Ezekiel 47:12 · World English Bible
By the river on its bank, on this side and on that side, will grow every tree for food, whose leaf won’t wither, neither will its fruit fail. It will produce new fruit every month, because its waters issue out of the sanctuary. Its fruit will be for food, and its leaf for healing.
Sotāpatti: Entering the stream Stepping into the current that carries a person the rest of the way. Those trees stand where the water already runs, ankle deep at the threshold and deep enough to swim in further along, and none of them waits on rain.
From the Buddhism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
BUDDHISM
Sotāpatti: Entering the stream Stepping into the current that carries a person the rest of the way. Those trees stand where the water already runs, ankle deep at the threshold and deep enough to swim in further along, and none of them waits on rain. A person's part is to get to the bank and in; the growing after that is the water's work.
Idappaccayatā: This-conditionality Anything standing up does so only as long as what holds it up holds. Everything on that bank is borrowed: the trees own none of their greenness, and every fig on a branch is river water that traveled up through wood. Dam the channel and the orchard is firewood by the end of summer.
Amata: The deathless The unconditioned, which no dry season reaches. In that country a leaf holds out exactly as long as the root has something to draw on, and by high summer the hills are brown. A green leaf in that heat says nothing about the leaf and everything about what it drinks from, water out of the sanctuary, which has no dry season.
Akāliko: Not waiting on a season A quality of the Dhamma, that it bears whenever a person comes to it. Ordinary orchards give once a year, and you live the rest of the months off what is stored in jars. New fruit every month means no lean stretch and no waiting for a good year: whichever week hunger arrives, something on the branch is ripe.
Āhāra: Nutriment Whatever a life keeps taking in and runs on. These trees are planted to be eaten, and a person is built the same way, out of a steady diet: what the eyes are fed, what the mind chews on all day. Anyone living on that bank is eating from that water, and after a while it shows, the way regular meals show on a body.
Bhesajja: Medicine Medicine, and the Dhamma handled as one: taken, not admired. One tree does both jobs here, fruit for the hungry and leaf for the sick, and the tree keeps neither for itself. Medicine in the cupboard heals nobody; the leaf has to be picked, crushed, and laid on the wound. It is the same water that runs down into a dead sea and leaves it swarming with fish.
Buddhism lens
What have I been living on, and does it have a dry season?
The highest good is like water: it asks nothing, takes the low place, and feeds everything it touches. What grows beside it does not grow by effort but by staying near the flow.
The fruit of a life does not belong to the one who bears it. Act, give what grows, and let the source of the growing be the source, not you.
A fountain inside a person keeps giving as long as it is fed from beneath, and no dry spell outside can reach it. Teaching is not kept as an ornament but applied, the way a doctor reaches for the instrument at hand.
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