THE GREAT MATTER

    Let me respectfully remind you:
    Life and death are of supreme importance,
    Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.
    Each one of us should strive to awaken -
    Awaken!
    Take heed.
    Do not squander your life.

We’ve had much cause to reflect on this famous verse over the past few weeks. We have had two sad and painful losses in our small and large sangha. These remind us that the dharma we study and practice is more than a moral guide for our day to day lives. Too often people reduce religious life to “being a good person”. This is certainly good advice but the teaching which makes up our religious life is more than that. It is exactly this matter of supreme importance - life and death.
Our practice calls us to come face-to-face with our mortality and the inescapable fact of that “ticking clock” in the lives of everyone we care about. As Buddhists, we toss around the term “impermanence” and it can become a philosophical abstract unless we come back again and again to it as the fact of our own lives.
As these past few weeks have reminded us, we will experience the passing of so many of the people who inhabit our lives - we will observe the decline and unraveling of our own lives. Watching a beloved sangha member fade into silence was a complex and wonder-filled experience. It brought me back once more to this great matter of life and death.
I gassho to all those who presented this teaching.

Yours in the Dharma,                          
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu   

PRACTICE IN RENFREW AND RETREAT ANNOUNCED

1. RENFREW WEEKNIGHT SERVICE
We’ve decided to initiate a bi-monthly meditation service in Renfrew. Our first session will take place on Thursday, April 30, from 7.00-8.30pm at Innen’s home, 92 Lorne Street N, just behind the Metro in the West end of town. (A few doors away from Tracey’s Dairy). The program will be a familiar service format. We’re experimenting with this location and format to evaluate if we will establish a regular service back in Renfrew.
No experience is necessary and we welcome people of all faiths. Cost is $10.00/session or free for members.

2. VESAK RETREAT
We will hold our annual Vesak Retreat on Saturday, May 16, 9.00am-1.00pm at the RMML site in Pembroke. Vesak is the worldwide celebration of the birth of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha and the founder of all Buddhist traditions.
This retreat will combine sitting and walking meditation, as well as some EASE movements and contemplations. We request pre-registration so we can provide adequate food for snacks and lunch. Please confirm with me by May 14.
Cost is $30.00

Yours in the Dharma,                          
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu                      

       

HIGAN RETREAT

Just back from an excellent retreat at our New York state head temple. This was the Higan event and we joined some 15 others for a 2-day event with the theme of Buddhist Mindfulness. Participants were all ages and levels of experience and, for the first time, Red Maple brought 4 participants. It wasn’t the nicest weather, with lots of unseasonably cold and snowy days, but nobody seemed disappointed (even if a little weary of the cold). Even the Saturday kokordo walk up Barnaget Road, as chilly as it was, had a nobility and restfulness to it.
We did several structured practices:

• a four viharas reflection
• a contemplation on the Four Foundations
• a walking recitation

and we had several lovely services. Monshin designed a lovely Amitabha service on the Saturday night with a number of unfamiliar gathas that made it interesting.

On the Saturday evening we watched a captivating documentary on the kaihogyo practice of an extraordinary Tendai priest who did that legendary walk of 26 miles, daily for nearly 10 years. I have seen it before but found it no less astounding what dedication an ordinary person can cultivate.
Deep bows to

• Judy B, Jiho and Liz for their companionship and efforts
• Monshin for his leadership
• Shumon for taking such good care of us
• Gyo-sho, the temple assistant for his tireless support. I was especially taken with his drumming during the Heart Sutra.                       

Yours in the Dharma,                          
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu

O-HIGAN

Its exciting to be preparing for this year’s Spring o-Higan at our Dharma-home in New York. I haven’t done this retreat for a few years and it’s always a relaxing and restoring experience - especially nice to be going with 3 sangha members from here, Jiho, Judy and Liz. We (Canadians) haven’t participated in this retreat that much over the years, so to get four of us at once is great.
This celebration is focussed on the equinox (there is a twin retreat held in September as well). This is identified as the unique period of the solar year when hours of daylight and night are balanced. It marks a point of equipoise in the realms of birth and death, the worlds of the living and the spirit world. The word "higan" means "the other shore," referring to the Buddhist ideas of nirvana, awakening or any kind of spiritual conclusion. During higan, people visit family graves to comfort the spirits of ancestors.
For us in the Great White North, its more about celebrating the conclusion of yet another season of cold and darkness. This has been an extraordinarily challenging winter for us, and for our hosts in New York, so the time to practice outdoors in Spring clothes will be part of this transition from hunkering down to opening up.


Yours in the Dharma,                           
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu   

GHOST BOY

Over my recent vacation I started reading Ghost Boy: The Miraculous Escape of a Misdiagnosed Boy Trapped Inside His Own Body which provides an autobiographical account of the experience of South African,  Martin Pistorius , who, at age 12, descends into a near-death coma. At 18, he re-awakens to the world  and, with the help of several caring and insightful helpers, re-discovers his life, his body and his place in the physical world. Instead of being frightening, as with books like Brain on Fire, this is an immensely uplifting, positive and inspiring tale, told simply by the man who lived and lives it. I strongly recommend the book.

At our last mindfulness practice we tried to recreate a ghost-boy experience. We sat completely unmoving, with eyes open. I instructed everyone to block out rather than reach deep into their physical experiences. As people did this, I moved about the room emulating a mildly disinterested care-giver, as Pistorius experienced repeatedly.
In the debrief, some found the experience re-affirmed the safety and richness of their mental space. Others grew impatient and annoyed with their bodies. Myself, as the caregiver, it brought an indifference to the presence of others, a tendency to view them as lumps of flesh, as Pistorius’ helpers often did.

in the Dharma,
Innen

LENT

LENT
This week marked a central event in the Christian calendar – Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. This date signals a preparation for the celebration of Easter (approximately 40 days later, April 3), and all that it represents. Ash Wednesday and Lent are times of ritual purification and preparation, in advance of a Holy Day.
This is a unique artifact of religious ritual in our secularised world which has so thoroughly erased any attention to religious symbols and the enacting of any religious acts. Admittedly, Lent and Ash Wednesday are softened versions of themselves. We joke about what we might “give up for Lent” in terms of doing something which we might have intended to do in our collapsed New Year’s resolutions – no chocolate, more exercise. The emphasis is on how we could find the self-discipline to refrain from doing something, rather than the refinement or preparation of our spirituality or inner lives. In our shallow materialistic lives, Lent is usually an equally shallow statement that we would be better off with a little short-term restraint instead of our usual expectation of unending self-indulgence.
This is nothing unique to Christian practice, Buddhists, in our own way can be as shallow. One only needs to observe how practices like meditation are reduced to “stress-reduction”, rather than one of the essential cogs in the wheel of the Eight Steps to Satisfaction taught by Shakyamuni. Many Buddhists, most noticeably Western ones, firmly believe that there is no necessity for symbolic or ritual activity. We can dispense with bowing to Buddhas, making offerings and creating practice spaces which have spiritual power, as long as we live good lives, don’t harm anyone and do some meditation when we can fit it in to our schedules. Ritual events like Lent, or for us, Nehan, Vesak or Segaki-e, remind us that this material realm remains the Saha realm, one of ceaseless dukkha. Ritual acts are how we prepare ourselves to transcend this dukkha.

in the Dharma,
Innen, doshu

NEHAN

An 18th c. Tibetan representation of the Buddha's paranirvana

NEHAN
At our service yesterday, we held a brief Nehan Service. Nehan is the marking of the final passing on of Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha and founding teacher of our and all Dharma lineages.  Although he had his awakening experience may years earlier, and it was this that set him on his many decades of presenting the Dharma all over North India, this was referred to as his nirvana. This is described as the “blowing out” of his conventional self-identity, his recognition of the 3 conditions and the 4 truths which inform our practice and teaching. His death marks his para-nirvana, (nehan in Japanese) the end of his time as a human body. His body would simply decay and disappear, as all of our bodies do.
During the service I read a short memorial verse from the chanting collection of the White Wind Zen Community which I have always found moving. Then, for our contemplation we reflected on who this being, this Shakyamuni was and is to us, nearly 3,000 years later.  For myself, I have found it challenging to understand my view of someone from the ancient past of the world. Its like asking how to relate to Pythagoras or Confucius. Even more recent personages like our Dharma grandfathers, Saicho or Kukai, remain shadowy, distant and shrouded in legend. How much more so the historical Buddha?
Who is he to you?

in the dharma,
Innen, doshu
om namu shaka nutsu