Dharmavidya's Dharma talk at the beginning of the Bodhi retreat 2015

Okay, good morning. Well, the beginning of our retreat. So welcome to the Bodhi retreat. I don't know how many Bodhi retreats we've had now, quite a lot, but it's rather wonderful to be doing a second one here. And, you know, Bodhi, Bodhi, The Buddha, we all know. I'm going to talk about some very basic things, I think, since we're at this point. We know that the word Buddha, I'm sure you all know, is related to a word meaning to wake up, to be awake. So this is today, the 8th of December, is Enlightenment Day, the day the Buddha woke up. So that's what you've all got to do. We've all got to wake up. And when the Buddha woke up, his life changed. He was never the same again. The great anguish that he'd had before, the great obsession he'd had with working out his own salvation, doing all sorts of hard practices, ascetic practices. You may have seen some of these pictures of him with his ribs sticking out from starving himself or doing penances, doing serious, severe yogas. I don't know if he walked on fire, but you know, that sort of thing. His life must have seemed like walking on fire because he was driven, haunted in that way. It all went, poof, gone, you know, clear. He woke up, he woke up to something. Something very special. And from that has derived many, many traditions, many traditions of Buddhism, many different strands. And there are many, many different strands of Buddhism because of different conditions. These are both the conditions, differences of conditions in there being different types of people and also different countries, different climes, different social conditions, different circumstances in which the Dhamma has propagated. Even in the Buddha's lifetime, there were many different— he encountered many different kinds of disciples, so he gave his teachings in many different ways. Earlier, Today I gave a short talk in the morning service and said that you, in the kind of traditional division of the Buddha's teaching into periods, which is not evident or obvious from the texts, but was worked out later. The Chinese particularly had a much more historical sense, rather as we modern people do, than the Indians did. The Indians didn't really care about history. If a true teaching was given, they didn't care whether it came before or after, because the point was that it spoke of eternity, so it really didn't matter. But the Chinese, like ourselves, were somewhat interested in history and tried to put things into some sort of order. And so you have these schemas of 5 stages or 3 stages. Classic thing has 5 stages, but the first one is simply the Avatamsaka Sutta teachings, which it is said the Buddha poured out these teachings when he was first enlightened and nobody understood a word that he said. So then he had to rethink and thought, better present it in a different way. And the last one are the teachings that he gave on his deathbed. Between these you have these three stages which this morning I kind of loosely— not equated but drew in parallel with those three sort of well-known ideas of empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard. The āgama, Nikaya teachings were largely empathic in the sense that they were always responsive to problems of particular people in particular situations. So out of these, of course, came a great diversity. And in the Buddha's own time, there were many different groups, many different groups of disciples. And even the Buddha's leading disciples, each had their special talents. So one of the things we draw from this is that Buddhism is not a cloning exercise. It's not that there is like one right way to be a Buddhist. What the Buddha actually brought out was the distinctiveness of his disciples, the fact that they each had something special. And so in Buddhist training, Buddhist practice, On the one hand, you're looking for that sort of nub of gold in the individual and bringing that out. On the other hand, you're also stretching people into the areas where they're not so golden, you know, giving them responsibilities and opportunities to grow, develop, flourish, become more like that. But anyway, this led to a diversity, and we still have this diversity right down to the present day. In fact, it becomes more, as it naturally would, like the branching of a tree. There's nothing wrong with this. This is the main point I'm wanting to make really. Nothing wrong with this at all. Many different branches of Buddhism, the more the better. The Buddhist tree yields many kinds of fruit, as it were. So that's wonderful. Some approaches are more secular, some are more religious, some are more philosophical, some are more behavioural, and so on. This is fine, fine, excellent. But anyway, I'm going to talk particularly from our style. So the other thing that I'm using this for is obviously you'll get one particular perspective. So the Buddha gave these āgama, nikāya teachings empathically, and then in due course he gave the Prajñāpāramitā teachings, teachings about emptiness and so on, which really are like a description of how it is from his side. So this is like the congruent teachings, if you like. This is the Buddha revealing. So you have these huge Prajñāpāramitā sutras, and you can read them and sort of immerse yourself in it. It's like a sort of samadhi to read the sutra, because it goes on and on about emptiness and everything that you start to think, and think you've got something, it then takes it away from you. The Bodhisattva saves myriad beings, and having saved myriad beings, no beings have been saved, and there was no Bodhisattva there in the first place anyway. So he's always pulling the rug out from underneath your— whatever you think you've bottled it. Because we have this tendency, we want to sort of take the wisdom and bottle it. What was it that the Buddha woke up to? We want to get it in something, and now it's mine! Possessive streak that we have, you know, we want to hang on to it. I might let you have a little drop if you're good, you know. But all that is sort of so self-serving, you know. So the Prajnaparamita teachings are always sort of pulling the foundation away from that kind of development. And then there were this third wave of teachings around the Lotus Sutra. And the events that are recorded in the Contemplation Sutra, and the giving of Pure Land teachings and so on to Ananda and Shariputra. And these are a sort of pouring out of love, and in a way, sharing of what it was the Buddha woke up to. Everything, of course, was a sharing of what the Buddha woke up to. But in our terms, and in Japanese terminology, one way of saying what it was that the Buddha Buddha woke up to is what is called Mugeiko. Mugeiko means unimpeded light. Ko is light, and light is a kind of, you could say, symbol, but it's a lot more than a symbol because actually experience. When a person has a spiritual awakening, an awakening of faith, an inspiration, and insight. It has the quality of light. Even if the person has no eyes, even if physically they're blind, it still has the quality of light. There's something about light that is, whatever, archetypal, instinctive, I don't know. When Julian of Norwich saw Jesus answering her questions, she saw him radiant. You see this from tradition to tradition, it's not just Buddhist, everywhere, every religious tradition, when somebody encounters an angel or Hindu god or whatever, they're always radiant. The character of Aphrodite appearing was of radiant gold. So no matter where you go in the world, whatever religious tradition you go into, this character of great light. So light is more than a symbol, it's something that we palpably experience. And in a small way, of course, you see it in, like, when somebody's full of joy, we say, "Oh, you look so radiant," you know. Or somebody's really happy, they've fallen in love or they're just getting married or something, you say, "Oh, my dear, you look radiant today." And they do! There is a light, and then that light emanates, it shines, it is something that's shared, and it lifts other people as well. And so in the larger Pure Land Sutra, it begins with Ananda going to see Shakyamuni Buddha, and Ananda says, 'You look so radiant today. What's going on?' And then the Buddha teaches, talks, converses with Ananda. And that conversation constitutes the larger sutra. But it starts with Ananda recognizing the Buddha's being full of light. And Ananda rightly discerns, he says, Are you full of light? Because you yourself are reflecting the light of all the other Buddhas. Are you in communion with the other Buddhas? So there is this sense of Buddhas together with Buddhas. There's a text by Dōgen, a famous Zen teaching about Buddhas together with Buddhas. It's all just Buddhas together with Buddhas at the end, he says. And in the Pratyūtpanna Samādhi Sutra, which was the the first Pure Land teaching in China, for a long time was the most important Pure Land teaching because it was the only one that had been translated. There is this notion of seeing Buddhas wherever you look. So wherever you look, there's Buddhas. Yes, there's one over there, look. And, oh, there's another one. Like that, you see. And of course, seeing a Buddha makes you feel full of joy. Light up, whoa, wonderful, wonderful, yes. And so the Buddha is sharing this joy by sharing the light. And we say it is muge, muge ko, muge, light. Muge means no obstacle. Not unimpeded, it's often translated, no obstacle. Or 'mu' can mean 'no' or it can mean 'empty' or 'absence of.' So as in the koan, 'mu,' not even Buddha nature can stand in the way of it. 'Mu gekka.' So the light goes everywhere. So in this retreat, this is the theme of this retreat, is this motif, if you like, of this retreat, is this notion of mugeiko, of light, spiritual light, what we wake up to, what we have faith in, the essential nature of Buddha, if you like, penetrates everywhere. It's not yours, not mine, you can't have it like this, It just flows everywhere, nothing can impede it. Our efforts to grasp it, the obstacles we put before it, nothing can impede it. The light of Buddha, the love of Buddha, the life of Buddha flows everywhere. And that light, that love doesn't— it doesn't see anything that is not light. It augments everything that is light and it doesn't see anything that isn't light, which is why we can't sort of disguise or hide. Because what we tend to do is we tend to form an ideal, we form an idea of if I'm going to be a good Buddhist, it'll look like this. And so we then make a mask that looks like that, and we walk around holding this mask in front of us. And sometimes we turn the mask around so that we can see it. So sometimes we're trying to deceive others, and sometimes we're trying to deceive ourselves. But the Buddha isn't deceived. The light just flows through it as if it wasn't there. And this is love, you see. This is unconditional positive regard. This is unconditional love, universal love. And of course, You know, you can be loved, you can even believe that you're loved or know that you're loved, you still have your freedom. Different people respond to this situation in very different ways. You can know that you're loved and just take it for granted. You can, you can reject it. You can try and disprove it, try and destroy it, you can be frightened of it, you can be joyful about it, you can feel guilty about it, you can hide from it, or try to. You can do all sorts of things with it. You see? You still have your You have your freedom, you still have freedom. And so the thing with this great love, great acceptance, is that in a way it leaves you holding your freedom, your responsibility, your life is your own. If you are really loved, then you can't play the manipulation game anymore. You can try, but it doesn't really work because the person on the other side isn't playing. And so you're left with the responsibility of your own life. So this produces what from the ordinary sort of worldly mind seems like some very deep paradoxes, because we think of the unimpeded light being freely available to everybody, everybody is saved, you know, And you think, well, does that mean that there's no longer anything for me to do, no effort to make, no practice to— da, da, da, da. And of course, in one sense, that's correct. No practice is going to grab— we often do our practices thinking the result of the practice will be that we'll seize something, we'll get something. My dear senior, said Ananda to Makkakāśo, what was it that the Buddha gave you? What did you get? That's what Ananda wanted to know. And like, even after all those years of being with the Buddha, still the penny hadn't dropped, still he hadn't got the point really. But that's how we all are. We're all Anandas really, especially nowadays, all us educated educated people. Ananda was the most erudite of all the disciples. So we're all educated intellectual people, we're all like Ananda, we're all trying to get, get, get, get, get, get. And we try to get by our conceptualisation. Conceptualisation is a sort of grasping act. But even if what you're trying to get is already freely available and you're up to here in it anyway, like you've fallen in the sea and you're looking for water, you know. Then you're left with this complete responsibility for your own life. It's entirely up to you. You're not going to be punished or manipulated or driven or anything of the kind. There's no Judgment Day in Buddhism. There's simply you, with your life, and you are held in this great love of the Buddha's. And then it's up to you, what are you going to do with it? You see, where are you going to go? What are you going to do? And it's that kind of, it's waking up to that, that made Chakyamuni, for instance, realise that all those things he'd done up to that point, all those severe practices, all that anguish-driven effort that he'd made was completely vain, ignoble and useless, he said. It'd been a complete waste of time. This of course is why experiencing this great love, waking up to this great love, can make you feel ashamed. It can make you feel, "What have I been doing?" You know, like that. But also at the same time, a kind of exhilarating sense of freedom, great release, great sense of relief. It's all right. Fundamentally, it's all right. I mentioned Julian of Norwich earlier, who I sort of have a great feeling for her teaching, because she was anguished by another variant on this same problem, like, "If God's so good, why is there sin in the world?" And of course she came to this great revelation, this experience of light. She woke up also. And she expressed it as, "All shall be well. Sin is behovable, but all shall be well." Behovable has disappeared from the English language. This is one of the things you can look up on Google and won't get a single response. Response. And yet the word is very important in the English mystical history. Behovable, behovable. Yes, sin is behovable, but all shall be well. Sin happens, yes, bad things happen, because the sense of unimpeded light is like even if it was You can say even if the whole universe burns down in a great conflagration, all shall be well. And the sense of spiritual security and certainty, as it were, that comes from that waking up, waking up to Mugeiko, that's really what you gain, is that courage, that strength, that security that all shall be well. And it doesn't, as I say, it doesn't take away your responsibility for your life. In a sense, you feel in fact empowered to really mess up now, because in a sense almost as though there's a safety net, you know. Like if you're going to learn to walk on a trapeze or tightrope, you know, when you first start, of course you're going to fall off. And if there's no safety net, you're never going to start, never going to try. And of course, in this age of self-power where people feel that they've got to— they have only themselves to rely on, Many people spend their lives as if they're standing on that point at one end of the rope and never step onto the rope, because they feel that there's no safety net and they can only go onto it if they can be sure that they will be able to walk to the other end. And because they've never practiced, they're fairly sure they can't, and they're right. And so they never do anything, and they live their lives never joining anything, never trying anything, never doing anything, because it's too risky. In a way, to live a full life, one has to take risks. And for us, for people in a spiritual tradition, For us, we say, like, we have the support of the Buddha, we have the Dhamma. The Dhamma is what holds, so the Dhamma is the support of the Buddha. You can, I'm sure, see how you can phrase it in other ways in other traditions. Each one has its metaphysics, has its terminology, its way of wrapping this up, but it's essentially the same truth, that there is a spiritual security given through that faith in the unimpeded light. And faith, of course, is grounded in experience. And initially our experience may simply be that we have had experience of other people who've had experience. So this is the idea of tradition, of transmission, you see. We're in the— this is the Bodhi Day, Enlightenment Day, the day that celebrates the enlightenment of Shakyamuni Buddha. And we're in like about the somewhere between 80th and 90th generation since Shakyamuni Buddha. And through all those generations it's been passed down. So probably our first encounter with a spiritual tradition is we meet somebody else who's been inspired by somebody else who's been inspired by somebody else who's been inspired by somebody else. All the way back to Shakyamuni or whoever the founder of the tradition that we enter is, Sufi, whatever. So that's— but there has to be some experience to be a basis of faith. It's a fallacy to say faith and experience are opposed to each other. They're not. Faith is built on experience and then augmented by further experience. The Buddha says Take the teachings and try them out, yes, because through your experience then you will deepen your faith in the teachings. And with that deeper faith, you'll then try out some more. Just like on the tightrope walking, the more you, you know, once you've walked across a rope that's that wide, you might think, well, I'll try one that's this wide. So you take more risks. You see, with more experience. You gain proficiency, you gain experience. So experience and faith work together, they're a self-reinforcing cycle. And that's how the dharma progresses. So other power is not a— you know, I said you might respond to being loved in many ways. One way you might respond to being loved is to put your feet up and bask in this this glow and sleep. And that's good, it's good to do that, but then you're going to wake up again and then you're going to need to do something else. There's nothing wrong with basking in the glorious light of the Buddha. When you go to the Pure Land as a shravaka, that's all you do, you sit there and lap it up. But after a while, then you want to do something else, and then you— and in that urge to do something else, you become a bodhisattva, and you go out into the world with your little bit of knowledge, but with that sense of security and inspiration. And then you try things, and then you have experience. And so with a little bit of faith, you do something, You get experience, you grow, like that. And that's the spiritual life, that's how it goes. So initially, your first awakening is often to meet somebody who has that glow, who has that light, who themselves has been inspired. And they, of course, have been more than just inspired by somebody else, because they've been inspired, they've tried it out, and then they've grounded their faith in experience. But then you too start to ground your faith in experience. And initially, of course, the help of other people is enormously valuable. Being in a sangha, keep good company, being with other members of the sangha, enormously helpful. But ultimately, you don't need any support at all because the light is everywhere. No matter where you go, you're completely alone, if you're in a situation that's basically hostile, wherever, the light will still be there. But through our experience, our ever-deepening practice in faith, we get more and more confidence that that is the case. And that enables us to let go of a whole load of things, that kind of anguished search for self-salvation which the Buddha went through, he was able to just let it go. And we are the same, we can just let it go. We don't have to pursue our own salvation, it's taken care of, we're already loved. But the fact that we're already loved, we still have our life to live, we're here, so there is that kind of existential Fact. But of course, what do we want to do when we're in that state? What did Shakyamuni want to do? He simply wanted to find other people and share this good news with them. And then he, by his intuition, clairvoyant power you might say, realized that his former teachers had died, but the people he'd recently been practicing with were still there. So he went and he walked all the way to where they were and he taught the five ascetics, they're called. So on Bodhi Day we're thinking about all that, we're thinking about that story of the Buddha's enlightenment and teaching of his first five disciples, revealing the Four Truths for Noble Ones and so on, which I'll not talk about in this talk but I might talk about in another one. So those events are concrete events in the world. They were adding to the Buddha's experience. We shouldn't think that because he was enlightened on the 8th of December, whenever, whichever year it was, that that was the end of the matter. That was, in a way, that was the beginning of the matter. That's what sent him forth, sent him forth walking across India. Teaching those people, teaching many other people, encountering some very challenging situations. He goes and teaches these people who worship a great python, doesn't he? He goes and sits in the python sanctuary and talks to the snake. Some of the things you— you can leave now, you know, government warning. Faith can get you into a lot of bother. Spiritual practice can lead you into all sorts of messy situations. But on the other hand, they are the wonderful situations. They're the ones that you look back on, Shakyamuni looked back on. We talk about Shakyamuni, you know, Buddhist practice being living in the here and now. A great many of the sutras are Buddha reminiscing. Many of the suttas are Buddha looking back and remembering those magical occurrences, telling the story. So the nama often is a matter of sharing the story. This is one of the things, one of the ways that we grow, is hearing each other's stories. One of the reasons we meet for a retreat is to tell each other's stories. This is always traditionally the way. During the monsoon rains in India, they all met in one place and told each other the stories. 'What have you been doing since the last rains?' 'Oh well, I went up to the Himalayas and I met these strange people and they tried to eat me, but they ate my friend, but I survived.' And I taught them the Dhamma, and at the end of it all, they were all happy. Yes, sharing stories. So our retreat is not one of severe separation, it's one of meeting where we can tell each other stories. Of course we can profit or waste opportunities always. In a retreat we try and make the most profitable use of this opportunity to be with the sangha, to experience the light, the unimpeded light flowing through all of us. Okay, well, that's probably enough for a beginning. Thank you very much. Namo Amida Butsu. Namo Amida Butsu. The original and sacred vows. All the unique and essential grace to enter this pure land. Therefore, with body, speech, and mind, we are devoted to the teachings, that all may attain the state of bliss. Namo Amitabha.