Post-Mappo and the Innocent Heart by Dharmavidya David Brazier.

Very nice to be here. This morning we all sang Namo Tassa. Namottassa bhagavato arahato samma sammuttassa. Anyways, it appears like we are here to— we've got this theme this week. Speedily arriving at the door to the Pure Land, the gate to the Pure Land. How to get the gate to the Pure Land? To which the simple answer is to take refuge. So, 'Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.' Very simple. Doesn't require much. Somebody sent me a message this morning. I'll read it to you. You might, um, you might identify with some of it. I don't know. This person said, I observe that as a child I had faith, a sense of some core strength that came from somewhere that wasn't me personally. Over time, this sense got eroded by various life experiences. When I met my Buddhist teacher, I rediscovered this feeling, at least in part, and in moments, and in moments, and believed it would stay with me. Life events and circumstances have not been kind. I can barely connect it to any— I can barely connect to it anymore. I find myself full of doubt about even the slight resonance that remains. I tell myself it's just superstition or wishful thinking. I feel abandoned, and in my worst moments, as if I've been dismissed by everything, made redundant, not wanted on the voyage. I feel humiliated, rejected, ashamed, and crushed. I think there is a kind of broken anger there too. That feels it has no right to exist. I've been reading the Paravritti articles that I put up on the web. The article reminds me of this other world, but it seems imaginary, a place I have no place. 'When I met you, I saw that internal experience embodied. I was drawn to you because of that, even though I didn't know it consciously. I just recognized it in you.' I wrote back, 'Yes, I imagine the anger is somehow blocking the faith.' The anger is a reaction to the unkindness of life. We live in the midst of impermanence. Of course, that is precisely why we need the faith, and why we seem to have been equipped with it from an early age. At that early age we were helpless, and without such faith would not have survived. At that age, anger and faith coexist. You know how a little child can be very angry, but still they have faith. So anyway, this came this morning. And maybe you can see something in it. Maybe identify with some parts of it. You see, I ponder that in the classic texts that we read, they often talk about the different ages or stages of the Dhamma. And if you think about this, then in a certain way there was like a first stage or first age of the Dhamma. When Shakyamuni was there, and people met him, and people were enlightened, people found nirvana through their meeting with the Buddha, who embodied that spirit. Was there tangibly before them. And that tangible presence is why we— in Buddhism there has been this interest in relics, because people like the evidence that there was a tangible presence once. So that was a kind of first stage, a stage of direct inspiration. Encounter, when people, many people became illuminated, liberated through a direct encounter with the Buddha himself, or with his disciples, because it sort of ripples out, you know. Shariputra becomes illuminated through an encounter with the Buddha, but then many people become illuminated by meeting Shariputra, and so on, you see. Of course, everybody hoped that Shariputra would become the Buddha's successor, but in fact he died just before the Buddha did, 3 months before the Buddha died. So that didn't happen. And actually the Buddha left no successor. But various lineages nonetheless exist. So then we move into a kind of second stage where people could get enlightened by what we now call self-power practices. By doing what Buddha did. Because these— when they did these practices at that time, they were still imbued with the spirit, because people could remember, and they had received the transmission from people who knew the Buddha. So it wasn't like just doing a technical procedure to get a technical result. I've told the story sometimes of— there was a school in New York, in Harlem— some of you may have heard this story before— where nobody from this school— it was a very poor area, you know— no one from this school ever got to university or to college or passed lots of exams. But one person who was a graduate of this school made good. He was a black man in New York who started a business, and he was successful, and then he made piles of money. And so in American terms, he A great success. And so one day the school invited him to give an address to all the assembled pupils in the school. And so he wrote his speech and actually probably a little bit nervous going up 'How am I going to speak to all these people?' But he, anyway, he was asked, 'Now it's your turn, please come up and speak.' So he did, and he went to the rostrum, and he looked out at all these faces, and he remembered his own experience of being in this school, and the struggle of living in poverty, in poor area of New York. And he put his speech aside and he stood there visibly moved. And then he said, "Look, any of you kids get to college, I'll pay your fees." I've made plenty of money. I'll pay your fees. And of course this was a kind of big shockwave ran through him. And so he was as good as his word. He set up a fund to make scholarships for people who graduated from that school for as long as the fund lasted, which was going to be quite a while into the future. Now the interesting thing is that many of the people that he was talking to that day got to college. They were inspired and they got to college. Now the fund was set up so that anybody who graduated from that school would get paid for. But very few people subsequently from that school got to college. Only the people who'd been in that room at that time, who received the experience of seeing that man moved and seeing his spirit of generosity actually got to college. And I think this illustrates the business of transmission very well. And that didn't take long, you know, he was only out there speaking for 4 months 20 minutes. But it changed many, many, many young people's lives. And even those who didn't get to college, it affected them too. Some of them thought, "Oh well, I don't need to go to college. He didn't go to college, but I can be a businessman." It affected them. So there is a heart-to-heart transmission. You know, in the Zen things they say, 'The heart-to-heart transmission outside of the texts.' You know, it means like this. It isn't just there being a mechanism. He'd set up a fund. But no subsequent children, or very few, avail themselves of that fund. Because they hadn't been there. They hadn't received the heart-to-heart transmission. Simply getting the money wouldn't do it. Simply having the mechanism, the protocol, the procedure, this wouldn't be enough. Not enough to move people like that. So I think the second period of the Dhamma when people got enlightened by self-power practices, those practices were imbued with this transmission. It's not just that technically they did so many hours of meditation, or they did so many prostrations, or they did whatever it was, such and such ritual procedure, or kept the precepts perfectly, or whatever it was. There was within that, that was the form that embodied the spirit. If the spirit isn't there, the procedure doesn't do anything. Like that, empty. You see. So gradually the self-power practices became empty.— and we moved into what was called mappa, which was the dark age of the Dhamma, the age of decline of the Dhamma. And in this age, third age, there arose teachers like Honen Shōnin, who showed a way through faith. That through faith one could arrive at the gate in less than a day, 20 minutes, if you were in the right hall at the right time. So in his time, this was a great success. Hōnen had innumerable followers in his own day. He set up a school of Buddhism, Jōdō, and in subsequent generations other schools blossomed off it: Jīshū and Jōboshinshū, and so on and so on. And it spread. Like wildfire. It's very popular. It's all over Japan. And other teachers earlier, Shandao in China and so on, they had the same effect. So this was like third age of the Dhamma, known as the Dark Age, 'mappa'. So what about us? We're in post-Mappa. Postmodernism. We're in post-Mappa. We're in, you could say, the Fourth Age. Beyond even the Dark Age. When it seems that it's almost impossible even for people to have faith. Even that door is closed. People are like my correspondent. They sometimes have a vague sense that this faith was their birthright in a certain sense, but they can't access it, they can't get hold of it, they can't use it. You know, it's blocked. Some of this you can put down to the nature of our society, the nature of our education, our particular, rather peculiar sense of rationalism, and so on, which makes us doubtful, makes us cynical, makes us sophisticated. In a certain way, because life is terribly complicated. We, you know, the little verse, 'A pure land, they say, is far, far away, but if you're really going that way, you can arrive in less than a day.' This is based on a little song that was sung by Kūya, who was a Hijiri. And Kūya wandered from place to place in Japan, went all over Japan, right up to the north, to the islands, everywhere, went all over Japan. But mostly he was around the capital, Kyoto. And He would roll up his sleeves and do whatever was necessary. And during that time there were plagues, so what was necessary quite often was digging graves, carrying away bodies. And, you know. Now, in those days they didn't have television.— and there weren't so many people. Kuya would wander from place to place. If you wandered into a village, you'd be noticed. Everyone would want to know, "Who's the stranger? What's he all about? Why is he here? What's he got to offer? What can he do?" And so, As well as helping them build a bridge or mend the road or whatever, Kuyo would sing. And he would sing the Nembutsu. And he would dance. Dance the Nembutsu. Odori Nembutsu. Honourable Dance Nembutsu. But, you know, if you wander into a town nowadays, nobody knows you. I go to hundreds of towns. I'm completely invisible. I can walk into the main square. I'd have to do something really dramatic to be noticed, and if I did that, they'd lock me up. So, you know, Francis of Assisi took all his clothes off in the main square Well, it's— so we live in a mass society which is very complicated, but it's also alienating. Everybody is alone. There's a certain sort of loneliness. So people, when they get something, they cling to it. Sort of. And of course we have this kind of romantic ideal that everybody will find at least one other person that will make their life complete and so on, which feeds on the fact that everybody actually feels so alone, so alienated, so cut off, you know, like the British used to say, The person says, 'I don't have a place on the voyage. There's no place for me on the boat.' Like that. And Kūya went into a village, there was certainly a place for him on the boat. He might be regarded as a madman, but then they had a place for madmen. He might be regarded as a prophet, and they had a way of relating to prophets. And so on. He might be regarded as a labourer. Well, they had things that labourers could do. So he would be fed, and he would be looked after, and he would be listened to, and people might scoff at what he said, or they might take it on, but he wouldn't be ignored in the way that he would be today. You see. So we live in this age which is in a quite almost literal sense, soul-destroying. It's very difficult to have faith in this chopping machine that is modern society. So, we have to think what is needed in this, and I think what's needed in this fourth age of the Dharma, really, is some sort of return to innocence. You know, we've lost our innocence. And before you can have faith, you have to have some innocence. Like this, just like the correspondent said, "Back in the innocent time." childhood time, there was something there. There's a kind of vague sense of it. And I think many people have a vague sense, but they can't operationalize it. They can't make it meaningful in this complicated life where everything requires Nkuya just walked into town on his feet. They said they needed horses. Now we have the most complicated machines. My car has a computer inside it. I don't understand everything it does. Life is like that, terribly complicated. And so how can you just be innocent? How can you just be simple in this society? Of course, if you have a life like mine, it's a little bit easier because I have chunks of time when I'm in solitude. And when there's just me and the trees and the birds, It's a lot simpler. But even then, various bureaucratic demands come in the letterbox, and all the complications of society. So, but sometimes when I'm walking across that field, or walking through the trees, there's a kind of overpowering sense of 'it doesn't get better than this.' There's a release. And sometimes I'm completely on my own and I just burst out laughing, or— 'Oh Lord!' Or there's a temptation to be like a small child. Which I indulge. And I encourage you to do likewise. There is work to do, but in a way the work is also play. I have to fetch down that dead tree and chop it up for firewood. But I don't have to do it today. So if I choose to do it today, it's because it's what I feel like doing today. Just like a child. Oh, let's jump down that tree! You see? So, an attitude of playfulness is quite different from an attitude of 'Oh, I've got to get that job done.' So much of our time is spent with deadlines— dead lines. And it deadens us, because we don't cast ourselves into something with the exuberance of a child going to play. We are faced with what we feel are obligations. Even to the people that we love and hold most dear, we feel tied. And also, of course, we have this self-consciousness. 'Oh, I couldn't do that. What will they think of me?' Or, 'What will he think of me?' Or, 'What will she think of me?' Like that. So, there's a kind of second thing going on. This is why Leonardo da Vinci said a person is only truly themself when they're alone. When they're even with one other person, they're all the time calibrating everything they do because of the other person. Of course, there's a great virtue in being considerate of the other person. But it can so easily turn sour, so easily turn into— what was initially enthusiasm and generosity can turn into obligation and this sort of prison. So Shakyamuni often talked about, when he was asked, 'What is nirvana like?' Sathya Robyn, he manners like if you've been in prison for a long time and then you find the doors open and you can just walk out like that. Or you've been lost in the desert and you're terribly thirsty and suddenly you go over a dune and there's a pond of water. We only— and we appreciate things in that contrast. You see? No contract. It strikes me as a very interesting thing that in the West, with the style of religion and spirituality that we've had in the West, it seems to be the case that when people meet with a disaster or trauma or something, everything falls to pieces, this often shakes whatever faith they've got. They give up on faith at that point. They say to themselves something like, "How could a good God make the world to be like this?" or "Let this happen to a good soul like me?" You know, you understand that sort of sentiment. But when you look at the histories of the great teachers in Buddhism, Most of them found their faith at such a point. Dōgen, we hear, decided to become a monk when he saw the incense smoke rising over his mother's coffin. Honen was propelled into his Dharma Korea by watching his father be assassinated. So these impacts with impermanence— Nagarjuna gave up his playboy life when his companions were killed. And he was the only survivor of this little gang who had spent their time having a good time in a completely thoughtless and self-indulgent way, and the others were all killed in an escapade. So it is quite well established in so many stories in Buddhist history, that people met with some great disaster, things fell to pieces, and that's when they discovered faith, or that's when they set out on the path, or went forth in some way. Quite the opposite of what we tend to see in our modern Western civilization. And one has to ask why this is. I don't fully have the answer. It's something I ponder upon. But some of it, I think, is to do with the extreme materialism of our lives. You might say, when I set out my sort of 4 stages of the Dhamma, well, people still do self-power practices. Well, they do, but they don't do them for the sake of enlightenment. They don't do them for the sake of nirvana, for the most part, in my observation. They do them for worldly gain or for self-enhancement. They do mindfulness or meditation or whatever really with a view to something worldly. So our sights are all set on worldly success. And so when this, this doesn't happen, if we still had any vestige of belief in God, it's his fault. You see, like that. Whereas in Buddhism, where there isn't the same sense of an all-powerful God, but just the working of the universe. And in that sense, Buddhism is more existential. We find ourselves here in the midst of this karmic wilderness. When impermanence strikes, this galvanizes people. They go on. 'Goodness, yes, I can't just go on the way I have been. I have to do something.' And this leads them to a change of heart, a new path. It might be the wrong path. So, Shakyamuni goes off into asceticism, or Nagarjuna goes and becomes a hermit in the hills and talks to the animals. Well, both these are progress of a sort. They're not the real liberation that Buddhism offers. But they're— for those particular people, those particular careers, they were— when you look back, you could say this was a necessary stage, stepping stone on the way. And eventually His teacher, Palswa, comes and digs Nagarjuna out from his hermitage and says, 'There's more is possible. I teach you to be a proper monkey, sir.' And of course, Nagarjuna went on to become one of the greatest philosophers of Buddhist history. That's how we think of him, but probably at the time he was thought of more as an exemplary monk. Many of his writings are about conduct, personal conduct. But we modern sophisticated people appreciate philosophical subtleties, you see, that we can pore over and not understand at all, but pretend to our friends that we do so that our status is elevated but it's still an attachment to a worldly— even what we think of as being spiritual is often actually quite contaminated with worldly ambition. So when is it not? Well, when we return to some sort of innocence. So this is my sort of prescription for this morning. Finding ourselves in the fourth age of the Dharma, as I'll call it, the post-Mappo. We need somehow to find our way back to some of that innocence. We see this innocence in children. Some of you have children? You see this innocence in children. But the child lacks the know-how, and the parent often has to be the supplier of know-how, which the child finds unwelcome. The child has a natural impulse to do such and such, and the parent can see this is not a very good idea. And so there is then conflict. And we get many, many of these conflicts. And if you think about it, the lives of children now are, certainly in our society, are more circumscribed than they even were in my youth. When I was a child, my mother would say in the morning, "Go out and play." I'd disappear for the whole day. I'd be roaming over the hills, playing in the trees. Parents don't allow their children to do this anymore. The children— I would walk 3 miles to school. Nowadays you're taken in a car, you're passed from one adult to another adult. Everything has a fence round it. Even if you go out to play, there's a— playground fence around it. And so the scope even to be a child in the kind of original natural sense has been reduced. The socialization process has become more intense, more concentrated, more heavy. More heavy. I think that's a good way of thinking about it. Everything in a sense has become more serious. Innocence is a lightness. We talk about enlightenment. Enlightenment doesn't just mean light, like from the sun. It also means to lighten up, less heavy. Somehow we have to recover innocence. We have to lighten up. We have to be able to play, to let ourselves go, to just throw the ball without thinking, now, is anybody watching? Like this. And am I doing it properly? And what will my score be? We have to not worry about the score. Amita. No score. Amita means no score. No measure. Like this. So, self-consciousness is the enemy of innocence. And of course we inculcate this in our children, because we want them to be successes in a worldly sense, and a certain amount of that is necessary. They have to learn that. But in the process, we— something is lost. We have to recover it somehow, recover this playfulness. So that everything becomes— work becomes a game. The things that we do are no longer chores, they're no longer burdensome, they're fun. It's like that. Life should be fun. The Dhamma is fun. Of course we have this tradition of religion which is also very heavy. I found it was a long time before I realized in Japan that the temple was where you went to be accepted just as you were. In our society religion imposes— we have a sense of religion as imposing a straitjacket on people. But in Japan there's more the sense that it's society, secular society, that puts the straitjacket on you. The temple's a place where you go in and take it off. Where the Buddha will accept you just as you are. So there is something different about this style of spirituality. Lightness. I remember, some of you may remember an old-time friend of ours, David Bray. He was quite scientific and inclined to scepticism and so on, and sometimes found things in our Buddhist world difficult. But he kept coming, and I said, 'Well, why do you keep coming if you find it difficult?' He said, well, you know, when I— he had visited Ladakh or Kashmir, Ladakh I suppose, and he said there was something about the light spirit of the people, and he said, I thought, I want some of that. And I suppose in a way I want some of that back. You see? Because everything's become too serious, become too heavy. And in that process, something has been lost. And I think one of the difficulties we have being Buddhists in the Western world is that the tradition in the Western world of religion is heavy. It's a pressure on people to conform, to always be good, to— it knocks the fun out of it. Whereas liberation, liberation of spirit, opening up, lightening up, very important. Especially in this fourth age of the Dhamma. My contribution to Buddhist metaphysics. We're in the post-Mapper. Well, I've probably said enough for this morning. I think you've probably got the message. And we'll see where we get from there. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.