It does seem an entirely reasonable idea that human communities should be considered as biological entities, as organisms, because after all they’re made up of biological entities; they’re made up of organisms.
The human body is composed of cells, and these cells are in turn composed of molecules, and these in turn of much smaller entities. And there are enormous, vast spaces between these tiny components, so that if we look at them at that level of magnification, we should be confronted by things that were clearly individuals because of their great separation in space. Why could we not argue that a human society is an organism in just exactly that sense as the human body is an organism—although built up of many, many tiny and widely separated centers?
Here we do have something that looks very much like a real biological organism composed of more than one human individual, because, you see, the pattern of communication that exists between them is not one which they have planned and mapped out and understood. They have, in a way, you might almost say “plugged into” each other: they catch all sorts of cues from each other by means of which they are not conscious.
I think we can get away from certain confusions; get away from the confusion that, when Man’s individuality is transcended, it means that he tends more and more to become a cog in a social machine. On the contrary! What Buddhist and Taoist philosophy mean by the “transcending of individuality” is the increasing subordination of the order of the individual, not to the order of the collective, but to the underlying order of nature, of the whole physical universe—which is ineffable (to use a mystical term), or infinite (to use a mystical term) not because it is vast and vague and shadowy and mushy, but because it has a complexity, a multi-dimensionality, which escapes the very simple, very abstract patterns in which our thought is able to form itself.