OTHER PAGES ON THE LEAFLET
THE BODY’S LANGUAGE
We speak to each other using a shared vocabulary and grammar. This makes it possible for us to understand each other. Sometimes we have to learn a new language to communicate with others. I know this to be a difficult challenge from my recent efforts to learn enough Japanese to get by on my trip there. (Note of confession - I was largely a failure in this regard).
Our Dharma great-grandfather, Kukai, the founder of the Shingon tradition, proposed that we cannot know the Divine directly but that we can communicate using three different languages - body, speech/breath and mind. He based his teaching on three practice bases, each one being the language of those modes. Mantra (what we call recitation or chanting) uses the sounds we make with our breath. Mantra expresses sounds of letters, words and collections of words . What we take as the meaning of a phrase is not the mantra meaning. That lies in the expression of a universal sound, which is itself the expression of a particular energy or force, what we call Buddhas or Bodhisattvas. Mandala are cosmic landscapes, which we enter mentally through visualization. Mudra is specific hand positions, that likewise express universal energies.
These stylized and formal languages are captured in specific patterns of sound, movement and imagined space. We can also understand at an even more everyday level, the language of the body. When we touch a surface, when we walk along the ground, when we suddenly notice bright sunlight or the sound of a bird, we are understanding something of who we are. Before or even without conventional language, the body speaks to us, providing information about our experience. Our movement practices, such as the walking and chi-gong we perform regularly, offer us opportunities to hear and speak that language.
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
Loving Kindness
In the discussion at this month’s Mahasangha, we examining the Metta Sutra, the Teaching on Loving Kindness. In part I said:
we do not reserve metta (loving kindness)for some and withhold it from others. The practice must be directed to all beings. In fact, this reminds us that our practice is for the service of all beings, not just humans, or people we like, or everyone in Canada. It calls us to serve and work for the liberation of all beings, humans and animals. Even in the world-view of that time it would include beings in the hell-realms, in the heavens as well. Metta begins with recognizing our inclusion in the vast universe of existence, and as with the Vow that has come to define Mahayana Buddhism, we vow to liberate all beings, in all times, in all spaces.
We also acknowledged that metta practice is, like nembutsu, is at once the simplest and most difficult of practices. The instructions are minimal and it does not require any particular location, preparation or equipment. On the other hand, it requires we have the sincerity, faith and determination to reach deep into our own hearts and direct our most heartfelt intentions for the benefit of others.
To see the whole talk on the Metta Sutra, click the link above
RESILIIENCE
During the presentation on resilience I did yesterday , I suggested two preliminary steps for the 6-element model of resilience (for more, see www.resiliency.com ). In addition to the six elements in the description (boundaries, expectations, bonding, etc.), I used a mindfulness lens to supplement two other elements - awareness and purpose.
Before we can engage in what resiliency theory calls “set clear and consistent boundaries”, we must begin with a deep and dynamic awareness of who this person is. This is not learned from a book or received on advice from another. This is only authentic when it results from a personal and rigorous inquiry into our own experience of who and what we are. That knowledge is self-affirming. It also shifts and changes over our lives, so it needs to be an ongoing inquiry - what we call our mindfulness practice.
For us to articulate high expectations, we must use the awareness we acquire to provide us with some clarity on the purpose of our lives, whatever that may be at that time. Expectations motivated by externally imposed shoulds or flawed awareness of our experience or needs powered by the three forces (kleshas) of aggression, greed and laziness, will lead us further down the path of suffering - our own and for others.
The model or framework of resiliency offers us a potent tool to reflect on in building our life competencies. The perspective of mindfulness, in my mind, deepens that frame even more.
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
OBSTACLES
At the retreat I was leading yesterday, someone asked about dealing with “emotional obstacles”, in particular how does mindfulness practice help. The main thing we need to remember is that obstacles only occur when there is attachment. If we become fascinated with some feeling state, memory or detail of emotional experience, there can be a contraction or compression of attention. This compacting produces the apparent shape and form of the obstacle, it appears to us as something real and permanent. That leads to struggle and more emotional experience as we become frustrated, upset or whatever reactions we get. That then repeats the activity and it becomes the next obstacle.
We can keep in mind the Zen expression, mizuno no kokoro or “heart like water”. Water does not recognize obstacles, its behaviour is that of flow and circumvention. It does not become attached to objects, it penetrates or goes around them. When we experience some apparently unresolvable emotional experience, one which arises as if it were an obstacle, our practice is best when it opens around that experience, like water around a large boulder or island. It is best when it saturates and dissolves the experience, that is, when we come to recognize the transience of that experience.
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
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
