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All Right, then, let's discuss Deism in the Pure Land School
All praises to the the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the ten directions.
All praises to the innumerable Dharma Protectors on every level of manifestation.
All praises to the Gurus, innumerable as the stars of heaven.
All praises to the lineage holders, who sacrificed the pristine purity of the Dharmakaya, and descended the terrible stairs of duality, through innumerable degrees of scathing limitation, generation after generation, through hundreds of generations, to bring Precious Buddhadharma even to us here today.
When Simon& asked me to discuss further about the Pure Land practice, I was delinquent from my Bodhisattva vow. I had to be dealt with by an expert before I could do that.
Please bear with me. This is going to be indirect, but I guarantee you that I will get to the point.
Today, Sunday 15 Oct 06, there was an earthquake resulting in a power outage on the island of O'ahu, and it happened just as I was about to depart from the North Shore to go to my temple, Fo Guang Shan, in Honolulu's Chinatown. All the radio stations went down, I couldn't go online, and at the time there was no way to know what had happened. For all we knew, the earthquake had generated a tsunami which had taken out Honolulu, including Chinatown and my temple.
I decided to get on the bus and go, not knowing if the buses would continue to run, or if I would be met by civil disorder in town. The bus driver himself did not know whether we would be able to arrive in Chinatown.
Why did I do that? This is just not mainstream wisdom. I should have hunkered down in my home, and waited. Here's why: the Pure Land practice doesn't bear fruit unless you can practice through your own death. And if your death, then what of any other loss at all?
(I also knew that a Chinatown is a good place to be stuck in a disaster; this is an ancient culture that has a long cultural memory about dealing with absolutely any kind of disaster, and I knew that at least I would not be bored there, which looked like my prospects in a mainstream culture that was simply thrown into depression by being frustrated with respect to its obsessive energy consumption, but that was secondary.).
Since my practice was to go to temple on Sunday morning, and really, I had been gnarled on about this by the Abbess and others, and since my Pure Land practice has to be true in a condition of disaster, therefore I went. If I had met further disaster on the town side, my attitude would have been the same towards it.
When I arrived at the temple, I was scathed at in Chinese for not having mainstream wisdom; I should have had some sense and not arrived at all. So I said that I didn't want to make trouble, and tried to make my getaway, but the Abbess wouldn't allow it. I could see that she, and only she in this entire stressed-out Sangha, which was a small group of absolutely Chinese diehards, could understand my motivation. So she made sure that I was included in preparations for things that she simply failed to talk about, which I would have had no way of doing left to my own devices.
And I should mention the demeanor of the Bodhisattva. On normal occasions, the Abbess is often awesome and severe, but in the midst of absolute uncertainty by every other member of the Sangha, including yours truly, her cheerfulness was unquenchable.
So the Sangha adapted. Since the Buddha-hall was too dark to use, we set up in the dining hall, in an absolutely stripped sutra-chanting mode, the Abbess using a wooden fish that was even smaller than my personal one. What we chanted had nothing obviously do do with the Pure Land; it was sutras related to Pu Hsien Pusa (Samantabhadra) and Medicine Buddha, and the Diamond Sutra. All of these sutras are absolutely skillful with respect to disasters, especially if you can actually remember to do them in the midst of one. And the Sangha's energy was blistering. We were sitting Western-style on chairs, but when I rose from my seat, I had cramps in my legs exactly as if I had been sitting Zazen.
So what does all this have to do with the Diety? Because, consider this: the Pure Land is a practice that is specifically configured to deal with our limits. And the qualities of it have the awesome and paradoxical qualities of breaking through limits. In this case, I would not have been able to arrive at the temple, and to gain all this merit, if my Pure Land practice, which would seem to have nothing to do with it, were not true.
In the limit, what you percieve in this practice is a Person, who has given you a way out of your limitations, and you can always engage Him, or not engage Him. In that moment of practice you do NOT have a choice between this sophisticated view of a personless Diety and that sophisticated conception of a both personless and not personless Diety. What you have is a stark and bald choice of whether you are going to practice or not. And if you choose to practice in an emergency, your practice will be true because you're doing it with your whole mind. That's where the truth of it comes from.
When the lights finally came back on on the North Shore of Oahu, I wrote this and posted it, and I hope from it that my Shifu will know that I am really trying to belong to her.
It is adharmic to equate Amitabha with the Christian God because this teaching about a Creator-God is just not the teaching of the Buddha, and because the Christian God has been used to justify war, which is an abomination to the teaching of the Buddha.
All praises to the innumerable Dharma Protectors on every level of manifestation.
All praises to the Gurus, innumerable as the stars of heaven.
All praises to the lineage holders, who sacrificed the pristine purity of the Dharmakaya, and descended the terrible stairs of duality, through innumerable degrees of scathing limitation, generation after generation, through hundreds of generations, to bring Precious Buddhadharma even to us here today.
When Simon& asked me to discuss further about the Pure Land practice, I was delinquent from my Bodhisattva vow. I had to be dealt with by an expert before I could do that.
Please bear with me. This is going to be indirect, but I guarantee you that I will get to the point.
Today, Sunday 15 Oct 06, there was an earthquake resulting in a power outage on the island of O'ahu, and it happened just as I was about to depart from the North Shore to go to my temple, Fo Guang Shan, in Honolulu's Chinatown. All the radio stations went down, I couldn't go online, and at the time there was no way to know what had happened. For all we knew, the earthquake had generated a tsunami which had taken out Honolulu, including Chinatown and my temple.
I decided to get on the bus and go, not knowing if the buses would continue to run, or if I would be met by civil disorder in town. The bus driver himself did not know whether we would be able to arrive in Chinatown.
Why did I do that? This is just not mainstream wisdom. I should have hunkered down in my home, and waited. Here's why: the Pure Land practice doesn't bear fruit unless you can practice through your own death. And if your death, then what of any other loss at all?
(I also knew that a Chinatown is a good place to be stuck in a disaster; this is an ancient culture that has a long cultural memory about dealing with absolutely any kind of disaster, and I knew that at least I would not be bored there, which looked like my prospects in a mainstream culture that was simply thrown into depression by being frustrated with respect to its obsessive energy consumption, but that was secondary.).
Since my practice was to go to temple on Sunday morning, and really, I had been gnarled on about this by the Abbess and others, and since my Pure Land practice has to be true in a condition of disaster, therefore I went. If I had met further disaster on the town side, my attitude would have been the same towards it.
When I arrived at the temple, I was scathed at in Chinese for not having mainstream wisdom; I should have had some sense and not arrived at all. So I said that I didn't want to make trouble, and tried to make my getaway, but the Abbess wouldn't allow it. I could see that she, and only she in this entire stressed-out Sangha, which was a small group of absolutely Chinese diehards, could understand my motivation. So she made sure that I was included in preparations for things that she simply failed to talk about, which I would have had no way of doing left to my own devices.
And I should mention the demeanor of the Bodhisattva. On normal occasions, the Abbess is often awesome and severe, but in the midst of absolute uncertainty by every other member of the Sangha, including yours truly, her cheerfulness was unquenchable.
So the Sangha adapted. Since the Buddha-hall was too dark to use, we set up in the dining hall, in an absolutely stripped sutra-chanting mode, the Abbess using a wooden fish that was even smaller than my personal one. What we chanted had nothing obviously do do with the Pure Land; it was sutras related to Pu Hsien Pusa (Samantabhadra) and Medicine Buddha, and the Diamond Sutra. All of these sutras are absolutely skillful with respect to disasters, especially if you can actually remember to do them in the midst of one. And the Sangha's energy was blistering. We were sitting Western-style on chairs, but when I rose from my seat, I had cramps in my legs exactly as if I had been sitting Zazen.
So what does all this have to do with the Diety? Because, consider this: the Pure Land is a practice that is specifically configured to deal with our limits. And the qualities of it have the awesome and paradoxical qualities of breaking through limits. In this case, I would not have been able to arrive at the temple, and to gain all this merit, if my Pure Land practice, which would seem to have nothing to do with it, were not true.
In the limit, what you percieve in this practice is a Person, who has given you a way out of your limitations, and you can always engage Him, or not engage Him. In that moment of practice you do NOT have a choice between this sophisticated view of a personless Diety and that sophisticated conception of a both personless and not personless Diety. What you have is a stark and bald choice of whether you are going to practice or not. And if you choose to practice in an emergency, your practice will be true because you're doing it with your whole mind. That's where the truth of it comes from.
When the lights finally came back on on the North Shore of Oahu, I wrote this and posted it, and I hope from it that my Shifu will know that I am really trying to belong to her.
It is adharmic to equate Amitabha with the Christian God because this teaching about a Creator-God is just not the teaching of the Buddha, and because the Christian God has been used to justify war, which is an abomination to the teaching of the Buddha.
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Comments
Your description of the Abbess's cheerfulness reminds me so forcibly of many wise women whom I have been privileged to meet: if there is a job to be done, however overwhelming, it is better done with laughter and lightness of heart. I recall Mother Teresa's smile, although I never had the blessing of meeting her in person. I watched her interviewed by Malcom Muggeridge, a notorious pessimist, in Calcutta. He deplored the state of the city and she refused to continue the interview until he could come back to her and tell her of the beauty of the place.
As regards the 'head' stuff rather than the (to me more vital) 'heart' and action, it is important to me that I make it absolutely plain that I do not equate Amitabha with the 'Abrahamic' Yhwh/Father/Allah god. The terms that you use would, if we were looking for parallels, apply more to the person of Jesus the Christ as Pantocrator. Calling on the Name at the moment of death is, also, deep in Jewish tradition: many dying at the hands of Spain's Inquisition did so with the Sh'ma on their lips. A wonderful, if fictional, version of this is to be found at the end of Andre Schwatz Bart's The Last of the Just. Earlier Christians would try to do the same and to be holding images of Christ and the saints at their death. It is interesting to learn that the same desire and certainty of its liberating value exists within your tradition, too.
The confrontation that you describe between the "mainstream wisdom" and your decision to travel to be physically within the community is one which may not be common within the 'native' tradition and you demonstrate your own point: change is coming to older practices from the interaction with Western individualism and greater mobility. I think that all traditions and lineages are experiencing much the same. As they always have, I suspect.
No, this is actually very traditional behavior, ever since the person who would later become the second Patriarch of the Zen School in China travelled to where Bodhidharma was sitting, immovably staring at a wall. I do not consider the Abbess to be less significant than Bodhidharma. Marpa travelled to his teacher in the Himalayas. Milarepa travelled to Marpa. In fact, I am not aware of a single lineage holder who did not have to travel to his teacher, including the modern-era ones. And even more so the ordinary Buddhist students.
It is the mainstream behavior of both East and West that is untraditional, with respect to real Buddhist practice. Both mainstreams have the same tendency in the case of a real or percieved mass threat: to hole up at home.
It was interesting to see who was left in the Sangha in a time of stress. Who would come out of their safe material cave? It was a whole other group from normal completely. One was a wealthy donor. The majority were elders on small fixed incomes living right there in Chinatown. In general, the most prominent directors (who in general are affluent and comparatively Westernized) were missing. I recognized one very unprominent director, who is not affluent and who has an American boyfriend, and there may have been others. But the big shakers and movers were unrepresented completely. The younger members were all missing. The flashy women were all missing. The attitudinous women were all missing. There was me, a complete wild-card, having nothing apparently in common with any of them except my practice, and some Chinese language. And of course the Abbess. Out of something like twenty people, only two were men.
But it was exactly the same Sangha that has practiced in exactly the same way, through nearly two millennia of Chinese history, in which there was either a natural disaster, a war, a dynasty/reign change, or a full-blown persecution, in every single generation.
I know. I was there, and I was Chinese.
Just a clarification. Are you saying you have been in China for the past 2000 years, or what? I'm confused to say the least.
_/\_
metta
No, just that I have had some recent births there. One birth in a Chinese literary class is enough to inform you of the entire history of China.