Amida Order Bodhi Retreat Day Two Dharma Talk - Dharmavidya

Namami Devi. So, second day of the Bodhi retreat. So it's the day after Bodhi Day, so you're all enlightened now. Got that out of the way. We've just been doing prostrations. Very important part of Buddhism, prostrations. Muditāma said, "When bowing ceases, Buddhism ceases." So that makes it pretty central, doesn't it? A pretty vital bit of the proceedings. So from our point of view, bowing is a nembutsu. Everything's 'nem butsu' . Everything's a way of taking refuge. Bowing is a way of taking refuge with your body, not with words. Though, of course, we sing also, but the singing is like extra in that sense. You're doing something with your body. Bending the body. And, you know, like a tree in the wind, a bendy tree survives. It's a very Taoist sort of idea. The tree that is bendy survives. The tree that is rigid, the storm comes, it breaks. If we are stiff, rigid, then when the storm comes, we break. Of course, initially when we hold ourselves stiff and rigid, we think we're becoming stronger. And of course, in the short run this is true. In certain moments we have to hold ourselves rigid, we have to be strong in that way, but it's not something you can sustain. It's a lot of these days about sustainability. Humans don't sustain terribly long, a few decades each of us, but still we do a lot better if we're supple, if we're bendy. Some years back there was this fashion for bendy toys that you could do all sorts of things with. And make things with. You know, you could make things with them because they were bendy. So I want to talk about that a bit, that we bow with the body, we practice with the body. When we talk about Mugeiko, about the unimpeded light, the light of Buddha, that shines everywhere, that has no obstacles. You know, one of the implications of this, we were saying yesterday, like, if you feel unconditionally loved, then you suddenly, initially you think, "Oh, it's lovely," then you think, 'That leaves me with complete responsibility for my life.' Another dimension of that same principle is, of course, that it leaves you with no taboo areas. There's nowhere where the light doesn't go, so there's nothing that's excluded. It's very easy in a Spiritual community, in any community, but we're a spiritual community, so we'll talk about this one because it has a particular slant in a spiritual community. It's very easy in a community for taboos to grow up as like the shadow side of ideals. And of course, spiritual community breeds ideals. Lots of them, yes, they grow like mushrooms. We have lots and lots of ideals. And however much we say, 'Just as you are,' and things like that, still we all go around with a big bag full of ideals. And this isn't bad in itself, but it always has a shadow side. Every ideal has a shadow. It has some taboo that goes with it. So this is why we say spiritual training, you know, you don't have to do spiritual training because Amitabha will love you anyway, but if you want to, if you want to have a look at your life, it's no good starting from the ideal. No good starting from the ideal because ideals breed blindness. If you start from the ideal, then as soon as you see something that departs from it, a little censor in your mind comes in, t-t-t-t-t, with his scissors, and cuts that bit out, you know, You look at your life and it looks like one of those newspapers in the old, bad old days of the Soviet Union, when half the front page was blacked out with ink, you know, because the censor had said everything that was interesting mustn't be read. You see? And this is a problem we can get into very easily in a spiritual community, that all the things that are most interesting about life you can't read about them. You're not allowed to look at them, even in your own internal secret newspaper in your own head. The censor has been at work. And these blockages, they're— we were talking about energy sinks the other day— they're energy sinks. They take our energy away because it takes energy to do that, you know. And actually we are the censor as well as being the journalist. So we're like this with ourselves, we're locked up inside in some kind of self-defeating waste of energy. And it's not just spiritual community, it's society as a whole. Society, in a way, is a kind of spiritual community. It has its ideals, it has its norms, it has its values. And with all of these go taboos. They vary somewhat from one culture to another, but they start to take on the form that, or the feeling that, this is reality, you can't doubt it, 'it's always like this,' and so on. When you travel a bit, as I do, you are helped a little to get some relativity in this matter, because you go to other countries where they think differently. But this is not a total solution, it doesn't cure you completely, but it does give you a little bit of relativity, makes you realise that that way of thinking or this way of thinking is Doesn't have to be like that, you see. I made some study years ago of phenomenology. And phenomenology, you look at the relationship between the real world, you might say the phenomenal world, perhaps we have to leave the word real out, it's a minefield philosophically. Let's say the phenomenal world, the world the world hits you, hits your senses. And the a priori world, which in a sense is like the world of all possible worlds. Now, for many people, their all possible worlds actually is rather narrow. We limit our sense of all possible worlds. One of the things that spirituality should give us is a sense that there are many, many, many more possibilities than we ever dreamt of. It should open us up. Too often spirituality closes us down. We come to spirituality perhaps feeling a bit insecure, perhaps at a difficult time in our life, perhaps wanting something to grab hold of that we can feel, "This is firm, this is certain, this won't move, won't let me down." And we grab it tightly, and perhaps that's what we need to do at that stage, perhaps that's useful to us at that time. But it's a narrowing, you see. It makes— we start to become dogmatic, we start to think this is the only way or the only thing, or this is right and true and final and so on, you see. But it's a narrowing down of our mentality, it's a narrowing of our mind, narrowing of our heart, you see. Whereas actually what spirituality should do is to open our mind, open our heart, like the big mind of Buddha, big heart of Buddha. After his awakening, he was by no means so fixed on one thing. After his awakening, he had an open heart, open arms for everybody. Anybody who came to him, didn't matter whether they were kings or warriors or prostitutes or traders or What they were, whoever came to him, his heart was open to them. And he was also willing to know what was their world, what were their possibilities. Because the Dhamma, the unimpeded light, is going to find its place everywhere. It doesn't matter what the other person, what frame the other person is coming from. So the ideal bodhisattva is like that. They can flow into whatever space is available, like water. You know, water flows down a hill, it finds some area and it makes a lake. The shape of the lake just depends on what's there. The water doesn't mind. So ideal bodhisattva is like that. But to be like that, one has to have this openness. Now, as I said, typically a person comes into a spiritual community from the other position. They come in from the tight, closed position, and that's what they need. One shouldn't condemn anybody for that or condemn oneself for being like that, because that's what you need at the time. But the progress of being in such a community, of being amongst people who, at least some, have at least some openness of mind and heart, opens us. We open each other, we loosen up, we become freer. And this is why in Buddhism we talk a lot about liberation. So the unimpeded light is a sense of every aspect of life can be touched by Amida. Not just the ones that we can hold up as being, this is me being a good Buddhist, or this is me being a good member of this, that, or the other society group. Role, me being a good cook, or whatever it is that I've identified with, you see. Which is also why, of course, we talk a lot about identity, letting go of identity. Doesn't mean you don't have identities, you have lots of identities. But actually, the way to let go of identity is to have many, many. You can flow from one to another to another to another, just as the water can find whatever shape in the lake. So in the, the, um, Shantideva's great classic on the bodhisattva's way of life, he says things like, if somebody needs a bridge, I will be a bridge for them. If they need whatever they need, they need to be a house, I will be a house for them. It is like that, that you are free. But how do you get to that freedom? You can see we're talking about two rather radically different things. The state in which one looks for refuge, one looks for security, and the result of finding that security. It's almost like going through a black hole, it seems. You pop out the other side, you're in a completely different universe. So this is spiritual life like that, it's a great transformation, you see. And so all this is a sort of aside to having said, "Don't start from ideals." Don't start from ideals because it blinds you, yes, it narrows you. So what should you start from? Well, what you should start from is fact, is from evidence, from what is so, yes, from what you find. So in this sense you do start phenomenologically. The way you expand your a priori world is by looking at your phenomenal world. By actually encountering it. And we started off talking about bowing. You know, I do get back to my subject eventually. Big digressions, but we get there. The bowing is done by the body. We live in this world in our bodies. And one of the most, one of the big areas where we have taboos where we have inhibitions, where we're not liberated, is the body. And in many spiritual communities there's a complete taboo on looking at our bodies. In others not, but in some there is. But we can gain a huge amount by looking at the evidence, by taking stock. You know, the beginning of spiritual training, generally speaking, is taking stock. What is the case actually, if I'm honest with myself, if I have sincere mind, yes, if I sincerely look, what's the case, yes. And we may apply this principle in regard to many aspects of life, our social life, our life with our other members of the community and so on. But one of the areas where we can apply it is to our bodies. What do we think of our bodies? What do we feel about our bodies? What do we feel about the bodies that we encounter? You know, we live in this world of bodies, all around us are the bodies. There is evidence that one of the biggest factors on how children grow up is what they look like. Through your genetics or whatever, your karma or however, You know, that's what you've got, that body. And then that's what people see. Everybody around you sees that body. Maybe it's a big body. What do they feel? Intimidated, maybe. Or maybe they look to you for protection, or they ask various things of you, like, "Can you reach the top shelf, please?" Or they assume you can do all sorts of things, like change plugs or whatever. Which you might not have a clue about, but they make assumptions. So all around you, because of your body, because of the body you have, most of which you could do almost nothing about, maybe you could make some decision about whether you grew a beard or not or something like that, but mostly there's not a lot you can do. Because of that, people make all sorts of assumptions about you. And we have all sorts of social taboos that say we mustn't mention these things, and we mustn't talk about them, and we must pretend that everybody's equal and all the same, and none of this exists. But actually, we organize most of our life around it. If you have a little body, then perhaps people feel protective towards you, or perhaps they like you in certain ways, or perhaps they reject you in certain ways. Perhaps they overlook you, they just have a conversation over the top of you, you know, and you're wondering what's going on. Or sometimes the other way round, you know, if you're a big tall person, you're often standing there sort of looking at the stratosphere and there's all this going on down here that you're sort of unaware of. But anyway, you recognise some of these, see? And why are we laughing, you see? Why we laughing? We're laughing because a lot of this is taboo, yes, and even little things like this are taboo, you see. But to do real spiritual training, we need to open that box a bit, yes. It may be a Pandora's box, there may be a little sprite at the bottom who will cause a lot of trouble, but somehow we have to go through that trouble. Adam and Eve had to leave the garden. They had to leave the garden in order to function in the world and find their way to the kingdom of heaven. This is how it is, yes, you have to go through it. So, somehow we need to overcome this sort of inhibitedness. And one of those, I'm suggesting, one of the big areas to look at is like our bodies. And when we look at bodies, we're looking at things like size and shape and weight and things like that. How do we feel about our weight? You know, how many people in the room feel happy about their weight? You know, it's like that. We're also talking about Therefore, food. Yes, we have this hall here, next door we have another hall where we do a different sort of meditation. Instead of sitting on our bums, we fill up our mouths. And this is a different sort of meditation, you see. Great emphasis in Buddhist training on meal times. You go to a Zen monastery particularly, the whole huge hullabaloo around meals, because it's recognised that this is an area where a lot shows up. If you want to know about greed, hate and delusion, you only have to just Watch carefully what you do at mealtime. If somebody was there with a candid camera and filmed you through the film, through the meal, and then afterwards they go through it with you, "What were you doing there?" "I was watching how much marmalade that other person was taking." You know what I mean? You recognise it? Like that, you know, and some nice delicacy appears at the other end of the table and you're thinking, "Hmm, yes, I hope they don't eat all that before it gets up here." And all sorts of bits of greed and hate and delusions, you know, all sorts of delusions about how much better I'm going to be if I eat 3 more of these, and actually at the end of it you have a stomachache. And just delusion. So we think, how do you get some leverage on greed, hate, and delusion? Well, every day, you know, just look at simple behaviors like what we do at mealtime. And this is an aspect of the body, of how we feel about our bodies and how we feel about other people's bodies and how we interact and so on. Yes, see? And then of course sex, yes? Huge areas of difficulty around sex. Of course here the sort of social norms come in, because we have a strongly established, even with all this massive amount of immigration and disruption and so on and so on, we still have very strong norms in our society about these things. But you know, within Buddhism, just about every combination you can think of has existed. Polyandrous societies, polygamous societies, monogamous societies, huge amounts of celibacy in certain areas, all these things. Many different possibilities in the way that humans cope with their sexuality. This is talking about it in the sort of gross institutional level. Many possibilities. But of course, just around these things, what do we experience? Jealousy, envy, possessiveness, hatred even, you know, most strong passions rise up in relation to these sorts of things. Again, take stock, you know, where are your inhibitions, where are your limits, what is it that stirs you in that way, what comes up? Take stock, have a look, what is the evidence, what's the reality? Not that you're necessarily going to be able to change it, As last night we were having a sharing session and it was pointed out that often just the sheer fact of identifying something is amazingly liberating. Doesn't necessarily mean that it changes. The instance that was being talked about was recognizing that one was in grief about something. Just recognizing that you are often very liberating. You go on grieving, but you find that a whole load of other things that the blocked grief was blocking are no longer blocked. And so now you can grieve and do whatever the other things were that you somehow had lost the capacity for or lost the energy for. This is because it's not really that the process itself, like the grieving process, is sucking all of your energy away, it's certainly taking some, but the censorship of is taking some more. And that's what's really incapacitating. It's the taboo often that's incapacitating. Things like grieving is a natural process. Feeling sexually attracted is a natural process. Feeling hungry is a natural process. Feeling you need to go to the loo and have a good shit is a natural process. Yes, but if you feel inhibited about these things, that inhibition soaks down a whole load more energy. Yes, see? And when you think about it, like, these are all very ordinary things. These are things that happen all the time. Every day we experience some of these things. So if we have a habit of inhibition about them, How much energy are we losing? And that energy that we're losing is the joy that's released by liberation. You see, when you read in the Prajñāpānasamādhi Sutta, when they heard the Dhamma, they were all so overjoyed they were dancing on tiptoe. You get some sense of the energy release that's possible. The joy, the alacrity that is there of a liberated spirit, a liberated mind, a liberated heart in a liberated body. So by looking at our body, our attitude to our body, our attitude to the things of the body, our attitude to just the simple things that the body does, like when we make our prostration, You know, what's there? How much different people have very different attitudes to making prostrations. Some are much more stiff than others. Some feel joy in it, some feel, what's the point of this? Some see it as, you know, Thich Nhat Hanh needed to persuade his community to do prostrations And they were all— this is a gross caricature and terribly bad, and I shouldn't say these things about a great Zen master, but the fact is, I'm sure reading between the lines, he needed to get his community to experience the joy of prostrations and all that was involved in it. And they were all right-on progressive Western people for the most part, with lots of progressive ideas, many of whom would have said, "I'm not going to bow to anybody, blah blah blah blah blah." So he called it touching the earth, which was so beautifully ecological. And all these green people wanted to touch the earth, of course they did. So now they don't do prostrations, they do touching the earth. And it works wonderfully, you see. And after you've touched the earth a lot— this is called skillful means, by the way, it's the action of Buddhas. And, you know, great Buddha found a way of helping people to do something that they had a resistance to, you know. So one thing is you help yourself to get over resistance, and sometimes You know, in a way it's a little trick, but sometimes we have to play little tricks on ourselves even in order to do this. This is called skillful means. But of course, what we're looking for is not just to get to that point, but also to get to the point where our heart and mind are also liberated. You see? But then it is true that doing something is a good step on the way. Often with our very educated Western attitude, we think it has to start in the head, and then into the feelings, and then when we feel right, we'll do it. But actually it works entirely the other way around. A lot of life is quite the other way around. We start by doing something, because we do something, we feel something, and when we feel something, then we wrap some thoughts around it, and then we think we're being sensible. But actually the whole thing's happened— it's a rationalization, largely, what we think, you know, it's come after. So what you do with your body is very important. The body is kind of leading edge of your exploration. So doing things exploratively, experimentally with your body, like the first time you do a prostration. You know, there's that nice story about the two people going around a Zen monastery One's an American, well, they're both Americans, and his friend has come to visit and he's started doing Zen. The two of them are going around the monastery and the friend has never been to anything like this before. And the host, he bows when he goes into each of the rooms, you see. And the friend says, "Well, what are you doing bowing to these idols?" 'You shouldn't be doing this, you should be a self-respecting stand-up person, I could spit on these idols.' And the Zen host, the Zen guy, who's learnt a little bit by now, he says, 'Okay, that's fine, two different practices. I'll bow, you spit.' I think it's really nice because there's a great acceptance there, you see. But there's also a sort of slightly tongue-in-cheek challenge, yeah. And in a way, acceptance is like that, you see. Acceptance is challenging. It's like many of us have learnt sort of counseling methods where you make what were called reflections. You say back to the person, basically what they've said to you. And you might think this does nothing, but actually it does a lot, because it's like when you look in a mirror, you see the thing coming back, and you think— and quite often, you know, somebody says something to you, you say back exactly what they've said, and they say, 'No!' Because when you see yourself in the mirror, it's quite different to your image of yourself. Same's true with your body. What you think is going on and what's actually going on, very different. So the body is a good mirror. And a lot of training is a matter of seeing ourselves in a mirror. Not because we want to coerce ourselves into conforming to an ideal, but simply because we want to be in the world of reality. When you're in the world of reality, lots of energy will be released, all sorts of things will happen quite naturally. And they won't necessarily look like what you've held up as your ideal. The ideal is a kind of straitjacket. You know, maybe the ideal person is a certain size and shape. What are you going to do? You know, get a load of clamps out and squeeze yourself into the box. That's what we're trying to do spiritually a lot of the time. Is fit ourselves into a Procrustean bed, you know the story. But that's not what spiritual training is about. Spiritual training is about reality, accepting the reality, the real energy, the real body, the real person, the real encounter, the real things that come up. Yes, dukkha, you know, being in a physical world is dukkha. Is a truth for noble ones. Samudaya, what comes up through being in that world, is a truth for noble ones. It's not a matter of changing those things, it's a matter of what you do with that then. That's what makes the spiritual path, that's what puts you on the Eightfold Path. You know, the difference between the noble one And the ordinary person is in the Third Noble Truth, not in the first two. It's in the— it's what you do with that. And what you do do with it, certainly from a Pure Land point of view, is you have faith. You have faith that fundamentally all shall be well. It's all right. It's all right to have a body. It's all right to be hungry. It's all right to have sexual feelings. It's all right to be tired sometimes. That's quite natural. This is why, you know, you read, like, what is Zen? Zen is sleep when you're tired and eat when you're hungry, you know, drawing water and fetching wood. This is the spiritual life. So this is the This is what I want to say this morning on the back of thinking about bowing. Bowing is something we do with the body. The body is here in the world. The world is full of mugeiko. Mugeiko makes everything all right. It's all right. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.