthropocentric. And later he talks about that maybe they're cerebrocentric. But the question is, how do we successfully adapt to our environment? And it's not so hard to argue that our kind of intelligence It's not adapting so successfully to the changes in our environment now. If we just look around at all of the climate disasters going on and our intelligence doesn't seem to be responding very well to that kind of plant intelligence or some other intelligence. Again, I'm not suggesting that we become plants or that we vegetate. How do we become informed by a deeper kind of awareness to learn a new kind of networking, a new kind of awareness that actually is more successful at responding to changes in our environment?

[31:25]

So there's a lot more in this article. It's fascinating, I think, and suggests that we look more closely at what is consciousness, what is awareness, what is awakening, and to question what we think our intelligence is. So maybe I'll just stop there.

[31:49]

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