Practice with a talk by special guest Bobby Ahlander

I need to take a photo of the shrine room.

We're all on the floor.

That's literally not happened in 8 years. Stuffing the lime this evening.

So a warm welcome to Claire on Zoom, and thank you for being here for the first time.

And to my right is Bobby, who has come to speak to us this evening all the way from America. I came just for this. We've given him 20 minutes and then he'll be flying home tomorrow. No, we've offered him some time in our lovely guest room in return. And me and Caspar met Bobby on the Bright Dawn study program, which we've been doing for a year now with an American organization, Bright Dawn. And Bobby happened to be over in the UK for something else and very happily wanted to come and see us here. Um, and so usually we would begin practice with a Dharma glimpse, which is just a short bit of writing by somebody who comes to practice with us. But instead today we will go straight into meditation, and then later on we'll have a longer talk by Bobby. Um, so we'll go straight into meditation. Um, so As we sit silently together, maybe the invitation this evening is to allow the Nembutsu to follow your breath. So here in this temple, we practice Nembutsu, which is, which is a, a kind of a way of connecting to the Buddha. And we connect to the Buddha by saying the name of of the Buddha. The Buddha that we connect to here is the Buddha of Infinite Light, Amitabha. So the easiest way to allow the Nembutsu to accompany you in meditation is to just say the word Amitabha in your mind, and, and as you breathe in, you can kind of let Ami and then Taba as you breathe out, and then just let some space So don't change the length of your breath, just allow it to be what it is, and just imagine this word kind of like bobbing on a wave of your breath. And then after some time, we will do some chanting together, and we will use the word Amitabha, and then we'll have a little bit more silence.

So nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Amitabha. Amitabha.

Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Ameesh Abba. Ameesh Abba.

Ameesh Abba.

Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha.

Amitabha.

Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha.

Ame taba.

Ame taba. Ame taba. Amitabh!

Amitabh!

Amitabh!

Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabh. Amitabh. Amitabh. Amitabh. Amitabha. Amitabha.

Amitabha.

Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha. Amitabha.

So next we will recite the refuges, vows, and precepts together. The refuges are something that all Buddhists have in common. We all take refuge in three things: the Buddha, the Buddha's teachings, and the community of spiritual seekers. 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 Buddha. For refuge I go to the Dharma.

For refuge I go to the Dharma.

All that guides us to wisdom and compassion.

All that guides us to wisdom and compassion.

Namo Dharma.

Namo Dharma.

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.

Namaste.

So the precepts are, um, a bit like the Ten Commandments, but there's an acknowledgement that we will fail to keep any of them perfectly. So please repeat after me. With faith in the Three Jewels, with faith in the Three Jewels, I pray that I may not take life.

I pray that I may not take life.

With faith in the Three Jewels, with faith in the Three Jewels, I pray that I may not I pray that I may not steal. With faith in the Three Jewels, I pray that I may not fall into sexual misconduct. With faith in the Three Jewels, I pray that I may not fall into wrong speech. With faith in the Three Jewels, I pray that I may avoid intoxication.

Right, great. It's time for the Bodhisattva Vows.

Now the Bodhisattva Vows, which are call and response, and the words are on your little bit of paper if you want to read them. And the Bodhisattva Vows are— what's built in is the impossibility of attaining any of these vows, but we vow to head in that direction. Innumerable are sentient beings.

We vow to save them all.

Inexhaustible are deluded passions.

We vow to transform them all.

Immeasurable are the Dharma teachings.

We vow to master them all.

Infinite is the Buddha's way.

We vow to fulfill it completely.

And I missed out the 6 words that are my friend Terry's motto. He's going to have some pretty serious heart surgery on Monday, so he's very much on my mind. So please repeat after me: no blame, no blame, be kind, be kind, love everything, love everything. Namomi to be. Okay, so without any further ado, I will hand over to Bobby and Like 20 past, 25 past-ish.

Just tell me to wrap up.

Okay, you're one of those speakers.

Just ding that bell when there's like 2 minutes.

Okay.

It's not written, I speak from an outline, so.

There is a clock there if you want to look at it, but we will keep an eye on you as well. So 20 past, 25 past? Okay.

Yeah. All right. Wish me luck. You look lovely, by the way.

I'm in— I came to have one of my very—

Oh, I knew I was going to forget that.

Just like that. Does that work? And is that my camera over there? Is somebody there? Hello? Hello, Claire.

We put it on YouTube as well, where, as I said earlier, 2,000 people may have viewed it.

I'm— a very good friend of mine, she used to work for me and she— we've just been very close for years. She came to London for— to get a master's degree and met a man and fell in love.

Imagine that.

And so now she's getting married. And about a year ago, I booked this ticket And I, for some reason, I booked 8 days for a 2-day wedding. I don't know why, but as I got closer, I was like, yeah, what am I going to do? Like, I've been to England several times.

I'm like, what?

I don't need to go to the British Museum again. I've been there like 4 of the 5 times. So I just started realizing I had friends that, and I had not actually met these two in person. Only on Zoom. And I thought it would be fun to just kill a couple of days in beautiful Malvern.

No one—

do you know that no one in England knows this is here? They're like, where are you going? And I was going, I'm visiting some friends in Malvern. And they're like, so you've got a little secret, like a little secret place here. I was introduced to Buddhism in sort of an unconventional way. I was born and raised Mormon. Do we know any Mormons here? Hopefully?

No?

We're not all weird. And so I served as a missionary for my church when I was a youth. You've probably seen us walking around in our little white shirts and black name tags. And then I went to Brigham Young University, which is the university that's owned and run run by our church, and you are required to take religion courses there. And most of the religion courses you take, of course, are the things that you would expect from a sort of a Christian, uh, style religion— lots of Old Testament classes, lots of New Testament classes, that sort of thing. Um, but we also were allowed some latitude in the kinds of things that we could fill the rest of those spaces with.. And I had an interest in world religions. So I took a world religions class from a man who had spent most of his career as a Presbyterian minister. And he spoke and he taught the class. He wrote, he'd also written the text for the class. And pretty much every session was a different, you know, basically religion, all in a group, right? So Judaism was a day and Christianity was a day and that sort of thing. We had a day on Buddhism. And it, I thought it was just lovely. I just really connected with the things that he shared and that we read and studied. And so sort of from that point on, I read very casually, but I kept up reading from time to time, the people we've all heard about, Thích Nhất Hạnh and the Dalai Lama and Pema Chödrön and teachers like that. And what's been love— what's been good for me is that I had a lot of misconceptions about Buddhism, as many people do who haven't really been exposed to it, especially Christians, and/or especially if you don't live in a region of the world where there are a lot of Buddhists around. So I've, as an example, I was talking to my mom, she's still very faithful practicing Latter-day Saint, and I had to deliver some good news to her. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I was like, Mom, guess what? Da da da da da. And she's like, oh, praise God, or praise Buddha. And I was like, well, we don't, we don't really do that, Mom. We know Buddha's not a god. We do, we do We are devoted to his teachings. We, we like, we're focused on what he taught more than anything. And he's sort of the example of sort of how to go about it, right? And, you know, Buddha, the word Buddha means the awakened one. Or the one who woke up. But I actually like to think of that more as not the one who woke up, but one who woke up. We know that he was not the first to wake up. We know that he has not been the last to wake up. We know that our journey in Buddhism is about waking up, right? And so I'm going to come back to that a little bit later. But his point was that we can all wake up. Now, one of the misconceptions that I had when I was a practicing Mormon was that Buddha was a god, and that when I saw a statue of a Buddha, then that— like, in our tradition, we don't have a lot of— in Mormonism, there aren't a lot of— we don't We don't worship kind of at the feet of, of statues, but we do have statues. We have statues of Jesus, um, Catholicism. If you've ever been to a cathedral, Anglican Church, we've got lots of symbols there. And, um, so when I, you know, when I used to go visit downtown Salt Lake City, which is the central— that's like center of Mormonism, right, in Utah. They have a giant, uh, statue called the Christus. It was, um, made by a Danish sculptor. And when I stand in— when I would stand in front of that, I, I did feel devotion, uh, toward, uh, not toward the statue but toward the, the, the person that it represented, right? God. We believe— Mormons believe that Jesus is a God and other Christians believe that Jesus is God, but it doesn't really matter.

But we—

but I would— but when I first started looking at Buddha statues, I— my inclination was to feel worshipful toward the Buddha because I had kind of been taught to feel that way when I was reverencing something, you know, sacred. And But I started to understand, even before I really dove into Buddhist practice, what the point of a Buddhist statue is, or at least one of the points. And I learned that when I went, I was visiting a museum working in a city, and I like to go to art museums when I have a chance, and we had about half a day. So I went to the, it was in Phoenix, Arizona.. And I was with a friend and we were just wandering around and I came around the corner and there was an image of the Buddha, just the Buddha's face and shoulders, not a statue per se, but sort of a carving in stone. And it took my breath away. I was like, and my friend is like, oh, he's a practicing Mormon. I was at the time too, but he's like, he's like, He looked at me like he didn't understand, and he kept looking back between me while I'm just like staring. And he's, he's like, I don't get it. Like, what do you see? And I said, how does, what is the expression on his face telling you? And my friend is like, Well, he looks peaceful. And I was like, right. That's what took my breath away. Not necessarily the artistry of the work, although it was a beautiful piece of art. It was that I felt what I was supposed to feel. And there's lots of different versions of the Buddha. And you can see lots of images, and I started to learn, oh, what is it when I'm looking at this that I'm supposed to remember? What is it I'm supposed to feel? And that's been a good orientation for me. So I'll— so when I first walked in this room and I saw that Buddha right there, of course, you said it was from Thailand, and I think I kind of knew that because you can tell stylistically. But like, there's like the serenity on the face. It makes me go, oh, that's how I want to feel. That's how I want to feel. I want to feel that kind of serenity. Now, any first-timers here?

First-timer?

How much Buddhism do we know, you and I? A little bit. All right, I'll try to define a little bit. But, um, so bodhisattvas— have we heard of bodhisattvas before? Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you some definitions. So, um, according to Buddhist teacher Kosho Uchiyama, this is how he defines a bodhisattva. A bodhisattva is an ordinary person who takes up a course in his or her life that moves in the direction of the Buddha. You and I, actually anyone who directs their attention, their life to practicing the life of a Buddha is a bodhisattva. Okay, here, but here's another definition from another Buddhist teacher in a different tradition who says a bodhisattva is a Buddhist deity who has attained the highest level of enlightenment, but who delays their entry into paradise in order to help the earthbound. Now, if you can put those side by side, they're pretty different. And of course, you know, you know how many versions of Christianity there are, right? Like, there's just so many. And same with Buddhism, there's just lots of versions, lots of interpretations and sort of styles, and different cultures have sort of taken in different ways. But when I, when I lay those things sort of side by side, there is there is something that is sort of the same, and that is a bodhisattva is sort of pointed in the right direction and also helping other people to sort of point in that direction. And so how do we know who is a bodhisattva? Is it important to know who? Maybe, maybe not. I think it's fun to think about. Martin Luther King Jr. in our country, you probably heard of him, right? In our country, he was a very important civil rights leader in the '60s. He was assassinated. He had some correspondence with Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Vietnamese Zen master and also a civil rights activist in his own country of Vietnam. And they exchanged some letters over a few years, and they met in person a couple of times. And after meeting Martin Luther King Jr., Thich Nhat Hanh said, Martin Luther King Jr. is a bodhisattva. Now, I don't think, I don't think Dr. King thought he was one, because that wasn't his, he would have never thought of himself being that, right? So that made me go, oh, maybe it's possible that someone is a bodhisattva and they don't know they're a bodhisattva. So then I started thinking about, wait, who do I think might be a bodhisattva that maybe doesn't know they're a bodhisattva? And I came up with a couple. Now, my examples, these are Americans. And actually, I only have two examples I'm going to share really quickly, and they're both musicians. Music is really important to me. So how am I doing on time? I'm doing okay. All right. Anybody heard of the Beach Boys? Okay, so the leader of the Beach Boys is Brian Wilson. Now, Brian Wilson is, he is, I think he's a musical genius. He was able to do very sophisticated things with pop music, which pop music is a very simple art form. I mean, it's not, if you can learn how to play 3 chords on your guitar, you can become U2. So it's, I mean, that's how easy pop music really is at its core. But he was able to infuse very interesting and sophisticated things into his music. So if you want a spiritual experience, and I can't guarantee enlightenment here, but take an hour, put on some headphones, and listen from beginning to end the Beach Boys album called Pet Sounds. It's been out for about 50 years. My recommendation is you listen to it in stereo with your headphones on, but it's also in mono, you choose. And then when you're done listening super carefully to that from beginning to end, then hit me up on Facebook and let's have a discussion about whether or not you think Brian Wilson is a bodhisattva, because I think he is. Are you guys familiar with Lizzo? Do we listen to Lizzo over here? Lizzo is my hero. I think Lizzo is a bodhisattva. When you look at what she is doing with—

Can you describe her a little bit?

Oh, Lizzo is a large Black American woman who is body confident and she's positive and she, in her lyrics and in her work, She's trying to help everyone feel good about who they are, not about who they're trying to be, but who they are. So listen to some Lizzo music. I think Lizzo is a bodhisattva. So now I want to talk about a little bit about enlightenment. So enlightenment is something I've been studying personally. Several months now I've been like trying to learn about it. What does it mean?

What is it like?

What does it feel like? What does it look like? If you think about it, don't say it out loud, but in your head, think about what enlightenment means to you. Like, what does that word connote? What do you think happens when you are enlightened? The story of the Buddha, he goes, he sits under the tree. He'd spent 7 years trying to find the answers to his questions. And finally, he was just like, I'm just going to sit under this tree until I have the answer. And eventually the answer came. And, but then what? Like, I mean, there's a whole lot of mythology and allegory that's sort of been added in by the cultures over the 2,500 whatever years since. But he sat, he woke up, and then what did he do? He spent another 40+ years telling people how to wake up and encouraging them to wake up and to say, don't believe me, just try it yourself and wake up, right? And I realized that I've had, I've been, you know, we talk in Buddhism a lot about attachment, and I realized that I was attached to a very specific definition of enlightenment or a picture of it or something like that. And so I've tried to sort of let, release my kung fu grip on that and sort of just allow some learning to come in. I would have, I probably would have described enlightenment in a very sort of Mormon revelation way of sort of clouds opening and light coming down and angels singing. In my head, that's what it was supposed to be. Uh, there's an old Zen, but there's an old Zen teaching, and you probably heard it, uh, that goes, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. What is implied in that teaching? Like, that teaching is teaching us what enlightenment is without telling us what enlightenment is. There's a Buddhist teacher named Jack Kornfield. He wrote a book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. He's modernizing that teaching. The ecstasy, ah, the laundry, right? I think I, I was, I was, I was born a Mormon. My parents were Mormons practicing, had been their whole lives. So had their parents many generations back. So I, I just, I was because I was born, uh, that way, right? And but Mormonism, just like Buddhism, just like, um, Islam, just like Judaism, are according— are like Reza Aslan, the author Reza Aslan talks about those just being languages trying to express the same thing. And I think when you try, when you step back, you can see how that's true to a degree, right? What happens is, and we've all seen it in organized religion, is that you start hanging on to things along the way, start getting attached to things being a certain way, and they're supposed to be a certain way, and they're better way than that other people do it. And that's, I think, where religions in some ways start to go wrong, because they're, they're missing the point. We're all supposed to be waking up. I mean, Christianity is about waking up in a— it's just that most people don't see it that way anymore. But Jesus taught us, he was trying to teach us to wake up. Um, okay, let's see. I've kind of been jumping around here. Um, I used to think that if after enlightenment you were like perfect, like you, it was like, have you seen The Matrix, the movie The Matrix? Has anybody seen that movie? There's, if you haven't, really hard to explain, but they're able, in The Matrix, they're able to upload information into your brain. So they like stick a little thing in the back portal that someone has put back there and you can literally like a computer program load information. So the famous moment in the movie is where Neo, the main character, is laying down in the chair and he's having something uploaded into his brain. And all of a sudden he opens his eyes like, "I know kung fu." And he has new kung fu. And I kind of thought maybe enlightenment was like that, but there isn't anything in the canon about enlightenment being like that. And again, we go back to the Buddha. The Buddha, did he, was he perfect? I don't think he was perfect. Did he experience pain? I think he did. I think he learned through his enlightenment how to have, how to be in pain but not suffer. That's, I think, part of what we learn in Buddhism. So my sort of, the way that I sort of see enlightenment is this. I see enlightenment as a moment that then allows you day to day to day to see things in the way they need to be seen, so that then you can align yourself around the principles and the values, and then the suffering starts to go down. That's my own way of sort of articulating that. Not very, uh, it's not perfect, but we'll get there. Um, so I see enlightenment as sort of a flip of a switch. As sort of like a moment. And only you can know if you've had this moment, but a moment where you realize you've woken up. And now, you know, the Buddha taught that our aim here is to see things as they are. And I think you can really only start seeing things as they are when you've woken up. I mean, you can practice and you can get, you can have moments like that. But then when you wake up, now it's, now the work is about seeing things clearly and helping other people see things clearly. Maybe, so I just mentioned the Buddha, he taught that like it's possible. I think he's taught us, I don't know that he said this, but I think he's taught us that it's possible to feel pain but not suffer from the pain. Viktor Frankl, if you've heard of Viktor Frankl, he wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning. He was in a— he was a Jewish man in a concentration camp. And one of the things that he observed was he was a psychologist. So he observed really interesting things while he was in that experience. And he observed that there were people— everyone is having the same experience, but not everyone is suffering. At the same level. And that, that for me, I'm like, okay, that's, that's Buddhism. That like, because do I feel pain? Yes, I have a, I, I, I hurt my back a couple of months ago. It's still not quite there. Every once in a while I turned it like kind of tweaks, but like, does it bother me? Not really. I know it's there. But I've kind of just decided that, oh, I just have a backache. And sometimes just deciding that you're in pain helps you not be in as much pain. But to close, the other thing I've been thinking about is what's on the other side of suffering. Like, this is something I actually don't think we talk enough about. We talk about suffering or the uncomfortableness of life or the unsatisfactory things of life and what causes those things. And but that we know through the Buddhist teachings that there is a way to sort of reduce the suffering for ourselves and for other people. But what's on the other side of that? What does the other side of suffering feel like?

Have you thought about this?

Think about it for a second. Like, if I'm able to like get to this point where like suffering isn't as big a deal, where I'm feeling pretty satisfied, like what— like, that's the point. We don't really talk a lot about what that point is, but what is that? And I think that's peace. I think the other side of suffering is peace. In your heart, in your mind, in your body. I think you can feel peace and still be in some sort of pain. I think you can feel peace and be sad at the same time. Peace is on the other side of suffering. And peace— one of my new mantras that I, that I say to myself all the time is, peace feels good. Imagine just for a second a time when you felt very peaceful. I think you've all experienced a feeling of peace, whether it was, um, on a walk in nature, or maybe it's while you're holding a newborn baby, or who knows. Think about a time when you felt peaceful. How good did that feel? Almost— there's nothing that feels better than feeling peaceful. Peace feels good, and peace is on the other side of suffering.

Thank you so much. So we will finish, um, bowing to each other. So in a minute, Nanji will ring the bell, and we'll stand up and bow to each other. And I haven't forgotten— no, I've changed the plan. A practice of flexibility. But thank you for that face that Thought I might have forgotten. So when Angie rings the bell, we'll stand up. Then, uh, when Angie rings the bell again, we will bow to each other, one side and then the other. So Bobby and Angie will bow to each other. You just stay there. Yeah. Um, and then everyone else work that between themselves, and then turn and bow the opposite way. Perfect. Namitabhu. And then we have two bows to bow to the Buddha. And then we tidy our seat to be grateful to our seat, and then bow to our seat. And we finish with the closing verse, which is on the little bit of paper. Let's starts blessed. So if you want to join me— sorry, there's one just—

blessed.

Namomi tabu. So announcements, um, our next retreat day is the 4th of November. And we're hoping that we might have a talk by Naga Priya. Thank you. Fifth Saturday, is it the fifth? We're hoping to have a talk by Naga Priya, who's written a really beautiful book about Shinran. So fingers crossed he'll be here for that. And Angie will be offering a kirtan as part of the retreat day, which will be very lovely. And some— you're going to put some more dates in as well, aren't you, for Sundays at some point? Yes, absolutely. So keep an eye on the website. Um, there's a golden bowl in the hallway. If you're able to make a donation, that would be great. And anything else? Cuspalita tea? Yes. Uh, so if you'd like to join for a cup of tea, please do. Bobby has never had a cup of tea in his life.

Mormons don't drink coffee and tea. Wow.

That's one of our things. So I've had coffee.

Yeah.

But I haven't really ever had a proper cup of British tea.

So whoever's making the tea will be offering Bobby his first ever— the shock on Bill's face!

Do we have Earl Grey?

We do have Earl Grey.

I would like Earl Grey because that's how the current drinks on Star Trek are.

Somebody will sort you out with an Earl Grey. So thank you all for coming and yeah. Say goodbye to Claire.