On July 20 we gathered on Zoom for the seventh session of “Warera: Shinran and Solidarity.” Only three people joined me but we had a good session covering “Notes on ‘Essentials of Faith Alone’” (CWS pages 460-462).
In the verse by Shandao, he identifies the Pure Land as the realm of nirvana. “The uncreated” is the term mu-i 無為 which appears frequently in Zen texts as wu-wei and translated as “doing nothing,” but I feel what it really means is “just do it to do it, and not for the sake (tame ni) of something.” Even the MS-Word program dictionary says the second character means doing something with utility, for some benefit. By getting away from calculating the utilitarian value of beings, we can appreciate the oneness of all things, that “plants, trees, and land all attain Buddhahood.”
Shinran elaborates on “sundry good acts” as those things we do from self-power, that is, when we believe we deserve credit for putting into action something the world will judge as “good,” something that will chalk up points for us to get a priority entrance into the Pure Land. But with that mind-set, “it is hard to be born” – you can’t be in the realm of “doing not for the sake of” if you’re still calculating how certain practices done in a certain quantity will earn your rebirth.
So to try to get this across to our calculating minds, the historical Buddha chose to tell us the story of Dharmakara whose deep aspiration is to include all beings in his awakening. I commented that it seems we are learning this lesson of unconditional inclusion at a time when our government is placing more and more conditions on people in order for them to receive help with food and shelter.
In our discussion, I had to be reminded of this – that even those bullies (there’s at least one at every temple) are our teachers as much as those we recognize as helpers. And as we all see in the news, so many of our government leaders are sociopaths, out to harm the majority of people just to have material benefits for themselves. How can we also see them as our teachers, as our fellow travelers on the path to the Pure Land?
Instead of highlighting a widely known activist, this month I want to share what inspired me recently – a post in the Substack account “Just as you are” of Kaspa Thompson. Kaspa is a non-binary leader along with their partner Satya Robyn of the Bright Earth Buddhist Temple in England. Somehow I find the British Pure Land followers so refreshing in their warmth compared to those hard-liners in New England who take the Larger Sutra so literally. In their July 23 post “The Buddha help me meet my anger,” Kaspa discusses how Christians describe their relationship with Jesus as “personal,” like having a friend that talks one-to-one with you. But Kaspa says of Amida Buddha, “How can I have a personal relationship with something that is infinite and boundless?”
[Photo from Kaspa’s Substack]
Then when Kaspa found themselves in a situation where their anger grew too large to be dismissed, the “Buddha stepped forward and suddenly I became aware of so much space around me. Enough for all of my parts to exist without overshadowing each other.” Kaspa describes this spaciousness as “the support of Amida.”
Kaspa’s post seemed to bring together the passages of Shinran that we read – it is the compassionate means of the formless, colorless, unhindered Dharma body to help us by making us aware of the embrace of not just all beings, but all the parts of ourselves, the mean and dirty, fearful and cunning, neglectful and obsessive. This embrace of the one reality means we accept as fact the cruelty being directed at others, a cruelty that we are a part of. But the spacious support of Amida is not static; it is continually flowing from change to change and provides the karmic conditions for us to be participants in those changes.
Among all the atrocities going on in our world, at this time the forced starvation of people in Gaza is particularly heartbreaking. Yet in Namu Amida Butsu we hear the infallible optimism that I wrote about in last month’s blog post. There will be changes and we will be impetus of those changes.
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