Does A Starfish Have Buddha-Nature?

I had the good fortune to be raised on the coast, and have spent a good deal of my life beside, on, and in the sea. The incredible diversity of the marine environment has always fascinated me; I never tire of turning over stones and gazing into tide pools for hours, every one full of intriguing new creatures for my consideration.

But from toddlerhood, what has captivated me most are the lowest phyla. And of these, my decided favourite were the echinoderms. I loved sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and sand dollars, but most especially starfish, in all their myriad extraterrestrial forms.

At the risk of bathos, I believe they were my first Zen teachers.

Because starfish, like other faceless marine invertebrates, have no brain. Yet they get on just fine.

They move about, eat, reproduce, and apparently enjoy your typical animal lifestyle, all without hearing, seeing, or thinking.

Still, they have to experience their habitat on some level. They're highly active, constantly touching everything with thousands of tiny restless tube feet. They know light from dark, warm from cold, wet from dry. When I pried one from a piling and lifted it out of the water, it clearly knew something was up, demonstrating behaviours my species associates with animation and alarm.

But they were obviously incapable of grasping my nature. Those little translucent fingers must've telegraphed something on the subject, but the creature clearly had no idea what I looked like; the whole notion of visual appearance is foreign to organisms not programmed for vision. Or sound, so there goes that dimension, too.

Raised into the air and sun, every marine thing suddenly gone from tactile contact, it had to be completely bewildered; the simple displacement of a few feet having brought this limited being into a world so strange it literally had no idea how to proceed.

I used to think about this as a kid: that starfish, wholly competent and to all appearances supremely confident in their intended environment, were probably certain that everything in existence could be known by their tube feet and rudimentary photosensors. Growing older, meeting many more sea stars, it also occurred to me that "what can be known" to starfish must in places exceed "what can be known" by humans; their radically different neural network can't just fail to catalogue information that ours can; in some domains, it must also catalogue information ours can't.

Jump ahead several decades, and I've now tried and failed to read marine biology at university (chemistry proving one of the categories of information my neural net does not catalogue), to splash at length and exoatmospheric hypervelocity into the sea of Zen.

Where I'm reminded daily of starfish.

Because Zenners talk about perception a lot. And the lack of it. And the lack of perceiving our lack of perception. And the perception that we're perceiving perceptions that we can't perceive we can't perceive.

And then perceiving that.

Without perceiving it.

All of which I suspect starfish are too insightful to piddle with.

But my species is dead certain everything that can be perceived, we can perceive. With our so-so eyes, our so-so ears, and especially, our simply magnificent, climax-community brain.

It isn't belief. It's knowledge.

I run into it all the time. Near-death experience people. Atheists. Certainty addicts of one cant or the other. And those annoying "scientific mindset" people who can't even perceive science, let alone everything.

We are chronically, incurably ignorant of giant swathes of existence. Whole dimensions. Entire phenomena that we don't simply not see or feel, but indeed that our brains, constructed for seeing and feeling, can't even picture. The very existence of these characteristics of reality, we will never grasp.

Because we're starfish.

And I think if a human can grasp that, there's hope for that human.

Besides, now Pisaster ochraceus, the purple sea star of my own North Pacific, apparently hunts in packs.

You read that right. These echinoderms band together like wolves and pitch epic raids against terrified prey.

This fact was only recently discovered by the planet's most advanced species, by an amateur diver no less, who noticed something quizzical in footage he'd taken of a P. ochraceus colony off the coast of Oregon. Curious, he sped up the film, then watched in horror as a brainless swarm of purple and orange sci-fi monsters zoomed at great speed over the rocks and sand, implacably herding and finally engulfing their presumably screaming quarry under a heap of flailing rays and gnashing centre discs.

Starfish are not intellectually equipped to do that.

But these do.