OTHER PAGES ON THE LEAFLET
Greetings All,
Here is part of a talk I gave at the Unitarian Congregation on Sunday, September 21. The entire text is on the Dharma Talk Link above
PURPOSE AND INTENTION
Lets begin by exploring the meaning of purposefulness in Buddhist psychology. Not so differently from our own Western psychology, Buddhist psychology strongly interweaves purpose and intention or cetana. Buddhists see intention as part of the process whereby we construct and maintain our identity. Purpose isn’t something given to us or acquired, the way we acquire opinions from the news. It is how we understand ourselves, how we establish meaning. It emerges from the inner processes of our minds.
Purpose is more than an understanding too. We could see it as a bull’s-eye on a target and intention as the archer’s arrow. Like an arrow on a drawn bow, intention is a potential. Until it is released, it is just a stick of wood hanging in the air. For it to give us satisfaction, it must be converted from potential to activity. Intention must be converted into intentional action.
This is how it relates to our identity.
We all contain many ideas, dreams and fantasies. Purpose will remain in the realm of dreams, and will only provide us with that desire of dreams until we witness ourselves taking action. For it to truly define us, purpose must be where we observe ourselves engaged in intentional and purposeful action.
Some of you may know the Indian term karma. Commonly, this is understood as reward and punishment. As people say, “what goes around comes around”. Unfortunately, this is a completely wrong-headed understanding of the Buddhist term. Karma has nothing to do with cosmic justice or moral principle. Karma means that tendency people have to act the way they have been acting. If you are addicted to watching reality TV, then the more you do that, the more you will continue to do that, and the more you will experiences the consequences that go along with that particular form of time-wasting. Karma isn’t something attached to us that we have to use up. It isn’t something that punishes us by making us reborn as some lower life-form. Karma is more of a momentum of purpose, so when we engage in certain intentional action, we will continue to do so. The Buddhist message is that we will do this and be burdened by the dissatisfaction and sorrow that comes with it, unless we use our mental abilities and physical actions to act differently. This is the reason for the Buddha’s Eight-fold Path teaching.
May you all know peace
Innen doshu
Om Namu Amida Butsu
AVOLOKITISHVARA MOVIE
I chanced upon a superb movie recently. Avolokitisvara (China, 2013) is a somewhat historical story that takes us back into the 9th century in China during the Tang Dynasty. We follow several parallel stories which intersect several times over the 100 or so minutes of the film. The political story is built on the usual court plotting and scheming of the Emperor and his inner circle. The main character is the Princeling, the Emperor’s illegitimate son who, by chance, is also the first in line for the throne. He is hiding out, pretending to be retarded, but has his own circle of supporters.
As the film opens, he is fleeing to a Buddhist temple, Mount Wutai. Near that same temple a few decades earlier, a poor but gifted rural potter created the unique green porcelain figure of Kwan Shih Yin (aka Avolokitisvara, Kannon, etc.). The day it is pulled from the kiln a baby appears floating in a basket on a lotus pond. She is named Little Lotus and adopted by the potter. As she ages, she and her older brother become living models of compassion. Little Lotus and her brother are at the temple when the Princeling seeks refuge there. If that isn’t enough, a Japanese monk named Hui-e has arrived from japan on a mission to retrieve the statue for the Japanese Buddhist sangha. Apparently his Queen believes it will bring the Japanese people together.
Much of the detail is based on historical events, the story itself is touching. It concludes with connecting the story with the actual Mount Putuo, a national treasure of Buddhism in China.
You can watch this movie, with English subtitles at this location:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnVcnzAXNOo
Yours in the Dharma,
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu
BRAVE NEW WORLD
I was watching a 1980 film version of the Huxley classic, Brave New World, in pieces (it’s a 3 hour film) over the past week. This 1930's novel was required reading when I was in high school, along with its book-end , Orwell’s 1984. Both stories consider a distant future, the first in a world where blandness, ego-centricity and pleasure dominate; the other, where a different kind of blandness pervades, egos are obliterated in a grey sameness and pleasure is replaced by a devotion for the state brought to perfection in present-day North Korea.
I have frequently pondered on what the world would look like if Buddhist monastic values and structure were to predominate. I’m not convinced that the world-as-monastery would be a whole lot better than either of these literary fantasies. What the Buddha teaches us is the tendency of human beings to act out of the three kleshas, namely lust / greed, anger /aggression and stupidity /dullness. If governments and societies are composed of individuals with these values and behaviours, its hard to imagine a system which would achieve the perfection we imagine waiting for us at the end of the democratic, growth economics government experiment.
We need to recall that Shakyamuni was more of a radical than a reformer. He was not in any way proposing incremental change, guided development or anything that suggested that all we need to do is be better at what we are doing. The Dharma Way is not about being a “good person” , as so many would like it to be. The Dharma is fundamentally calling us to recognize the temporariness of all we know and believe about ourselves and our world. It calls us to open ourselves to infinite possibilities, including letting go of the mistaken clinging to this transient self and world.
Yours in the Dharma,
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu
LABOUR DAY
Although very few people actually acknowledge this weekend as a recognition of the struggles, accomplishments and contributions of working people, it is Labour Day. Let me suggest this might also be a day to remind ourselves of the efforts and contributions of all beings. In our oryoki recitation we often will “This meal arises from the labour of all beings, may we remember there offerings”. What this reminds us is that each time we sit down to feed ourselves we can recall the incalculable chain of contributions made so that we may eat. From the people at the store who stock the shelves we can work back to delivery people, factory workers, pickers, farmers seed makers and the whole world of agriculture workers. Then multiply that times all the others for each item on our plate.
We may also recall that some of our food, especially meat and dairy in all of its forms comes to our table from the labour of uncounted animals or other beings, bees, birds, worms, beetles and on and on. Each has a contribution to make to that meal before us. With the humans we will often minimize this connection by saying “well they get paid for it” as if that balances off the debt. This cannot in any way even out the contributions of all those non-human beings, especially where our meal depends on their death.
Mealtime is but one way we can appreciate the efforts of so many beings. The greatest obscenity of the modern economic blindness is that we have dismissed the interconnection and contributions of animals, fish, birds, insects, trees, oceans and everything that is not rich, white males. Our existence is more than a web of beings, it is a web of interacting beings, each one contributing their unique efforts, their labours for the benefit of the whole.
Yours in the Dharma,
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu
REFLECTIONS ON RELIGIOUS LIFE
This week's Comment is part of a larger talk I shared at the Reflection2Action Retreat we held yesterday. The full text is available on the Dharma Talk Page here.
Within the ritual tradition in Buddhism, particularly our Tendai tradition, it is proposed that the reality we mentioned a few moments ago is impossible to experience or to communicate with through normal human actions. We are told that there are three ways through which that reality communicates with us. They are sacred chanting or mantra, particular postures or movements, mudra, and special visual patterns, mandala. If we wish to interact with that higher reality, then we must do so with those three capacities. If we are to agree that there is some reality beyond our individual human lives, then, it strikes me, we want to be alert to how we might connect with that reality. We cannot assume that this greater reality sees the human form and culture as being as advanced or special as we ourselves do, and that it must accommodate to our way of communicating. I think that, as we do with our mindfulness practice, we want to open ourselves to what is present beyond the confines of our limited bodily experience. We want to look for ways to reach deeper and deeper into the possibilities of human experience. With this in mind, it seems that religious activity, in addition to building community, offers us an opportunity to explore this realm, to move beyond our rather limited individual experience.
ACCOMMODATION AND SEXISM
A big story in this week’s news concerns some religious clerics who requested (and were given) special treatment by Canada’s Border Security. They apparently did not want to be checked over by any women staff for reputedly religious reasons. CBSA , as they have done before, it seems, accommodated their request. Is this a matter of accommodating religious beliefs, like women wearing face covering or those in uniform being allowed to substitute a turban for a cap?
All religions have their restrictions, and Buddhadharma is no exception. For example, its part of the Theravadin monastic regime that they avoid being touched by anyone. I’m not sure why this might be. Buddhists don’t subscribe to theories of contamination. Our tradition began in part because of our great grandfather Shakyamuni’s rejection of the caste system and its discrimination. There is, of course, an acknowledgment that we can be distracted by being touched when we are engaged in meditative practice. Perhaps, some monastics sustain their practice so thoroughly that it even pervades airport travel. I don’t wish to pre-judge a situation, but I suspect we are once more dealing with another example of the claim that men can be corrupted or stained by contact with women. This is certainly present in some Buddhist traditions, and that is our mistake to challenge and correct.
Our Canadian society is great because we tend to respect those different from us. We do and do need to accommodate differing religious beliefs. This must not be unquestioning, however. We need to ask whether requests like these are driven by racism, sexism or other prejudices, rather than real religious orders. As Buddhists, if we are aware of such practices in practitioners of our Way, we are obliged to question and confront this where we find it.
Yours in the Dharma,
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu
ROSARIES AND DEVOTION
This week celebrates one of the greatest of the mediaeval Catholic figures, Saint Dominic. It was he who founded the Dominican Order in the early 113th century. They were famous for extreme self-denial and hardship, as well as their dedication to serving their community. For the Latin scholars out there, their name lead to a pun, The Dogs of God (domini canis). Dominican practice promoted the use of the rosary, such as reciting and counting the Hail Mary.
We can observe two parallels with our own tradition - the use of the rosary and the reliance a devotional and salvational practice form. In Buddhism, recitation, accompanied by use of a nenju or mala (rosary), has been part of practice since the earliest times.
In most print-limited cultures, people relied on repetitive formulaic recitation to hold the memory and precise detail of important religious teaching. Since the introduction of sutras, we have used sutra recitation, usually in a mono-chant form, to learn practice and share teachings such as our familiar Heart Sutra reminder “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”. Although Christianity was devotional from the beginning, the prominence of Mary, or what we call Marianism, emerged later.
In Buddhism, we also saw the early Dharma switch from a stark quasi-atheism to inclusion of an emphasis on a personal relationship with Shakyamuni within a few hundred years of his death.
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| Tendai nenju or mala |
Shakyamuni, as an object of devotion, and gradually devotion to the countless bodhisattvas, like the pseudo-Mary figure of Kwan-Yin, became one of the characteristics of later Buddhadharma. Only slightly later we see the emergence of a strongly devotional tradition around Amitabha Buddha, who, like Mary is seen as capable of intervening in time to assist our salvation. Like Marianism in Christianity, this Amidism or devotion to Amitabha has become the most practiced form of Buddhism in the world.
Yours in the Dharma,
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu
