Though I was living in Los Angeles when the Hsi Lai Temple
opened in 1988, I hadn’t had an opportunity to visit there until this past
weekend. I happened to be in the LA area for my aunt’s funeral and on Facebook I
heard about the service for Aaron Lee at Hsi Lai.
The service was held at the Memorial Pagoda, a building out
of sight for tourists since it is behind the majestic Main Hall. Inside the
pagoda there is a round room with seating for about 100 people (during the
service the doors were kept open for the seated and standing overflow crowd).
At the start of the service, a nun who looked and sounded like a teenager,
explained the program. Each person was handed a pamphlet with the chanting in Chinese
characters and romanized pronunciation (they used the Wade-Giles spelling, so
this post uses nien-fo rather than
the Pinyin spelling nianfo). The nun
asked us all to chant with the handful of monks and nuns leading the service.
She said the chanting was for Aaron to hear, “and he is more familiar with your
voices than ours.” I was prepared to fold my legs under me to sit seiza on the cushioned row-bench but she
asked us all to stand.
[behind the Main Hall, no photos were allowed at the
Memorial Pagoda]
The crowd which consisted overwhelmingly of Chinese
Americans of Aaron’s age (late 20s to early 30s) seemed to have no trouble
following the shifting melodies and pronunciation of the chants. During the
Heart Sutra, I fell into chanting in Japanese since it was easier than reading
the romanized syllables for the Chinese. Then during the chanting of Namo Omito Fo (which the pamphlet said
to do a hundred times), the nuns distributed cut flower blooms and directed us
to go row by row to offer up the flowers to a tray on the altar.
During this chanting, I let my tears flow with the tears of
those around me. The calling of the name of Namo Amita(-abha/ayus) Buddha was
the music of mourning, seemingly endless but not feeling tiredly repetitious. I
started out singing loudly but then had to do it sporadically as I felt weak
and light-headed from the hecticness of the weekend and anemia (side effect from
chemotherapy). It took bouts of concentration to keep myself from losing
consciousness.
When the nuns and monks saw the lines for the flower offering
coming to an end, they switched to the shorter “Omito fo” and a swifter melody. The chanting was brought to a
close, then the service continued with the Dharma talk (the young priest gave
one of those “I didn’t know the guy, but here’s what you better know about
Buddhism” sermons), some moving personal tributes and a slide show. Although
reference was made to Aaron’s “be the refuge” essay, it would’ve been nice in
that setting if someone could have riffed on that.
It is difficult for me to even think of being a refuge for
anyone or anything at this time. For me to follow Aaron’s example of helping
and encouraging others, I’ll need quite a few more hyakumanben (100 x 10,000) of nien-fo
(remembrance of what awakening is). Yet if I contemplate the “ultimate refuge”
that Shinran sings about in his verses (Jodo
Wasan), I see Aaron Lee has been a part of that refuge, or rather, he has
become that refuge. As I keep pointing out – the working of Namu Amida Butsu
comes to us in very concrete ways, not as giant magic fingers from the sky.
Aaron Lee – his life activities and his words – are the manifestation of
Amita(-ayus/-abha) for me and hundreds of others, showing us the path of
ego-transcendence.
The young nun at Hsi Lai told us to chant so Aaron would
hear our voices, but in the hundred-fold repetitions of nien-fo it was Aaron calling to us by the names of our true selves.
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