OTHER PAGES ON THE LEAFLET
BUDDHISM: RELIGION OR SCIENCE
You may hear that Buddhism isn’t really a religion, usually because it has no God or doesn’t need rituals and so on. Particularly in the West, there are those who want to equate it with a school of psychology, cognitive psychology being the preferred type. Our Dharma friend , Dharmavidya David Brazier recently wrote on this and part of his comment is below.
“Buddhism is a religion. It has beliefs, rituals, altars, offerings, bells, candles, metaphysics, clergy, devotees, prayers, meditation, visions, visitations, celestial beings, other worlds, other lives, moral law, and salvation. All these are found in Zen Buddhism, in Theravada Buddhism, in Tibetan Buddhism, in Pureland Buddhism, in the other schools of Chinese and Vietnamese Buddhism, in fact, in all of Buddhism all over Asia. Buddhists probably burn more candles and incense than the Catholic Church. These are not degeneration or cultural accretions. The founder himself gave us robes, taught ritual and contrition, revealed other lives and worlds, and spoke with the gods. Secularised and rationalised variants of Buddhism exist, but it is these that are partial forms and cultural products of later derivation.
Sometimes it is said that Buddhism is scientific. This assertion would put Buddhism somehow within the frame of science, but Buddhism has much that would not fit into that frame. However, although we cannot really say that Buddhism is scientific, science is Buddhistic. Science is Buddhistic in that science is a way of knowing some things. Buddhism can accommodate everything that science perceives, but science can only perceive a fraction of what Buddhism encompasses, the fraction that appears within the frame that the restrictive rules of science impose.”
The full article is here:
http://amidatrust.ning.com/profiles/blogs/buddhism-is-a-religion
Yours in the Dharma,
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu
Read this week’s Ask the Religion Experts column here
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/ask-the-religion-experts/index.html
DISASTERS
Today’s dangerous and unseasonable snowstorm took our morning contemplation to explore the arising of disasters, crises and great losses in our lives. We reflected on what we experience in these moments and how often we wish to be spared from such extraordinary events. There is a clear physicality about these experiences. We often express our response in the breath, in body tension and tears or (surprisingly) laughter.
Although no one would wish for disastrous events or great losses, we all recognized that such experiences call us to reach deep into our resources to respond. We push ourselves to protect ourselves, to serve those we love or to be responsible citizens. In doing so, not only do we recognize capacities and strengths we might have missed, but we also refine and sharpen those skills and sensitivities. Each crisis prepares us to respond to the next one.
This is not universally true. It is clear that humans have their limits and repeated, extreme crisis response becomes what we know as trauma. Such experiences over-tax our capacities and damage our abilities and bodies.
Our practice activity, especially sitting mindfulness is too often construed as merely stress management or relaxation and we mistakenly shy away from experiencing or penetrating difficulties. This will stunt our practice maturity, which thrives on bringing attention to whatever arises in the space of body-mind-environment.
Yours in the Dharma,
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu
Read this week’s Ask the Religion Experts column here
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/ask-the-religion-experts/index.html
This week marks our biannual ritual of pretending we can manipulate time through adding or subtracting an hour on specific magic days. Our world is criss-crossed with images of time - think of all the ways we refer to time. (See the link to a few below). Phrasings of time are part of the way we construct our world, its is one of our key building blocks of identity.
Christians distinguish between time as chronos and as kairos. Chronos is simple “clock-time”. Kairos refers to the right time or the fulfilled time. Within that faith, history is a straight line of time with an end and fulfillment. Kairos is the moment when purpose begins to be fulfilled. In Asian cosmology, time is seen as a field or cycle, with no perceivable start or conclusion. The figure of Kali, the Goddess of Time comes from Hindu tradition and has been borrowed for the Buddhist vision of the Wheel of Existence.
This Wheel or bhava-chakra establishes our lives as an unending cycle of grasping, compression and dissatisfaction. Although it is a flow, driven by the principle of karma, it is not a condemnation. What we are taught is that the Dharma and our practice of it is the assured way to escape from that cycle.
(Some time phrases: http://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/time-idioms )
Yours in the Dharma,
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu
Read this week’s Ask the Religion Experts column here
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/ask-the-religion-experts/index.html
Journeys
The image of “journey” to describe our life is a familiar one, but there are many ways to make a journey. Some journeys are linear, from here to there, with a single destination in mind. Others are circular, where we go and return, sometimes to accomplish some task and come back. Still others, in the style of Thoreau or Basho, are random, we head out as we wish, travel where and for however long suits us. They may be a day-trip, a week’s holiday, a mission or a pilgrimage.
It can be interesting to ask ourselves what the image of this journey may be, how we see ourselves on it. Each type of walk has its own requirements and expectations for us. Consider for yourself what is the form of the journey you see yourself to be on. What is its shape (linear, circular, random)? Consider who may be on your journey, or is it totally a solitary one? Consider whether you are walking a path never walked by you or others before, or is this repeating a trip you have made, or re-traveling one taken by others.
Once you have formed a picture of the journey you see for yourself, consider whether this is the one you want to be on. Can you re-imagine it in a more positive way? Is you or purpose what you imagined, or can you re-write that in some more positive way for your life? Is the route or map the only one you can follow? Perhaps there are shortcuts or alternative routes which will fulfill the purpose of this journey without such demands on you.
The most important and under appreciated insight is to consider who is accompanying you on this journey. Are there others actually walking with you, making it easier or more companionable, in ways you didn’t appreciate before? Our teaching and practice assumes we are never alone on our journey. In Japan there is a wonderful expression, “dogyo ninin”. This means that no matter when or where we travel on our route to fulfillment we are always in the joyful and supportive company of others, at least the loving presence of Amitabha or one of his many manifestations, like Kwan Yin or Jizo. Who is walking with you?
( from our last Contemplative walking session)
Yours in the Dharma,
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu
Read this week’s Ask the Religion Experts column here
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SANGHA DAY, FAMILY DAY
This week, on the full moon which marked Valentine’s Day, we are simultaneously celebrating Maha Puja or Sangha Day which commemorates the spontaneous gathering of over a thousand of Shakyamuni’s arhats (senior disciples). Sangha literally means the “community” and refers to both Shakyamuni’s most intimate followers but also the larger community which supports it. Shakyamuni added sangha as the third jewel, along with Buddha and Dharma, no doubt to reflect the crucial role of human relationships in the relief of suffering.
In Japanese Buddhism this larger community is referred to as sodai, and might also imply the “extended family” supporting a Buddhist temple. It would include clergy and lay-people who were equally engaged in sustaining the temple which served its locale.
Its worth noting the parallel symbolism of our designation of this same weekend as including Family Day (for we Ontarians, at least), a time when we are reminded to honour the importance and individuals who make up our family. We can also recall that we are members of another family, our Dharma family, that collection of people who share our commitment to teaching and practicing the Buddhaway.
Our Tendai tradition is a priestly tradition, one which has built and preserved temples which serve thousands of communities of Buddhist families. There is a remarkable symbiosis between the clergy and its sodai. Families, be they your own or those you serve as fellow members of the larger Buddhist spiritual family, provide us with the context for practice and service.
Please enjoy your time with your family this week,
Yours in the Dharma,
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu
Read this week’s Ask the Religion Experts column here
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ATTUNEMENT
Paying attention and keeping open awareness are familiar advice in our practice. However, these are but half of practice. The other is that of attunement or alignment. By this I mean the way we express our selves in relation to what we are attending to. We might consider a stringed instrument, for example, where the harmony and musicality depends on the attunement between the strings and between the instruments in a group. In the same way, we do not exist independent of our context; we are part of an ensemble. Harmony, resonance and attunement are how we produce the sweet music of our lives.
The simplest form is our own physical alignment, the balance and clarity of how we hold our bodies when we walk or sit. We are all used to checking our spine, leaning and hand position when we sit or walk. We instantly notice the difference in strength between a posture of alignment and one of imbalance. This is a dynamic activity, we check again and again with each breath to see how we are in our bodies and in relation to the space we inhabit.
On a larger scale, our practice is one of aligning and attuning to the activity of the Buddhas. In each moment of our lives, in each decision we make, our faith recommends we establish ourselves in relation to that single and unending purpose - presenting the Dharma. There is a popular motto making the rounds - “what would (Jesus, Buddha, whoever) do?” that invites us to act like some model. More importantly for us is to the question “how are the Buddhas doing...?” We need to do more than mimic the Buddhas, but rather align ourselves with their ever-presenting activity.
Yours in the Dharma,
from Akashaloka,
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu
Read the latest Religion Experts column here
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The Easy Way
A Sangha member recently asked about the Heart Sutra , in particular the mysterious concept of emptiness (sunyata). Our discussion reminded me of the vulnerability we have of being attracted to, challenged/confused by or turned away from our faith by difficult philosophical ideas. It is typical of modern Westernizing influences in religious life that things get boiled down to the most impenetrable notions, and people are judged as infirmed if they cannot show a dexterity with notions such as emptiness, impermanence or non-difference.
Our religious lives are not college entrance exams and we don’t need to cram for some mid-term to stand (or sit) in our community. Our practice is not one of figuring things out, some advanced research project. It is the way we align ourselves with the Dharma, and we do this with the body and mind we have at our disposal. In this effort, we have, as we say in our Tendai tradition, “10,000 ways” to practice. To be sure, some of these ways include “Dharma study”, the exploration and interpretation of religious texts. However, this way is appropriate only for some and not required of all.
When we are tempted to throw up our hands at the mysteries, we have what Shinran calls “the easy path” to follow. This is the path of recitation or nembutsu, simply keeping the phrase “om namu amida butsu” in our attention at all times. And it is just one of those many alternates to study.
When we hear a piece of music and are moved by it, we can relate to it by attentive listening. This what it was created for in the first place. That may be enriched by understanding the details of the musical composition, the subtleties of performance and the historical context. This is not better than the first, nor an impediment. We are helped when we notice how we undermine our own practice by expecting intellectual sophistication as the standard for practice.
Yours in the Dharma,
from Akashaloka,
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu
For more comment, vuisit my Religion Experts column.
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