A Buddhist group practice session led by Satya Robyn includes a Dharma glimpse about knitting and grieving, guided meditation, chanting of Amitabha and Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, and recitation of refuges and precepts. The community also announces upcoming gardening, book study, and tea gatherings.
Chapters
Good morning everybody, welcome. Special welcome if it's your first time joining us. Welcome to myki on Zoom. We'll begin— Satya's waving at the camera, you can't see from there. We'll begin practice as we always do with a Dharma glimpse, which is a sort of a moment of learning that somebody has in their everyday life that teaches them something about themselves, about the world, but in this, in the spirit of Buddhist teaching, I suppose it reveals some truth. And today someone called Marie has sent in a Dharma glimpse, and Fergus has very kindly agreed to read for us. Just move the mic closer to you. Thank you.
Knitting and Grieving: A Dharma Glimpse by Marie, which comes with the caveat that she's never written one of these before in her life. So, two things have been happening for me this past couple of weeks, and they feel like they're connected, but I don't know how. Perhaps I'll find out in the writing. My sort of mother-in-law is dying, and a good friend of mine is dying too, both of cancer, and I've been knitting a lot. My Granny taught me to knit, and my daughter knits too, and this is often something we do together. Sometimes I get out her wool and needles when she's feeling anxious and upset. She doesn't often like to talk much, but sitting together quietly making things seems to help her and me. You can't think too much when you're knitting. Some knitters can look at a pattern, which is sometimes a list of written instructions and sometimes a chart, and from the signs and symbols and abbreviations get a picture in their head of what the finished garment will look like, even if the patterns are very intricate. I'm a really good knitter, but I can't do that. And even when there's a picture of the finished thing on the front of the pattern, like the picture on the box of a jigsaw, I can never really understand how what I am doing will turn into the finished garment. I knit difficult, intricate things, and I don't understand why what I do turns into the thing it turns into. I just follow the instructions. And this is really comforting to me, and I hope to my daughter too. It is my daughter's grandmother who is dying. Her dad died a few years ago of the same cancer, and my daughter carries the gene too, and she will get it someday. There's some pattern in their genes that causes this, maybe some little mistake in the design. So the dying of her grandmother is a hard thing for my daughter to watch, and there's nothing I can do about any of it, only sit quietly with her and knit. My friend who is dying, he's more talkative, and he's really interested in what is happening to him. He's curious about what dying feels like and what it is going to be like for him. I know he's scared because sometimes he makes jokes, and he wants me to laugh at them to make him feel better. Once, after we'd spent some time together, he said that he'd noticed when he'd made me a cup of tea that I held my hand under the teaspoon he was holding so the used tea bag didn't fall on the tablecloth and make a mess. He said he liked that, my little cupped hand under the spoon. I think my body was doing then what it does when it knits, just the little smallest possible next step of something, like making sure a tea bag doesn't fall, even though the bigger picture is hard to imagine, impossible to understand, and beyond my skills to design. But tiny little kindnesses can come naturally, like knowing how to knit and purl. Sometimes I think not understanding the bigger picture, not being able to design my own life or the life of other people I care about, and not really even being able to correct my own mistakes very well makes life terrible. At other times I just knit. My body knows what tiny movements to make, like keeping a used tea bag safe, if I try not to think about it too much.
Thanks for reading that, and thank you to Marie for sending it in. We're always welcome to receive Dharma glimpses. We've got some time for sitting quietly together in meditation now. As I said when we were doing the walking practice in the garden, one could give lots of different instructions that would sort of point one to the meaning of what this is supposed to reveal, but none of them would really tell the whole story. We only really discover how it is through doing it, which is why in some Zen temples the only instructions you get are about the posture to sit in and how long to stay quiet for. Um, this morning I will also give you an invitation to follow the breath if that feels helpful. Just paying attention to the in-breath, the out-breath, the pause between breaths. Not trying to change anything, just noticing how it is from one moment to the next. If when you become distracted or your attention is taken somewhere else, gently drawing it back to the breath. And we'll sit for about between 10 and 15 minutes, and then we'll move into a period of chanting, and I will briefly introduce that when we get to it. In a moment, we all chant the name Amitabha together. Amitabha is the Buddha of infinite light and life and is one way of describing the existence of a benign process in the universe that alongside all the, the suffering that unfolds, there is a loving force, or a field of loving kindness, or the light of the Buddha shining to reach us. And this practice of saying the name of the Buddha, Nembutsu, sometimes we do that as a kind of, oh, please can I find this loving force? Please can I tune into it? Please can I remind myself that it's here? And sometimes We say the name as a thank you. Ah, I trust that it is here, that there is something that holds me beyond my own small mind, and I'm grateful for that. So the word, uh, Sanskrit word is Amitabha. There's a little melody, do join in when you get the gist. Amitabha. Amitabha.
Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha.
Amitabha.
Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Ame taba. Ame taba. Ame taba. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha.
Amitabha.
Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha.
Thank you. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. We'll now recite the refuges and precepts together, which you can find on the sheet of A5 next to you. The refuges are the things that as Buddhists we place our trust in, or experiment with placing our trust in. Buddhism accepts that trust or faith has different flavors, both the flavor of taking a leap and hoping that something will catch you, and also of sort of tentatively stepping and seeing if the ground is solid. Both appropriate ways of trusting at different times. And the refuge is the Buddha who set the teachings in motion, the Dharma, those teachings that were set in motion, and the Sangha, the community of people practicing those teachings, all ways which that benign process manifests in this world. And the precepts are very traditional and ancient way of describing the life of one who is influenced by that benign process. So please repeat after me. For refuge I go to the Buddha.
For refuge I go to the Buddha.
The one who is awake and full of love.
The one who is awake and full of love.
Namo Buddhaya.
Namo Buddhaya.
For refuge I go to the Dharma. Refuge I go to Dharma, all that guides us to wisdom and compassion, all that guides us to wisdom and compassion. Namo Dharmaya.
Namo Dharmaya.
For refuge I go to the Sangha.
For refuge I go to the Sangha.
Those who live in the Buddha's light.
Those who live in the Buddha's light.
Namo Sangha. Namo With faith in the Three Jewels— I pray that I may not take life.
With faith in the Three Jewels—
I pray that I may not steal. With faith in the Three Jewels— I pray that I may not fall into sexual misconduct—
I pray that I may not fall into sexual misconduct—
With faith in The Three Jewels—
Faith in The Three Jewels—
I pray this time you're falling to wrong speech—
However great it was, I'm gonna pull them too long speed—
With faith in The Three Jewels—
With faith in The Three Jewels—
I pray that I may avoid intoxication—
I pray that I might have avoided intoxication.
No blame.
No blame.
Be kind.
Be kind.
Love everything.
Love everything. Innumerable are sentient beings.
We vow to save them all.
Immeasurable are the Dharma teachings.
We vow to master them all. We vow to transform them more.
Infinite is the Buddhist way.
We vow to fulfill it completely. Thank you. Only slightly mixing at the They will, because they were looking at the words. But not as bad as when years ago when I was doing the bowmaster, I think Paul from Hawaii was leading practice, or the other way around, and I said, whoever was the bowmaster said, "Inexhaustible are deluded passions in the wrong place," and everyone replied with, "We vow to master them all." So I'm still practicing. I'm still trying to get that one. It's, it's much easier than all the rest somehow, saying it that way around. As we were walking around the garden this morning, I was really struck by the mix of cultivated things and wild things and areas where it's really clear, like, oh, this is supposed to be a flower bed and this is supposed to be a wild area. And the areas where it wasn't at all clear what the intention was. And if you walk around the garden with the idea of a formal garden in mind, then it doesn't fit that. And if you walk around the garden with the idea of a wildlife garden, it doesn't really fit that either. Partly because to really cultivate a wildlife garden takes some cultivation, because the— some of the processes that would have created those things in the past, like the wild cattle and the wild boar moving through places to open them up and create space for sunlight and space for temporary ponds to appear, we just don't have those things in the garden. Partly because the garden is overrun by things like ground elder that the Romans brought with them because they like the taste of the fresh young shoots, without really imagining that it would fill all the spaces everywhere, particularly the spaces left, uh, in damaged ecosystems. But later today we have a gardening afternoon, a couple of hours when you're welcome to join us and do some gardening from 2 o'clock. And we have to start with the garden that's in front of us. If I wish that it looked more like this or more like that, I can easily sort of become a bit frozen and end up not doing anything, and then it just carries on unfolding without any input from me and becomes further away from the thing that I'm hoping for. And our minds are a bit like this, and our lives are a bit like this. We collect habit patterns and beliefs and reactions and compulsions as we go through life. Maybe we even arrive in this world with some of those, you know, Buddhism has this idea that we don't— most of us don't arrive in the world as a blank slate, but we're already conditioned in some way by previous lives or by experiences in the womb or family conditions that are already impacting upon us as we arrive, from the moment we arrive in the world. And it's easy to wish, oh, I would like to be more like that person, or more like this, or I wish this thing wasn't going on for me. But to really have any hope of being any different, of becoming more kind, more compassionate, less harmful. The Buddhist path really is about moving towards harmlessness, and to have any hope of that, we have to start by seeing clearly, more or less. Oh, this is what's here. This is These are the plants that are in the garden. This is where all the nettles are. This is where the really thick brambles are. Well, this is what's here in me. This is where my compulsions are, my reactions. These are the beliefs that I still act out that probably aren't really serving me or the people around me, and yet I'm still carrying them.. And from that point of acceptance, we can begin to tend to ourselves. And I like this word tend because it's very close to tenderness, which describes the kind of attitude that we need to bring to ourselves and to our lives and to our gardens, um, one of loving kindness. We're not judging that these things are here. Maybe we even try and get some understanding of where they came from. And mostly we don't need to do anything other than bring loving kindness to them. Certainly that's true of the things in our own mind that we have collected. Often When we sit with compassion with these aspects of ourself, they begin to soften and change. As Pure Land Buddhists, we also trust that that compassion might come from outside of us, might be the light of the Buddha shining through, so we don't always need to generate it musfully ourselves. It's what Kobo Sensei called acceptance transcendence. First seeing clearly and then tending to what you find. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Now we, in a moment, Satya will very kindly ring a bell and we'll stand and face the main shrine and make prostrations. Please do as much as feels comfortable, both physically and emotionally. Some of us will go right down onto our knees. This is a way of— well, like the chanting, sometimes saying please and sometimes saying thank you, wishing for the arrival of loving kindness, of insight, and being grateful for what we've already bound of those things. And we will recite Nam-myoho-renge-kyo as we prostrate, which is another form of the name of Amitabha Buddha. And it's moving and it's saying some words, and it's a bit like learning a brand new dance, so don't worry too much if it doesn't all come together.
Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.
Namur Amida Butsu!
Namor Amida— Namor Amida—
Namor Amida Butsu! Namoha miyahu.
Namoha miyahu.
Namoha miya. Namoha miya. Na mo amida blue!
Na mo amida blue! Na mo amida—
We dedicate the merits of this incense offering to all Buddhas and bodhisattvas throughout space and time. May it be fragrant as Earth herself. Reflecting our careful efforts, our wholehearted awareness, and the fruits of understanding slowly ripening. May we and all beings be companions to Buddhas and bodhisattvas. May we awaken from forgetfulness and realize our true home.
Namamitabhadra. Please come back to your places standing, and we will bow to each other, once to one side and once to the other side, and then to the main shrine at the front. Now let's hide our seats and back to our seats, to the earth as well. In a moment, we'll recite the closing verse together, which is on the top of your A5 piece of paper. But before we do, just to let you know— well, I've already said about the gardening. You're very welcome to join us from 2 o'clock if you'd like to help at, uh, donation bowl in the hallway. Very gratefully received. There's book study groups. Is that what that symbol means that you're miming to me? Yeah, we're running a series of book study groups here at the temple and on Zoom. The next one coming up is on Gerald May's books, The Wisdom of the Wilderness, about a sort of heart call to becoming wilder in the sense of really tuning into what it means to be human, which for him meant going into the wild forest. And following that, we're studying a book called December Fan, which is a sort of Japanese phrase that means chocolate teapot, by a Pure Land Buddhist priest from the 20th, early 20th century. And finally, you're very welcome to stay and have a cup of tea with us. Namamitabhu. So we're just finished with the closing verse. Blessed by Amitabha's light, may we care for all living beings and the holy earth. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Okay, let me see if I can move the camera.
See you next weekend.
Oh, I'll stop recording.
