Infinite Life, Within Limits

Judith Trepp, tempera and pigment on linen, 2025

One of the key concepts of Nichiren Buddhism is the limitless potential of the individual. At first blush, this seems nonsensical. Will I, your humble essayist, be joining the NBA this coming season, filling in for the injured Celtics star Jason Tatum? Or might I dip a toe in theoretical mathematics and spend my days conjecturing with those oddball geniuses over at MIT? Well, no. But I could, knees cooperating, train for and run a marathon. It's not impossible. Of course, I would have to rearrange my entire life around that goal, but that's just a matter of will and desire. In fact, that is true of just about any situation where we perceive what we think are insurmountable obstacles. So, though huge swaths of existence are off limits or beyond my capacities, or anyone's, the range of possibilities within what might be called our individual spheres of limitation far exceeds what most of us imagine to be possible. People end up living lives they never imagined they would be living. You hear this all the time, and it could be you. I'd say it's true for me. Really, it's as simple a matter as whether you marry this person or that. Could be the difference between a life lived in Bangkok or one lived in Kansas City. Five kids or none.

So to say something is limitless or infinite is not to say that it includes or constitutes everything that is, or is possible. It is a particular infinity, if you will. Yet it is of the same nature as the ultimate infinite. Just as life is a dream inside a dream, one's personal infinity resides or materializes within the infinity that is the source and nature of all existence. One could also imagine that the infinity that cosmologists perceive as characterizing our universe, or indeed multiverses, is a very particularized infinity within another reality we can't even conceive of. On the other hand, if we look at this the other way around, we see that the interior consciousness of each person is also itself limitless. In fact, Emerson said that his entire doctrine or concern boiled down to "the infinitude of the private man."

I find these notions, or shall we say this phenomenon, well illustrated in the work of my friend, the Swiss-American artist Judith Trepp. Typically her paintings and drawings are composed within a narrow range of color and sometimes of value as well. Like our individual lives they are notable not just for what is in them but also for what is not. The word minimalism is frequently used a descriptor of her art, but that is misleading just as it is if applied to a single life. A few years ago we visited Judith's studio in Zurich and was struck by a large painting that appeared nearly monochrome, in a shade of maroon I think. As the day would progress and the ample sunlight in the room would shift, it would appear as a completely different painting every time I looked at it. What I was seeing wasn't the painting changing from this color to that color, and then that and then that, and so on. In reality, there was an infinite band of color happening within this "single" color. So, even though blue and green and yellow and so on made no appearance -- in fact most of the color wheel wasn't there explicitly (all colors are implicit in the others) -- the range of what was there could safely be said to be limitless.*

And of course, all this was happening upon a single canvas -- rather like our individual lives, with their limits of temperament, physical and intellectual capacities, and, of course, time. All of us experience anger. But the range of what anger means within that single emotion is infinite. All of us experience love. But the subjective experiences of love are infinite. You and I look at the same mountain and see something different. The Rashomon effect is everywhere and always. Then add in the fact that most of life is lived in memories and dreams, then, well, all bets are off. But let's bring it back to what's in front our face right now, namely, this essay. It has single topic and a mere 800 words or so, but could have been written in limitless ways. Each sentence represents a choice, with infinite unchosen options splitting off from there, like water from the prow of a ship. And your own thoughts, I hope, are traveling now to borderless places no one could have anticipated.  

* The painting I have posted at the top is not the same one as I discussed here -- it has a subtle form within it -- but the same principles pertain.