Have you really seen it? Just a big sheet of cloth to cover the body. That is the form of the tribe. The robes of the Buddha are the robes of the tribe. It’s a far cry from the tribal days when tribes didn’t make clothes. Just take this piece of cloth and that piece of cloth and tie it together into a large sheet, then wrap it inside yourself and call it a robe. And squeezing it like this, rolling it like that, forming a roll so that it doesn’t slip or fall off, that’s how you wear the robe.
Today we make clothes by cutting it into pieces, then assembling them into a shirt, the arms and legs are clear and specific. That’s why we dress neatly without being loose. Try asking someone who doesn’t know how to wear the robe, put the robe in, then it opens for a while, and you’re in the middle of the road, and you don’t know how to pull it up, a pile of cloth fell down, that was a pain, but the tribal people wear their robes very neatly, because they are used to it.
The monk’s robe is the image of the tribal clothes in the Buddha’s time. Seeing that robe means we remember the image of the Buddha in the past, we remember the image of the tribe. The Buddha is said to be a Crown Prince. But truly, of a tiny, tiny tribe.
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Is this a sort of poem? I like it, reminds me of this famous poem by William Carlos Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
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