Dog Dogma – Sutra Study Class Session 16

At the July 18 session we looked at vows 36-48 (Section 7, pages 27-29) and Akegarasu’s “Indescribable Changes” (page 23-27) in Shout of Buddha.

I didn’t have much to say about that last bunch of vows except to point out that Vow 38 is the “fashion vow” – that makes us aware how judgmental we are about what people are wearing. The vow tells us to see all clothes as “fine robes” regardless of whether there are stains, rips, faded colors etc.

 

The last vow mentions the “three dharma-insights” which the Glossary defines on pages 113-114. What is usually translated in Shin texts as “insight” is actually nin, like in the third paramita nin-niku, “endure abuse.” Here’s a reference:

http://tibetanbuddhistencyclopedia.com/en/index.php?title=Three_Endurances_in_the_Dharma

 

In Shōshinge, Shinran praises Shandao’s commentary on the Contemplation Sutra which says all nembutsu followers can be just like Queen Vaidehi in attaining the three dharma-insights. Considering the story of Queen Vaidehi, she had to endure a lot of suffering to get to those insights, particularly the pain of realizing how one’s own judgments were gravely mistaken.

 

The third of the dharma-insights “insight into the non-origination of all existence” is what Akegarasu illustrates in his poem:

            When the large dog appeared at the entrance to the room

            The cats which were sleeping there

            Jumped up in surprise and escaped,

            By accident knocking over a small table:

            The rice bowl was broken.

            The housewife is putting the two pieces together.

            The dog watches her face as if to say,

            “What has happened?”

The web of causes and conditions is so intricate and stretches over vast periods of time but like the dog we wonder why some event suddenly occurred as if out of nowhere. To me “non-origination” means we can’t claim some direct cause like “The devil made me buy this dress” or “The earthquake came to punish the gays.” There is no creation story in Buddhism because how the present world came into being is beyond our knowledge and comprehension.

 

In the poem, though, the dog doesn’t realize he set in motion the sequence of events leading to the broken rice bowl. Even though in the larger picture there is “non-origination of all existence,” we shouldn’t be like the dog and act like we don’t know how some things got broken in our society. As I’ve seen over and over (such as in Piketty’s book on capital), policies were made in the early 1980s that led to a lot of the problems we now face, but we can confront those policies and hopefully turn some things around.

Pervasiveness of Patriarchy – Sutra Study Class Session 15

 At the June 20 session we looked at the 23^rd to 35^th vows and Akegarasu’s “Cross Section of Love” (Shout of Buddha, pp. 149-157).  I mainly wanted to discuss the 35^th vow but most of what we covered is what I wrote in my blog (https://windycityjodoshinshu.blogspot.com/2018/09/vertigo-and-thirty-fifth-vow.html) and the “Women in Buddhism” series (used to be on the West Covina temple’s website but it was picked up by other websites). The main takeaway is that all the translations of the 35^th vow by ignoring the nuances of the three separate terms (female-person, female-body and female-image) are perpetuating the incorrect notion that only males qualify for enlightenment in the Pure Land.

 

The Akegarasu piece was very problematic for me and others in the study group. No matter how wise a Dharma teacher is in many ways, they are not exempt from our pointing out their prejudices and shortcomings. When I first read the piece as a young (late-20s) single person, the idealism Akegarasu expressed sounded attractive to me, but now as an old married person, his descriptions of relationships are discomforting. I can see Joan Sweany, as a single woman finding agreement with the piece as I did when younger, but I wonder how Rev. Gyoko Saito could relate to it because of how I’ve gotten to know him and his wife Toshiko over the years. Maybe he was still thinking of his first love, the woman he fell in love with when he first joined Akegarasu’s group – her parents objected to his wanting to marry her and she left the group.

 

What Akegarasu describes in that piece is why in Buddhism “love” has the negative connotation of “possessiveness.” I know women can get just as obsessed over a man as a man can feel about a woman, but usually women don’t have the means to turn their obsession into possession (unless she’s the Kathy Bates character breaking James Caan’s ankles in the movie “Misery”). Even in the piece when Akegarasu imagines a man’s life being completely “killed” by the woman’s overwhelming power, to me it’s just a twisted expression of how the man controls the woman by putting her in the role of his dominatrix.

[Poster from Communist Student Union of Germany]

For Akegarasu in his time and place, the pervasiveness of patriarchy was deeply embedded in the culture and despite his knowing the Buddhist teaching of respecting the independence of each being, he may have treated some women in his life more like possessions, receptacles of his urges, rather than as fellow Dharma seekers. At least that’s what I heard one minister in Japan criticize Akegarasu for – stringing along his mistress (during his second marriage) who first came to him to hear the Dharma.

 

There are other pieces in Shout of Buddha where Akegarasu demonstrates respect towards his women followers and I believe his assistants such as Toa Nomoto had boundaries that they didn’t allow him to violate. But no matter who the teacher is, we should recognize that any human will exploit another as an object if society lets them get away with it.