At the August 1 session we looked at Section 8 (pages 29-31), the verses called San Sei Ge aka Juseige, and two of Akegarasu’s pieces “Four Lives” (pages 93-94) and “Cicada” (page 105) in Shout of Buddha.
Higashi Honganji calls the verses San Sei Ge “Three Vows Gatha” because the first three verses are explicitly expressed as pledges, but the Nishi Honganji title of Juseige is more descriptive of the whole set of verses. The character jū can mean “repeated” (as used in many translations) and it can mean “add layer upon layer” (kasaneru) adding up to “heavy” (omoi).
I heard Dr. Haneda joke that Dharmakara came up with Juseige to sum up his vows so we didn’t have to chant all forty-eight at our temples’ Sunday services. In a way, Juseige is a summary of the vows, stating the essence of Dharmakara’s aspirations. That essence is not just in the first three verses but expressed throughout Juseige – his deep wish to include all beings in a shared experience of awakening.
[from Instagram – cicada with Shinran statue in the background at the head temple of the Koshoji sect of Jodo Shinshu]
I picked out the two Akegarasu pieces to show him quietly appreciating the lives around him – his friends and the insect. The Dharmakara story could be read as a grand drama but on a concrete level, it is about ochi-tsuite, just settling down into life as-it-is (or as Kiyozawa says, raku-zai, borrowing the Zen term “falling down into existence”). In our session I think I said something about expressions like “vow” and “aspiration” can sound so abstract, but the Larger Sutra is showing us Shakyamuni Buddha as a human being tapping into the deep wish inside all of us to feel a part of this whole universe of living beings. So the two Akegarasu pieces remind us of the concreteness of our moments experiencing simply being with other beings. Enlightenment doesn’t need to mean much more than that.
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