Recently, I have been following an anime series Full Metal Alchemist. In one episode, it was explained that the basis of the fantastical alchemy in the story was the equation that Individual = Whole.

The individual represented the self, and the whole was another term for the entire cosmos. What this meant was that the self cannot be absent from the cosmos and vice versa. Allow me to take this concept a little further.

The self, as we perceived, may appear to be another matter, made up of complex compounds and integrated together in a most mystical way. As is all sentient beings. However, even though a young child can pin-point, with great accuracy, where the major organs of the human body is, not even the most intelligent adult can identify where life exists in our physical body. Herein lays the mystic property of life. Unlike other physical objects made of matter, life cannot be created or manufactured. Matter can be molded into the most amazing machineries and set to function on its own. But even these required an external energy source. But life is a self-regenerating phenomenon. We learnt, from a young age that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It is merely converted from one state to another. Life is the only phenomenon that is able to perform this conversion without any external catalyst.

This was why the protagonist in the anime failed to resurrect his mother.

Now, the cosmos also have the property of self-regeneration and the self-conversion of energies. Upon closer inspection, we can identify that the cosmos do not behave very differently from the life embedded in our individual self. The heavenly bodies are interconnected to one another through a system of forces of which gravitational force is the one we are probably most familiar with. They are constantly interacting and affecting changes.

Similarly, our bodies are composted of millions of cells that are constantly affecting one another and are intimately linked. In a sense, our lives are like a micro-cosmos. And even the individual cell or even atoms that made up the physical world are in that aspect, a micro-cosmos. In the Buddhist philosophy, it is said that the entire cosmos may be viewed as a single living entity. And each individual self are but part of this entity and the link between each individual is defined as karma. Upon death, the individual life is simply returned to the cosmos in a latent state to await the right conditions to be manifested and regenerated again. The act of becoming a Buddha is nothing more than to fuse our consciousness with that of the entire cosmos and thus, developing compassion and wisdom that embrace the whole world and its eco-system.

And this fusion reinforces the equation: Individual = Whole. This is human alchemy.