Singing to the Skies: Imagery of the Afterlife

From “Taste of Chicago Buddhism” September 2016

At this year’s Eastern Buddhist League conference hosted by the Seabrook Buddhist Temple (in Bridgeton, New Jersey), one of the most enjoyable workshops I’ve ever attended was the gatha singing presentation. Music professor Kimie Carrie Tanaka was fantastic in teaching us the songs, able to explain the melody lines even to those who don’t read music or who haven’t heard the songs before. Her husband, Buddhism researcher Rev. Kenneth Tanaka, commented on the lyrics. Of the five songs we covered, two were established gathas (“hymns” we sing at Sunday services), two were gathas by the late Linda Castro and one song was a surprise to me. It was “Yuyake Koyake” (“sunset skies”) which we usually consider a Japanese children’s song, but Rev. Ken’s description of the lyrics as imagery of “going to the Pure Land” gave the song a poignancy for me.

[Rev. Kenneth Tanaka lecturing at 2016 EBL conference]

Now I hear the song as helping us accept the death of loved ones. Currently I’m reading Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of The Eternal Return and it’s making me see our Buddhist memorial rituals as expressing the transcendence of historical time (the fact of each life’s finite existence) by connecting to a sacred sense of time (eternity in the now).

The first verse describes seeing our loved one in the process of dying. Realizing their death is near, we see them first as a blazing sunset (yuyake), then an afterglow (koyake). The sound of the temple bell is the calling to leave the finite life and so the children in the song “take each other by the hand and go home.” It reminds me that in the case of my mother-in-law, my husband said in the hospital the moment before she died, she looked up as if there was someone coming for her. It was like someone in her past, such as her dearest sister, was coming to take her hand and lead her “home.” The last line of the verse says “Let’s go home together with the crows” – so to the sound of nature’s cries and the sight of wings in the sky, our loved one leaves their worldly life to return to the origin of all life.

The second verse is how we see our loved one after they have “returned home” (as I said in an earlier post, how we see them is their “afterlife.”) There is a great round moon glowing in the night sky – we see the brilliance of their whole life. Then as we go back to our ordinary lives carrying out the whims of our deluded ego-selves (“when the little birds are dreaming”), we are reminded of the continual inspiration of our loved ones, seeing the stars twinkling in the sky.

Now I’m thinking it’s a song we can sing at memorial services. Here’s the whole song in Japanese:

Yuyake koyake de, hi ga kurete / Yama no o-tera no kane ga naru

Otete tsunaide, mina kaero / Karasu to issho ni kaerimasho

Kodomo ga kaetta, ato kara wa / Marui ookina o-tsuki sama

Kotori ga yume o miru koro wa / Sora ni wa kira-kira kin no hoshi

Tsunagari: Reality is Community

From “Taste of Chicago Buddhism” August 2016

At the international convention of Higashi Honganji (Otani-ha) temple members called “World Dobo Gathering” held this past weekend (August 27-28) in the Los Angeles area, there was only one talk that struck me even though there were many talks given by a wide variety of speakers, some I highly respect (and some, not so much). That talk, early on the first day, was part of a “young scholars” presentation, to show the general membership that there are some up and coming scholars of Buddhism interested in the Higashi sub-sect of Jodo Shinshu. Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, assistant professor at Ohio State University, was the first of the three to speak. 

[photo taken at WDG 2016]

What Melissa said really captured the essence of Buddhism, that essential message that gets lost in the presentation of Buddhism in the West by the more high profile groups, Zen, Tibetan and Theravadin (the original three wheels that Tricycle magazine referred to in its early years). It is not enough for Buddhists to learn that the individual sense of ego-self is a delusion – there has to be the experience of living as “no-self.” That direct experience of reality is found in community with all beings, which Melissa said is what the philosopher Tanabe Hajime referred to as “Amida Buddha, not a One or Many,” but beyond such categories. She said while Mahayana groups hold up the “virtuoso bodhisattva” as the model to strive for, in Jodo Shinshu, we are inspired by Shinran who honored all beings as his siblings, feeling closely related to all of them. He didn’t just call them his fellow travellers on the spiritual journey, but his esteemed (using the prefix “on-“) fellow travellers (ondobo, ondogyo).

If there is no sense of connection (tsunagari, in Japanese) to all lives, then there is no experience of reality. It’s easy for monks and certified meditation adepts to claim they are unattached to the ego-self, but if they guiltlessly look down on others as “ignorant,” “needing to be awakened,” “shallow and unskilled” etc. etc., they are the ones trapped within walls of delusion. Shinran’s teachings remind me that there is no justification for considering myself superior to anyone else, but too many other presentations of Buddhism tell people it’s okay to put others down and feel you’ve earned your perch above the unwashed masses.

The very busy two-day event had poignant moments of reality as community for me. Although as I said, I didn’t think much of some speakers’ talks, I was touched that one speaker I was very critical of gave me a lovely souvenir (omiyage, product of your home area that you give to people you visit) and it reminded me how indebted I am to him because of all the help he gave me. I always complain that these big gatherings don’t give us much time to listen to and discuss the Dharma, but this time I felt it was a Dharma lesson about the sense of community to be chanting, singing and dancing (yes, we did Tanko Bushi) with all the three hundred or so attendees that I may never know well, agree with or see again. We can’t help but feel connected by coming together. Just to eat together is literally sharing life, as the words in our before and after meal recitations remind us that we take in the nourishing substances of other living beings.

The thing we must not forget whether we gather with three hundred people from around the world at a classy hotel or attend a Sunday service at our local temple is that we are just as connected to those outside the building as we are to those inside with us. At all these Jodo Shinshu gatherings in North America, we keep hearing the refrain of “the teachings aren’t just for the ethnic Japanese – somehow we have to reach those outside the Japanese community.” If ever the karmic effects of our thoughts have power, we should be envisioning all kinds of people as our spiritual siblings. Not that we can use telepathy to draw people to our temples and make them join, but if we ourselves can feel the connection to everyone, regardless of their religion or lack of it, we are experiencing the reality of community.

So I’m very grateful to Melissa Curley for bringing out that essential message of Buddhism and pointing out the way for us to live it.

Transforming the Summer of Sorrows

From “Taste of Chicago Buddhism” July 2016

When religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, human beings far too often become cynical, bitter, negative, and blaming. Healthy religion, almost without realizing it, shows us what to do with our pain, with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
                                    -- Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality

This summer it seems like we hear of one terrible tragedy after another in the news – here in the U.S. and around the world. I wonder what can any of us do to transform the painful sadness we feel over events such as the shooting in Orlando, the killing of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, the killings by police of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, the massacre in Nice, France, the crackdown on dissidents in Turkey etc. Some people believe we need to be more politically involved but I personally don’t have much faith in the two-party system right now.

As someone involved in religion, I want to talk about how our religious traditions, particularly Shin Buddhism, give us the guidance for transforming our pain, but I must dig deeply and widely to get beyond the fuzzy platitudes and find the sharp wisdom I need to hear.

In presentations on Shoshinge, I’ve said the translations of Shinran’s verses about Honen are all way off. So I tried my hand at putting into English what the words say to me:

My teacher Genku [Honen], who clarified the Buddha’s teachings,

Identified and empathized with the “good” and “evil” foolish ordinary beings.

He established in this remote [from the continent] land, the true essence from the great Teaching [Practice, Shinjin] to Realization [i.e. kyogyoshinsho]

For the spreading of the selected Primal Vow [aspiration to awaken to oneness] in this defiled world.

 [paraphrase of Honen’s Senchaku-shu:]

“The repeated return to the [stifling little] house of turning around in birth-and-death is decidedly caused by getting stuck in feelings of doubt [distrust].

The swift entrance into the [expansive] community of tranquility and unforced joy is inevitably brought about by shinjin [entrusting heart/mind].”

[photo from the Tent City Love picnic earlier this month]

What I think Shinran heard from Honen is how we must be continually opening our hearts to others and catching ourselves when the ego tries to erect any kind of barrier. In the killings, injuries and incarcerations in the news (and for many folks, it’s happening to their own families and communities), our sorrow should remind us to open our hearts wider and not hunker down in our exclusive tribe, blaming the outsiders.

Buddhism for some people becomes that gated community to keep out the riff-raff with their evil influences. Honen realized the “refuge” of the monastery was actually an encampment in denial of our interdependence with other lives, especially those who are judged as inferior. Like Prince Siddhartha leaving his family’s palace, Honen had to leave the fortress of aristocratic priests and seek out the truth that the Buddha awakened to – the truth of life as it really is: a flow of myriad elements, diverse outlooks and behaviors, a kaleidoscope of bodies and hearts/minds shifting, stumbling and soaring.

In each “Namu Amida Butsu,” we hear the scolding for our divisiveness and the insistent invitation to become more aware of the unbounded life that embraces all. How this will play out in concrete detail for me is yet to be seen.

Interfaith: Benefitting Others and Self

From “Taste of Chicago Buddhism” May 2016

One benefit of interfaith discussion is finding out how others see your religion. At the recent Universal Muslim Association of America gathering after our interfaith panel, I was sitting at dinner with one of the UMAA Chicago leaders. I told him I liked his speech about being close to God and the Quran, and he said, “I visited your temple a couple years ago in the Sacred Spaces tour.” I told him it was a different temple that was a part of that tour, not our temple. He said the visit left him with an uneasy feeling about Buddhism. “It seems to be a religion that each person comes up with his own ideas along the way. The person explaining Buddhism to the tour group kept saying, ‘In Buddhism, we listen to our inner self and follow that.’”

I told him that’s not how I see Buddhism – it’s not a “Do-it-yourself, make it up as you go along” religion. In our sect, Jodo Shinshu, we recognize there is a power beyond our ego-self and there are teachings to help us become aware of that power. I hate to speculate on who gave the explanation to the Sacred Spaces tour, but I know there are many people (including ministers) at Jodo Shinshu temples who would say the same thing, “We don’t need texts or external experts – it’s our inner voice that guides us.”

[from UMAA conference goodie-bag, a souvenir magnet]

In fact, I think a lot of people who identify as Buddhist feel that same way – that somehow Shakyamuni Buddha turned on the green light for each person to do their own thing and call it “Buddhism,” free of the restrictions of any organized form of religion. But anyone who bothers to read any bit of the sutras knows that Shakyamuni wasn’t just flapping his jaws and saying, “Don't accept what I say – go find out for yourself what the truth is.” On the contrary he was pointing out for us the pitfalls of relying on our deluded judgments and challenging us to test our fixed ideas against the flux of real life.

In addition to the oft-heard Western Buddhist rejection of “book learning,” there is the tendency to characterize Buddhism as pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps to enlightenment. In the 1990s my father was chauffeur in Minneapolis to Dr. Alfred Bloom on a lecture tour in the Midwest. At one public lecture, a man stood up and asked Dr. Bloom, “Do Buddhists believe in God?” My father said Dr. Bloom simply gave an emphatic, “No!” and the questioner promptly left the room. My father told me this story in a chuckling “What the heck!” way – but my impression is that my father and most of the people present would’ve preferred to see Dr. Bloom engage the questioner in discussion.

I feel it’s the Buddhists who close off interfaith discussions by refusing to listen to anything that references “God” with a capital G – “We don’t go that sh*t.” If we get past the label, we find much of what is said in monotheistic religions is a deeply experienced sense of tariki, the power beyond self. For example, one of the imans at the interfaith discussion said he rejects the narrow sectarian views of the militant Wahhabis. He said God’s mind is beyond our human comprehension and that the Quran says that in the diversity of life we see the beauty of creation and that includes the diversity of religious expression. So any group that claims only they follow the true way of God are deludedly believing they know God’s mind.

Humans need to be taken down a notch or ten – we think we have the answers but our attachment to our “rightness” makes us intolerant towards others. Religion, including Buddhism, has the wisdom of the ages, of the transcendent, that makes us humble listeners and more open-hearted towards others.

News of Paris and Sandra Bland

From “Taste of Chicago Buddhism” November 2015

Back in 2002 during what became known as the “Beltway Sniper Attacks,” schools in the suburban Washington D.C. area were under lockdown, keeping the students indoors. I remember hearing on the radio one father said he told his grade-school aged son, “What you are feeling now is not that unusual. There are children in many parts of the world and even here in the United States who everyday live in fear of being shot.” After the two perpetrators were captured, the children in those suburban areas could go back to being carefree playing outdoors, while even now in places around the world and in certain neighborhoods in Chicago, children are well aware that they can become the victims of violence at any moment.

I always recall that father’s words when I hear about tragedies such as the terrorist attacks in Paris – what the media plays up as so extraordinary for “nice neighborhoods” is sadly a frequent occurrence for the many who live in the midst of violent conflict. The people killed and maimed by the terrorists were enjoying typical First World pleasures – sports event in a large arena, concert by an American rock band, eating a gourmet dinner and sipping wine and espresso at a sidewalk café. The victims may not have been wealthy, but they like myself were bourgeoisie, having disposable income to spend on leisure activities. The news of Paris motivated some to bring attention to horrific massacres that had been woefully underreported – such as the April attack at a university in Kenya and the suicide bombings in Beirut. The terrorist killings in the Middle East and Africa usually take place in settings more proletariat (people working long hours to support their families) than bourgeoisie – victims were doing what people in the First, Second (former Soviet countries) and Third World mostly do, gather at the marketplace, at places of worship, at weddings and funerals, and at schools for the not-to-be-taken-for-granted opportunity of education.

With most of the news media focused on Paris, I would have missed the update on Sandra Bland were it not for Father Michael Pfleger (priest at Chicago’s St. Sabina Church) calling attention to it. I spoke about Sandra Bland at this summer’s Maida Center retreat – contrasting her arrest video with the stories of Buddhist seekers meeting their teachers, how the idea of “encounter” between two humans can go right (when one of them is free from ego-concerns) or go so very wrong. Unlike some of the other African Americans noted in news stories who died in police custody, Sandra Bland was from a bourgeois background – she was from Naperville, a suburban area west of Chicago.

What Father Pfleger was outraged about is the official report from the Texas county where Sandra Bland died – the attorneys asked the court to dismiss charges against the jailers because to them it was a clear case of suicide. They somehow read Sandra Bland’s mind and concluded she was despondent because none of her family members or friends would pay for her bail or come help her. Although there’s a possibility that Sandra Bland was suicidal due to physiological conditions, for the officials to paint her family and friends as heartlessly sending her to her death is reason for anyone to be outraged.

You may be wondering what these ramblings have to do with Buddhism. For one, Buddhism teaches us to be wary of what seems to be the truth – any person purportedly “telling the truth” is only giving a biased account of what they thought they perceived. Much of our bias is non-intentional – we are influenced by our upbringing and many internal and external factors. But from the beginning of humankind, people intentionally bend the facts to fit their agenda (I learned a lot about this in the Hebrew Bible course I took at the Pacific School of Religion one summer). So I really don’t give much credence to the news about what caused the Paris attacks – we all know how easily evidence is manipulated. But the Sandra Bland case should be especially troubling to us – anyone (particularly a person of color) can be targeted, incited, confined, possibly drugged and then reported as a suicide by parties who don’t want to admit to any transgression of society’s carefully structured rules of civilized behavior.

The other point is compassion – for the victims and the perpetrators and for many of us who are both at varying times. Shuichi Maida emphasized the Zen phrase “heijo-tei,” which Dr. Haneda translated as “flat-ordinariness.” I think it points to the ultimate equality of all beings. The people who were killed in Paris were no more special than the victims in Beirut or Kenya. The people who carried out the killings were no more evil than any of us – when we’re easily swayed to think some lives are not worthy and can be destroyed for our noble cause (think of the monks in various Asian countries resorting to violent means of “eliminating” the Muslims who don’t fit in their idea of a peaceful Buddhist state). To me “Black Lives Matter” is not a contradiction of “heijo-tei” but it’s a reminder of how much we violate the spirit of “heijo-tei” when one group is abused by those who feel superior. “Black Lives Matter” is Namu Amida Butsu – it’s being hit upsides our privileged judgmental heads and confronting us with the shining dignity of all beings. Despite what they look like, despite what we think they’ve done – they are shining with the truth of the past, present and future which we must aspire to understand with its pain and tears more deeply.

Praising a Priest and Pastor

From “Taste of Chicago Buddhism” August 2015

For studying the Larger Sukhavativyuha Sutra, I hoped to receive a lot of useful material at the all-day symposium on “Shinran and the Sutra of Immeasurable Life” at the Jodo Shinshu Center. There were six speakers with very knowledge-filled presentations but by far the most moving for me was Father Jim Fredericks. The title of his talk doesn’t sound that exciting: “Shinran, the Larger Sutra and the Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.” But unlike the other speakers delivering an exposition, Father Jim was opening his large heart to show us Shinran’s heart and embrace each of ours.

So here I’m not going to explain who Hans-Georg Gadamer was, but in that scholar’s hermeneutics framework, a reader approaches a classic text with many things in his background called “presuppositions” which affects how he interprets the text. In listing seven presuppositions that Shinran had in his mind as he read the Larger Sutra, Father Jim touched on Shinran the person and why he speaks to us so poignantly. The first four dealt with Shinran’s time and place and his training as a Tendai monk. But then in the fifth presupposition Father Jim pointed out that Shinran spent almost as many years as a “pastor” as he spent in the Mt. Hiei monastery. For some of us “pastor” doesn’t seem an appropriate term for Buddhist teachers, but Father Jim explained that what Shinran did in eastern Japan was pastoral work – “the care of souls,” using skillful means “to let truth arise.” He said Shinran wasn’t dumbing-down the Dharma for the uneducated farmers, but was conveying the full meaning of the Larger Sutra to them. So for any of us who are touched by the Buddhist teachings, it’s not a matter of learning them for benefitting only our own lives, but learning the universal application of those teachings through our sharing them with others.

The sixth presupposition was what Father Jim called “the metanoia at Rokkaku-do,” Shinran’s “existential realization of Dharma” in his dream of Avalokitesvara. In the seventh presupposition, Honen’s teachings are what made explicit what was implicit in Shinran’s Rokkaku-do experience – “grasped never to be abandoned.”

[photo by Janis H.]

Maybe it’s just my personal history of being rejected that made that phrase so striking to me throughout my study of Jodo Shinshu – “grasped never to be abandoned.” Now I heard it from a Catholic priest in Berkeley but then I found myself remembering being back in Kyoto (during my time at Otani University in the mid-1980s) making a pilgrimage to the Rokkaku-do after a disturbing dream about being condemned for my defiled longing for the one who had rejected me. I was brought back to the moment when Father Jim called me by name to translate “hakarai.” Before I realized he was addressing me (since I was one of the few people in the audience he was familiar with), other people in the room responded “Calculation!” Such is my hakarai – yet despite my deserving to be condemned (for that one old defilement and many, many new ones), I am grateful for being led to hear “grasped never to be abandoned” in the hongan, innermost aspiration described in the Larger Sutra.

The upcoming three days is the conference on “Subjectivity in Pure Land Buddhism” but yesterday I couldn’t escape my own subjectivity. Yet in witnessing Father Jim’s humility and open-mindedness, I am made aware of the great power of that which takes in all and excludes none. Who says a European-descent male Catholic can’t be one of the buddhas who enable us to hear the Name of Namu Amida Butsu?

Sharing Merit and Material

From “Taste of Chicago Buddhism” July 2015

What did Rev. Kobata of the Buddhist Church of San Francisco say in his presentation at the “Buddhist-Catholic Dialogue on Suffering, Liberation, and Fraternity” (June 23-27, Rome)? Pretty much what he covered in his Dharmathon talk in April - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bulb3IHGgI

Since I was at the Jodo Shinshu Center in Berkeley for the Dharmathon, I heard Rev. Kobata’s talk live, so hearing him give a very similar talk in Rome was a disappointment to me. But it was well received by the Catholic delegates – I heard the priests call it a “great homily” and my roommate Sister Anne McCarthy said everyone was buzzing about it at lunch. Later I was grateful for Rev. Kobata’s talk because it gave me material I could use in translating the eko-mon “merit-transference verse.”

Ministers “steal” each other’s material all the time – it’s all part of sharing the Dharma. There’s no need for me to feel flattered when younger ministers tell me they’ve used stories from my presentations in their Dharma talks – it wasn’t really my material to begin with but what I received from Kiyozawa Manshi, Akegarasu Haya and Maida Shuichi in their modern interpretations of Shinran and Shakyamuni Buddha.

During the dialogue we enjoyed hearing songs and chants from various Buddhist and Catholic traditions. Before going to Rome, some of us decided Bishop Noriaki Ito would lead our “Japanese chanting” group. We had the slot right before meditation on Friday morning, so we decided Rev. Alan Senauke would introduce the meditation portion. He said the meditation should be closed with a reading of a “merit-transference” verse but Rev. Nori said that the eko-mon was already included in our chanting. So I said we could read the English translation of the eko-mon. I didn’t have one handy with me so Rev. Nori told me to go ahead and give my own translation.

The term that hung me up in the eko-mon is “o-jo.” I have explained it to newcomers to Jodo Shinshu that “go to be born into the land of peace” doesn’t have to mean you die and get reincarnated in some afterlife paradise. So for this group of Catholics who believe in heaven and Buddhists who mostly believe in reincarnation, I wanted to put forth the modern Jodo Shinshu presentation.

Then it occurred to me to use something from Rev. Kobata’s talk that the whole group had heard the day before – his acronym for ALIVE. He had quoted Howard Thurman, “Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” And Rev. Kobata said that we come ALIVE: Aware, Loving, Inspired, Valued and Engaged. So this is how my translation of the eko-mon came out:

            I aspire to share these virtues

            Equally with all beings

            And in all of us together

              The heart of awakening arises

            And we go forth, coming alive

              That is, as Rev. Kobata told us, we become A.L.I.V.E.

              --Aware, Loving, Inspired, Valuing, and Engaged--

            Coming ALIVE in the realm of peace and joy

I was fortunate to meet the real life example of Rev. Kobata’s acronym – Papa Francesco. Even though he spoke and moved with weariness, in the meeting with our group of 50-some people, Pope Francis was very much aware and loving. He’s definitely inspired by Jesus Christ and all the great saints, particularly the enlightened St. Francis of Assisi. And besides making each of us feel valued (he took a moment to read my name tag before shaking my hand), in his Loudato Sii he reminds us to appreciate all the lives that comprise the planet earth. And finally, you can’t ask for a more engaged pope – how easy it has been for popes (and Buddhist lamas, gomonshus, roshis et al) to act aloof and above everyone else, but Francis uses his high profile position to call us into interaction, across races, countries and religions. And although he has yet to promote the ordination of women, at least he called off the Vatican attack dogs on the American nuns, so I believe in time he’ll set the stage for women to take a more leading role in Catholicism. He definitely showed no sign of discriminating against anyone in our group for their gender, skin color or status (lay or clerical). Unlike some of the Buddhist monks at our conference who were blatantly sexist, the Pope showed each one of us his utmost respect.

Freeing Women from Depression

from "Taste of Chicago Buddhism" October 2015
Two names that sound similar to me are Sylvia Plath and Sunya Pratt – the names of two very different women. Most people know of the poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) who suffered from depression and committed suicide at the age of 30. There have been times in my life when I strongly identified with her – feeling there is so much you want to give to and get from the world but you feel like a failure, unable to be what people consider “a good woman.”

So this past Sunday when I was guest speaker at the Seattle Buddhist Church I said that the occasion they were commemorating – the annual honoring of Shinran’s wife Eshinni and daughter Kakushinni – “sends the wrong message to our young people.” I said the message it was sending was that women were valued only for being supporters of some great man. To honor someone who really contributed to Buddhism as her own person rather than as someone’s wife or daughter, I said the Seattle temple should be commemorating Rev. Sunya Pratt (1898-1986).

Contrary to the 1986 L.A. Times article (http://articles.latimes.com/1986-03-01/local/me-13148_1_buddhist-temple), Rev. Pratt was not an entirely self-taught Buddhist but as Rev. Ama’s book (Immigrants to the Pure Land) clarifies, she was the student of one of the top scholars of Shin Buddhism of the time, Rev. Gendo Nakai (unfortunately no relation to my husband). As Rev. Ama’s book details, Rev. Nakai was a visionary in realizing for Jodo Shinshu to develop a foothold in the West, it needed non-ethnic Japanese ministers and he trained several. But Sunya Pratt seemed to be the one person who really grasped Jodo Shinshu (not stuck in the moralistic Theravada mode as Ernest and Dorothy Hunt of Hawaii were).

Why didn’t she succumb to the depression of women such as Sylvia Plath? I believe in “Namu Amida Butsu” she heard the voice of encouragement from the entire universe – “You can do it – don’t listen to the petty complaints. Listen deeply to the aspiration to bring all beings to awakening.”

At the International Association of Shin Buddhist Studies conference in August, there was a paper presented by Prof. Angela Andrade on depression. Although Angela-sensei can’t always attend the biennial IASBS conference, I’m always happy to see her and listen to her papers. A non-Asian from Brazil, she has been deeply permeated by the Shin teachings and was able to spend some time in Berkeley studying under Dr. Nobuo Haneda (pictured together below). At this IASBS conference, I was glad she presented the paper “An Inquiry into a Contemporary Expression of Pain: A Shin Buddhist Approach.” I wished we had more time for her to dialogue in public with Dr. Carmela Hirano, a practicing psychiatrist and minister assistant at the Salt Lake City temple.

Reading Prof. Angela’s paper I see the clue for freeing women from the kind of depression Sylvia Plath experienced. Although “general” Buddhism addresses the issue of real vs. delusionary sense of self, Prof. Angela’s paper points to Shinran’s radical key to liberation from depression:

What a joy that I place my mind on the soil of the Buddha’s Universal Vow, and I let my thoughts float on the sea of the Inconceivable Dharma.

In Shin Buddhism, no woman has to be the “good girl” – we can be like the song from the Disney film “Frozen” says, “I don’t care/ what they’re going to say/ let the storm rage on!” In a way, it’s no wonder that Rennyo Shonin found women particularly receptive to the Shin teachings. “Society already tells us we’re flawed – now we hear the Buddha telling us to flap our wings and fly into to the great horizon.”

Getting back to my talk at the Seattle temple, I said to the young folks, “Dream big – even though your parents and others say you can’t do that because you’re a girl or you’re a boy, you’re Japanese or Spanish whatever. In Namu Amida Butsu we hear Amida which means ‘no boundaries.’ Find yourself a good teacher like Rev. Sunya Pratt found in Rev. Gendo Nakai. That’s the way to be who you are and not what others say you have to be.”

A Recap with Revisions (“Dharmathon” talk on YouTube April 15, 2015)

From "Taste of Chicago Buddhism" April 2015

The title of my talk is “The Liberation Theology of Shinran Shonin.” The term “Liberation Theology” was used from around the mid-1950’s through the ‘70s for a movement mainly started by Catholic priests in Latin America to apply the Christian teachings in creating programs and lobbying for the poor and disadvantaged in their countries – to liberate them from the oppression that kept them in poverty and suffering. However, what I am calling Shinran’s Liberation Theology is not about who to vote for or what programs to lobby for in order to liberate the oppressed, but rather his teachings are about liberating us from being oppressors. Some say the term “theology” doesn’t apply to Buddhism because we don’t talk about God, but I think here it’s appropriate because Shinran is pointing to a perspective beyond our human-centered view, the perspective of the Power Beyond Self which sees the absolute equality of all lives.

As you know Shinran was born into the aristocratic class and spent twenty years at the monastery on Mt. Hiei. During his time the view of the aristocrats and Buddhist practice went hand-in-hand in looking down on the common people. Just as monks believed they could work their way up towards enlightenment through practicing purity in thought, speech and action, the aristocrats believed they earned their privileged position through their morality. The common folk were called akunin, evil persons, because in the course of their work they broke the Buddhist precepts and so they deserved to live lives of misery and deprivation.

Shinran in meeting his teacher Honen and receiving the Pure Land teachings came to see how wrong that attitude of the monks and aristocrats was. Just as we are taken into the heart/mind of nirvana, receiving this great gift that we don’t deserve, we also realize how little we have done to deserve the lesser gifts of material wealth, comfort and health. There is no real basis for our privilege – we didn’t earn it, but came into it largely through causes and conditions beyond our control.

Today in our American society there is a demonizing of the poor and disadvantaged much like during Shinran’s time. We are their oppressors if we look at them as akunin, as deserving to be miserable because they aren’t working hard enough or upholding morality. In Shinran’s confession of being a foolish ordinary person full of defilement, his declaration of being an “evil person,” we see how wrong we are when think we can look down on others.

The third verse (pictured above) of Shinran’s Jodo Wasan [Pure Land verses] sums up his Liberation Theology:

Gedatsu no korin kiwa mo nashi

The Light of liberation is a wheel with no edges, boundaries

Ko-soku kamuru mono wa mina

The touch of this Light reaches everyone

U-mu o hanaru to nobetamo

And it smashes the division between Have and Have-not

Byodo kaku ni kimyo se yo

And our lives are returned to the awakening of absolute equality

Byodo kaku ni kimyo se yo is “Namu Amida Butsu” – to have our sense of privilege challenged and crushed so that we awaken to the absolute equality of all beings. That is our liberation from being the oppressors.

In the Tall Shadow of Taitetsu Unno

From "Taste of Chicago Buddhism" January 2015

[We are reminded] that within boundless compassion each of us is Number One, whether in last place or not. In fact, it is the last-place finisher, the foolish being, who is first in the eyes of Amida Buddha.

                                                From Shin Buddhism: Bits of Rubble Turn Into Gold

                                                Excerpted in Tricycle as “Number One Fool”

Jodo Shinshu lost its foremost spokesperson in the West when Dr. Taitetsu Unno passed away on Dec. 13, 2014.

At one seminar he mentioned he hated the cocktail parties he had to attend early in his academic career. I thought to myself, “What’s so bad about cocktail parties? Casual chit-chat with colleagues while sipping tasty alcoholic drinks sounds fine to me.” But he explained the thing he hated was: everyone had to stand.

For most women and especially Asians, there is a dread of situations where you know your short stature will put you at a disadvantage. As scientific studies have shown, humans like other animals tend to consider larger bodies as indicative of authority. The shallowest thinker in the room will be looked at as the expert if he towers above everyone else. I know at Buddhist gatherings I’ve felt invisible in crowds of non-Asian women – the stout gal with the shaved head and brown robes is looked up to as the venerable and this under-five-foot tall pipsqueak is too far below everyone’s eye-level to be noticed even if I’m dressed in my fanciest Japanese garb.

What Dr. Unno developed was a way of making himself seem tall. His voice was deep and deliberate. He carried himself in the way he stood, walked and sat as man of unshakable confidence. One trait he had that bothered me in the past is now something I envy. Although the professors in Japan enjoy being the sole speaker in the classroom (students are to be seen and not heard), at American colleges, students are allowed not only to ask questions but to challenge the instructor. What I’ve seen Dr. Unno do at his lectures is sternly shut someone down if they start to veer in a direction apart from his presentation. In some cases, students are just voicing their comments, but I witnessed Dr. Unno in what seemed a cruel stroke, put down a person who started to assert his opinion. After the seminar I told Dr. Unno he didn’t have to be so hard on that person because he was a long time temple member, not someone making an ignorant generalization about Buddhism. But now considering how much that same person has disrupted my presentations, openly questioning my qualifications to be the teacher, I wish had Dr. Unno’s swift samurai sword of words.

It may rub some of my fellow baby-boomers the wrong way, but Dr. Unno was like the Louie DePalma character in the TV show “Taxi.” He knew if he didn’t gain the upperhand and let people know he was boss, they would feel justified by their height to rule over him.

The fact that Dr. Unno spent most of his academic career at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, shows he was free of many of the ethnocentric pressures on Jodo Shinshu scholars and ministers on the West Coast and Hawaii, who are used to speaking to primarily Japanese American “baggage Buddhists.” Dr. Unno was the key influence on dozens of people on the East Coast and beyond to become not just “convert Buddhists” but to whole-heartedly embrace Jodo Shinshu as the ultimate expression of Mahayana. Although many Buddhist writers have been published by niche presses such as Wisdom and Shambhala, what an accomplishment for Dr. Unno that he had two books published by Doubleday, a mainstream press. I started reading Shin Buddhism: Bits of Rubble Turn Into Gold again and I’m struck by the wide variety of Western cultural references he brings into his presentation. Of course, he values his Japanese heritage but he knows that to speak to an ethnically diverse audience you have to go beyond “Bachan Jichan” (“Granny, Grandpa”) stories of old Japan. At the last seminar I attended, I was impressed that he felt comfortable going beyond the set phrases to describe Amida, and was stretching out into parallels found in Western art and philosophy.

To be the Number One Fool is to settle humbly (Namu) in the embrace of unlimited wisdom (Amitabha) and to shout that message with a lion’s roar, unintimidated by anyone who happens to be taller.

Virtue of Foolishness: Gutoku Tora-san

From old blog "Taste of Chicago Buddhism" December 2014

I want to write about the two movies I watched on the flight back to the U.S. from Japan. Their contrast could be a metaphor for where Jodo Shinshu stands in the midst of Western Buddhism.

During my dinner, I watched the 2003 Tom Cruise movie “The Last Samurai.” I often refer to that movie when I lecture on Manshi Kiyozawa and the Meiji Era, admitting that I’ve only seen bits of it on TV. So I was glad to finally have a chance to watch it.

It’s an absorbing film to watch but the story reminded me of the old TV miniseries “Shogun” with Richard Chamberlain. In the movie there was protest against the rising military-industrial complex with the samurai representing the more compassionate way of life. As embodied by Ken Watanabe’s character Katsumoto, the ideal samurai is an alluring hero, devoted to Zen serenity and disciplined code of honor.

After I slept some, I wanted to see the Tora-san movie before the flight ended. Some might dismiss the long-running series of Tora-san movies as lightweight slapstick comedies, but I always felt the ones I’ve seen were each well-crafted and somehow there’s a serious spirituality informing the formulaic plots.

The film I watched was the 1982 “Tora-san the Expert” (see poster above). Early on in the film, Tora-san attends a Buddhist funeral. When Tora-san is invited to offer incense, he ceremoniously whips out his scrunched up koden (condolence money) envelope and kneels down in a strict gassho (palms together) pose. Then instead of reaching into the granulated incense holder section of the oblong container before the altar, he mistakenly puts his fingers in the section with the burning incense. With a yelp of pain, he tosses up the burning incense grains he had pinched and they fall down into the neckline of the priest. The priest then yells in pain and a bustle of people are trying to help him by pulling off the layers of his formal robes, stripping him down to his underwear.

That scene is exactly what Jodo Shinshu teaches us – that we are bonbu, foolish ordinary beings, who pompously try to look wise and moral but end up screwing things up for ourselves and others. Yet as much trouble Tora-san gets himself into and causes for others, in the end he is embraced by everyone’s love, by the many lives (Amitayus) around him, particularly embodied by his sister Sakura, who is the bodhisattva Kannon in an apron and slacks.

Those of us brought up in the West are like the Tom Cruise character in “The Last Samurai” when we are drawn to the exotic surface of Buddhism. “Yes, this is calmness, this is the honorable way to follow,” we think and dream of being the gallant warrior conquering all our defilements and attaining a “good death.” But as the Tom Cruise movie and all other depictions of samurais show, the way of the warrior is really about glorifying one’s self and one’s tribe and putting down everyone else.

In the Tora-san movies, despite the slapstick roughhousing and flying insults, the plots are really about getting people together. No one is violently assaulted out of spite or for revenge. Instead there’s the comedy of come-uppance – I can’t help identifying with the priest in that hilarious scene. He covers himself up with shiny robes of authority but suddenly stung by the burning grains of suffering, he’s hopping around with his shabby real self exposed.

You don’t have to be Japanese to enjoy the Tora-san movies but I can see those movies won’t appeal to Westerners who’d rather see Japan as a samurai culture. (Ironically the director of the Tora-san series, Yoji Yamada, won international acclaim with his samurai films.) But Tora-san movies show the down-to-earth and caring aspects of modern-day Japan, just as Jodo Shinshu brings us a get-real Buddhism, not a package of attractive but unattainable fantasies.

What is "Windy City Jodo Shinshu"?

This will be a blog looking at Jodo Shinshu around the world from a Chicago viewpoint. I will be posting a few articles that were on "Taste of Chicago Buddhism."