Regaining Innocence by Dharmavidya David Brazier

You know, in my first talk I talked about this notion of different stages of the Dharma, and how in a certain way practices become more difficult. Because of the increasing complexity of society, the circumstances that we live in. We don't have the kind of immediate simplicity that the Buddha lived in the midst of. It's much more difficult to just go off into the forest on your own, as he often did, The climate's a lot worse. Living in India, you could do that sort of thing. You might be in danger of being bitten by a snake or something, but in a way that too was kind of very immediate and direct. Just as to some extent my life in France is like that. You are very much directly in contact with the realities. If you want to be warm, you go out in the forest, you gather the wood, you take it back, you saw it up, you burn it, you're warm. So you're connected, whereas here you just throw a switch and somewhere a long, long way away, a lot of other people are generating power that somehow comes down little threads to— but you don't see it. You're not connected. You don't have to dig the coal or the oil or the— make the solar panels or whatever it is that generates that electricity. So there's an increasing distance between us and the reality of what we're doing. And Caspar spoke somewhat about this in an earlier talk. And it makes our life sort of artificial. So that the challenge for us, as I suggested in the earlier talk, is somehow to get back to, or get closer to, a sort of innocence. We need an innocence of perception, an innocence of action that has been educated out of us. Socialization has kind of put us through a kind of washing machine that's taken it all out of us. And after I gave the talk, I had somebody explaining what had happened in the talk. And the person they were explaining to immediately said, 'Well, how do you do that?' How do you get back to innocence? Which, of course, is a quite logical and understandable question. Yet in a certain way, it illustrates the nature of the problem, because there's no 'how to' in being innocent. 'How to' is about how to contrive something, and so it isn't innocent. 'How to' is adding extra stages to this distancing from the reality, whereas an innocent life is immediate, spontaneous, connected directly to whatever it is. And we, we do have certain tools to help us with this. One of the obvious tools is the precepts, because the precepts are a description of an innocent life. We can take them as something that complicates our life if we want to. We can make them into a burden. We can make them into a heavy weight. But actually, if you just take them as they are, they're a description of an innocent life. They basically say, don't complicate things unnecessarily. You know, there's so many situations in life where we quite voluntarily and deliberately take on complications that we don't actually need to do. Or we impose them on others, one way or another. And this— taking on of complications or imposing complications is very closely connected to another theme that people have been talking about this week, which is about control. So Starla this morning rather dramatically used this slogan, 'Take back control,' which we've all heard far too many times in the last few months. It's a— taking back control is asking for trouble. Because it's setting up expectations that you can be sure are not going to be met. In the political sphere, take back control, we'll take back control of our borders, we'll control immigration, Will we? I don't think so. We'll have just as many immigrants in the future as we had in the past. They might be different ones, but we'll— because the economy needs them and will suck them in, whatever rules we make. We've had all sorts of rules to limit immigration before this slogan was ever invented. We still had immigrants come in, many of them illegal. So you're kind of setting up controls of that kind. You're sort of setting up, setting yourself up for failure. And then when the failure comes along, and things don't work out the way you expected— how often do things work out the way you've expected? They always work out somewhat differently from what you've planned. What happens? You get angry, you get dismayed, you get miserable, you get depressed, you get a whole range of emotions that were completely unnecessary because you didn't need to do that to yourself in the first place. You didn't need to set it up that way so that you would just smash into the wall that you yourself had built.— like that. The precepts are largely like that. They're about, "Don't do that. Don't do that to yourself. It's not necessary." You know, the unnecessary complication of life takes us away from our simple innocence, the innocence of a child. So the precepts are one very useful tool that we have. And studying them from time to time, very inspiring. You go through, we have these opportunities when new people are coming into the sangha. They're going to study the precepts, so somebody from the Sangha has to study the precepts with them. Perhaps we should have a sort of convention that they're not just transmitted by one person, but transmitted by two or three, so more people get the opportunity to go through all these precepts yet again. Because they are so inspiring when you read them. You feel humbled because you know that you don't keep all of them. But still they describe something, an ideal, something that we know deep down is that kind of innocence. That's the core, really. It's that— where is it? At the end of Summary of Faith and Practice, there's something that— there's a line that says something like 'simple-minded way.' In this simple-minded way. And Pure Land Buddhism is just a simple-minded way. You can have much more complicated versions of Buddhism, much more elaborate, metaphysical, whatever. But the essence of Pure Land is just simple-minded way. Like I heard, I've heard Cosima talking about Father Christmas this morning, and her child's simple-minded approach, which defeated all adult logic completely. Believing in Father Christmas was much more credible than that all these adults could be running this enormous scam on children. Much more credible. Yes. So one tool we have is the precepts, and studying them, reflecting on them, and so on. Not making them a burden, but just a kind of awesome wonder at what they describe. Take Masaru as a picture. And then another thing that we have is the Nembutsu. You'll be surprised to hear me say that. Where did he get that idea from? He must have been up all night working on it. Ding, ding. You know, because the Nembutsu simplifies thought. You can sit Like this morning, we had a long period of silence in the meditation. What goes on? You can say the Nembutsu. Perhaps you say— perhaps you coordinate it with your breathing. 4 or 8 or 12 Nembutsu with each in-breath and each out-breath and so on. Simplifies. There we are. That's it. And in no time you're in a kind of samadhi. Just like that. Otherwise your mind's off doing this, doing that, doing the other, planning, calculating, da da da da. So these are two important tools that we've got. I think two's enough. I'll keep things simple. We'll stay with two. I'm sure there's any number of others in the whole Buddhist Pano-Greek. But the precepts and the Nembutsu, this is the Buddhist life. The Nembutsu are the kind of substance of it, and the precepts are the description of it. Outside view and the inside view. Precepts are kind of outside view. Then it looks seriously— insight experience like that. Another way we can think about this subject of innocence is innocence is the opposite of guilty. If you're not innocent, you're guilty. So how much of our life revolves around this notion of guilt? Guilt, blame, which of course comes from judgment. We make— don't make judgment kind of centerpiece of your life. Self-judgment, judgment of others, ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. This is kind of stuff of Everything from kind of trivial gossip up to international warfare and kind of everything in between contaminated with this awful brush of guilty paint. It's all their fault. 'we must go out and rectify this situation, destroy them.' This is the ground of warfare. And we might be involved in those big wars, or we might be involved in little wars in our own families, or with our nearest and dearest. Often we're most judgmental of the people that we actually love most, depend on most, and so on. This is chum, chum, chum, chum, chum. All unnecessary. All unnecessary. Because it's really a, just a kind of internal version of what I was saying earlier about establishing control and thereby setting ourselves up for for failure. Because the other person's another person, the other country's another country. They have their reasons for doing what they do. And going out to impose the American way of life, or the Chinese way of life, or the British imperial way of life, or whatever it is, you know, in whatever historical period, on people who have a completely different history, a completely different character, completely different reasons for being what they are. That's just asking for trouble. And the same is true on a small scale in our own communities, in our own community here, in our families back there. Same thing. We try to impose a control which takes us away from our innocence, takes us away from simple, the simple fundamentals. Usually, most simple fundamental is that this person that we're castigating is probably somebody we love, actually. Most simple thing is love. Most simple thing is love. Because we say Buddhism is flowers in the sky. It's very nice. It comes from the— there's all sorts of history to it, but there's an essay by Dogen called Flowers in the Sky. I can't remember the Japanese for it. Which works better in Japanese, because in Japanese, sky is the same word as emptiness. Chūnyata. 'Ku' in Japanese. And so, flowers— we do use this somewhat in our own language— something flowers as— flower as a result. Flowering is the result. So, flowers in the sky means Things that result unconditionally, they come out of emptiness. They don't come out of somethingness. They come out of emptiness.

Yeah?

Gratuitous. Done for no reason. This is love. Love is like that. Love is for no reason. If we say, 'Well, she loves him for his money,' we know it's not really love. It's for a reason. It's not really love. Love is completely gratuitous. It's a flower in the sky. And so Buddhism in that sense is in this sort of flowery flowery. Chinese metaphorical language and so on. Buddhism is just flowers falling from the sky. In every situation, there's flowers falling from the sky. This is one of the descriptions of the Pure Land. What happens in the Pure Land? Flowers fall from the sky, and then the ground is strewn with miraculous petals. And what do beings in the Pure Land do? They spend their time collecting these petals, putting them into baskets, and trundling off to see various different Buddhas in other Pure Lands. And they go off to another Buddha in another Pure Land, and they make offerings of what they've got in their basket. They offer it up. So if you can think of life like this, that these petals are falling upon us all the time. Everything that happens is potentially a petal. In fact, actually, a nice practice, you know, we digress a little, come back to the story. When we do our walking meditation, In Japan, very often when they do the walking meditation, you get paper and you cut it out in the shape of a leaf. So these are Bodhi leaves. Bodhi leaves. Sometimes they're very ornately colored and everything. And as you do your walking meditation, every 2 or 3 steps you check off a leaf.

Like this.

So eventually the floors will be covered with leaves. This is like the Pure Land, you see, petals falling. It's a very nice sense of— I've been in Cheon In, 200 monks doing walking meditation, all chucking leaves, going round in the most elaborate labyrinthine walk, shedding leaves like Shittigaba, or like Mahasamaprapta, creating pure lands wherever they go, shedding these leaves. And with reckless abandon, as it were, like that. And you've seen also the Yes, here we are, Pai Nien with her good, full of kindness. It's upside down. She's not trying to retain anything. It just goes, you see. Because worldly things, you have to keep your good the right way up and probably a stopper in it as well so you don't lose anything. But spiritual things, you can just have it upside down and the gourd will stay full. It will always be full. However much love you give, that doesn't mean there's less. Quite the opposite, actually.

More and more.

Just comes from nowhere. So flowers in the sky can rain down interminably like this. Yeah, so you take your basket of petals, or flowers. And you make offering of them to other Buddhas, other Buddhas, not just our Buddha, but whatever Buddhas there may be. It's a wonderful thing about the Pure Land Sutra, that it has this kind of manifesto for inter-religious generosity. The duty of a pure land Buddhist is not just to guard their own, our Buddha, but to go and make offerings to other Buddhas in whatever ways will be useful and pleasing to those other Buddhas. So you can go and sing in a church or do whatever they do in a mosque or whatever, so long as it's not something awful like cutting the throats of goats or whatever, you can join in. And you're still doing Nembutsu, you see, like that. So yeah, so they go out, they make their offerings to other Buddhas in other realms. And then, by the magic, the Father Christmas magic of the Pure Land, they still get back for lunch. It says so in the sutra. They get back in time for lunch. And everybody rejoices.

Like that.

And this is— this all speaks of innocence. These kind of images. Mahayana— we ruin our appreciation of Mahayana Buddhism by trying to take it all too seriously and then taking it academically, and when did that happen, and what's the date for this, and is there corroborating evidence. And, well, I don't know. These things grew like mushrooms, you know. They fell like flowers from the sky. The exuberance and multidimensionality and extravagance of the Mahayana sutras, like Avatamsaka and so on. This is stuff of dreams. When we're in our dreams, we have another kind of innocence, really. Because many of the restrictions have been taken away. Not all of them, we still carry some in our dreams. And often in our dreams we run up against them, and that's why we have these struggles in our dreams sometimes, but less, less. We have a kind of freedom in our dreams. And, you know, we say, 'Amida Buddha is Sambhogakaya Buddha.' This is the realm of dreams and visions and all this kind of thing. So, allowing ourselves to dream This is very important. One of the ways of returning to innocence is dream. Live your dream. Allow yourself to dream. If you don't have a dream, how are you going to have a dream come true? Dreams coming true all the time. Dreams are there. The flowers of our dreams are falling around us endlessly, copiously, ceaselessly.

Like that.

So, this is not a kind of how-to in a do-it-by-numbers sense. But it gives something of a flavour. Entering into the flavour of the teaching. It's as— just as the great ocean, wherever you go, go to a beach in California, or Cornwall, or Vladivostok— is that on the sea? It still has the taste of salt. It has the same taste. And the Buddha says like that, the Dhamma may appear in any number of shapes and forms, and it flows into different— just like the sea flows into different bays and different depressions and different estuaries, and takes on a different shape, but it always has the taste of salt. The Dharma is the same. You might be a Zen Buddhist or Tibetan Buddhist or Pure Land Buddhist, but wherever you go in the Buddhist world, it still has the same taste. I've been all over the Buddhist world and there is always something recognizable there. Actually, in the East they tend to be a lot less concerned about, sort of, well, what sort of Buddhist are you? 'What shape Buddhism do you have?' They just say, 'Come in,' and they start ringing bells and chanting and stuff. They assume you're going to join in. And they might afterwards say, 'Well, what do you do? Show us.' Like that. Because, of course, it's different for every person. Each person is different. We can't expect other people to be the same as ourselves. It's a wonder that we've got, I don't know what we've got here, a dozen or so people in a room with something that holds us together. Because actually, I look around this room, very different bunch of, you know, each person is completely different. And that's how we are. There's no two things the same. Fingerprints are not the same, your eyes are not the same. Nothing's the same from one person to another. But you can see that as a disaster. You know, how can we possibly have harmony and peace and love and joy and so on if we're all different? Thank goodness we're different. You see? This is the richness. This is the— every flower that falls from the sky is a different color, a different radiance, a different scent. Wonderful, wonderful, like that. So innocence is also enjoying that abundance. The abundance of life, the abundance of experience. Some experience is tough, some experience is happy. Sometimes the happiest experiences are often in the midst of the toughest bits. If you don't have the tough bits, you don't appreciate the exquisite bits. If you're saturated in luxury all the time, it ceases to mean anything. It just becomes dull, like that. And then the innocence is even more lost, actually. People who are up against it often are closer to the Spirit than people who have it easy. As Aṁma Nisargadatta Mahāprabhu once said, it really stuck with me and I've quoted it many times in talks, So the reason we're not enlightened is because we have it too easy. You know, we live in this cocoon. I was reading very recently, well, this morning, before we came in, Doris Lessing writing about Tolstoy. The times he lived in, and particularly what life must have been like for his wife, who was always pregnant, and 4 of those children died, 3 of them in one year. And they had no running water. Water had to be brought into the house in buckets, and then heated.

Yeah?

There was no hot water on the tap. There was no privacy. There were like 20 or 30 people living in the building. Of course there were the parents, all these children, servants, nurses, tutors, 3 dozen people in the building. The walls are not that thick. No privacy at all. Yeah. And many of the things that we take for granted just didn't exist. I mean, some of the things we take for granted, like plastic bottles with shampoo in, you know, maybe a mixed blessing. But no, it must have been really tough. Sickness, sicknesses that we would regard as a minor inconvenience could so easily turn into something mortally dangerous. We are in an remarkable age. Yesterday I was reading a Japanese book, and one of the little sort of book of aphorisms, wise sayings, and one of the wise sayings is nobody should live beyond 40, because 40 was regarded as the beginning of old age, and old age was miserable. Old age was terrible because you were then dependent. Of course, some of them— Dogen lived to be 53, and some of the other characters— Shinran lived to be about 90-something. Honen lived to just about 80, I think. So some of these characters did live longer, but the norm was you lived to be, yeah, about 53. That was a pretty normal time to die. And from 40 onwards you were old. Of course we don't look at things that way at all now. We take a huge amount for granted. And some of this taking for granted is also a loss of innocence. Because it means we don't appreciate the flowers falling. We don't appreciate the riches that we— even relatively poor people in our society live in the midst of riches compared with that time. You know, Tolstoy was an aristocrat. He had the best. And he had these circumstances. So what it was like for peasants— tough, tough. And yet there would even in that society have been great joy and much faith. And in some ways it would have been easier to practice in that circumstance than it is for us. We are kind of cosseted. We have a certain a map, cotton wool wrappings. Distances us, where I started, distances us from the reality of the life we live in. And sometimes you cut through it, and like here you cut through it. Every morning you come up, I come up at 7 o'clock in the morning or 6 o'clock in the morning, I look out that window, and there's reality. Incredible! I mean, what riches like that? You know, we're busy making robes, but you can't make a robe like that one. Can't be done. That sort of gossamer thread of heaven that we're all clothed in day in, day out, every morning, a new, very ultimate miracle, you see. And so in medieval times, the sense would have been that when you die, you're going to go to that miracle. That's where you go, going into that miracle. And if you appreciate it, then of course the miracle comes to you. Now, here, in this life. So, innocence is appreciating the miracle of being alive, being with people one can love, in all its diversity. Namamita. We've got a little bit of time. I could take a few questions if there are any.

Thank you.

And then that would still leave us with a quarter of an hour.

I'll do the announcement, but that gets a bit long.

We're all right. We're okay. Yeah, okay, well, yeah, you don't have to ask about my talk, you can ask about anything. Anything? Anything. I'm not very good on recipes.

We have Google for that. Google.

How many minutes?

Pies, did we eat last night?

I thought it was rather wonderful yesterday, we did the Mondo, and the first question somebody said, what did you mean in that piece that you wrote about blah blah? And I had no idea what he was talking about. Such a great book. This is another pathway to innocence, of course. This is when you're stumped, when you're defeated, you know, you don't know, you realize your ignorance, the ignorance of a child.

So I do have a question I'd like to ask you, and it's in two parts. It's relatively simple.

Two-part question? Wow.

When I first came here, when I first Yeah. Excuse me, started getting involved with Buddhism and reading about it and visiting temples around the world. One of the things that you spoke today was about the simplicity.

Yeah.

I mean, I think my first proper experience of it was in Thailand, and there it really was, as far as I could see, apart from the language, taken down to real basic terms. But I've always found that in England, using Sanskrit which actually complicates it, particularly for somebody who's just arrived and, you know, they just walk through the door and all those words and names, it sounds like, 'What's that mean? What's this mean? What's that mean?' And somehow that detracted not only from Buddhism for me, but actually from your speech today. I was trying to find out, 'What does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean?' Would you agree, or how do you feel about what I've just said?

Sāsu, it's back, isn't it? I mean, there's pros and cons. One of the reasons that we include the Pāli passages in the morning service is so that people here know them. Because if you go to somewhere else in the Buddhist world, you may well be required to produce them. If you go to India, If you go to India, or anybody in the world goes to India, they will be expected to be able to give the refuges and precepts. And they'll be expected to give them in the Pali language, you see, which is an international language for Buddhism. So in that sense it's freeing. It enables you to speak to people people. You have no other— you can't sell them anything else. You can't. Because you can't speak Hindi or Bengali or whatever it is that they speak, but you can say the precepts in Pāli. Same thing with the Nembutsu itself. When I was in Vietnam, I was wearing my Buddhist clothes, but they're not like the Buddhist clothes of the people in Vietnam. So they'd look at me and they could see I was something, but what? you'd say. So I'd say the Nembutsu, and immediately, "Ah! We know what you are!" You see, like that. And it's a happy greeting. It's international in that sense. So there's been a long debate in Buddhism over exactly this. This issue. The Buddha said, 'Do the teaching in local language.' Teaching should be given in local language. But there is a utility also in having some sort of a basic core of stuff that's in some sort of international lingua franca. So I think it's useful for people to learn at least those sort of basics. That doesn't mean they have to learn the Sanskrit language or be able to speak Pali or whatever, but a little stock is quite helpful. There's also another thing, which is that many of the key words— Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha, Karma— there's no English equivalent. There's no English simple word that you can translate them into. So whatever word you choose is going to distort the message. And one of the problems of Buddhist studies in the West is that you can read 3 translations of the same text into English and they're not the same because different translators have chosen different equivalents for key terms. Whereas if those terms are left in the original, once you're over that initial hump, which you're talking about, you know, I think it is a hump for the person who first comes in, but once you're over that, it's actually much easier if they just leave them in the original, because then I know what concept they're talking about, rather than this person's idea of what it means, or that person's idea of what it means, or the other person's idea of what it means. So in some ways, the fact that these key terms remain a little bit mysterious can be quite helpful, because then you can spend time reflecting on them, going into what does koan mean. You know, and there's no exact equivalent in English. But you go on thinking about it, you go on thinking about it. What does dharma mean? What does dukkha mean? And so that's the second reason for keeping at least some of them, I think.

So the second part to the same question was really, how would this apply if If the Buddha had been born in Liverpool.

Well, then people in Bengal would be having to learn Scouts. Or at least a few words of it. A few phrases. But we still try and translate most of it into Bengali. Yeah, there's not a— if you go all the way in one direction or all the way in the other direction, there's problems. Akong Rinpoche used to insist that you couldn't study Buddhism unless you learned the Tibetan language first. I put that in the thing. Well, that's— to me, that's one extreme.

You see?

The other extreme is you translate it all and in the process you lose some of the nuance. And you impose, actually, a particular translator's preference upon everybody who reads it, when it would be better for them to study and make up their own mind.

Thank you.

Good question. Yeah, it's one of those perennials, you know. Is there all the way through Buddhist history. There's this dilemma: should we translate it all into Chinese? Should we translate it all into Japanese? And each stage, the transmission of the Dhamma, this question arises. I think you always hit on some compromise. Course, the real language is the lived life. It's the lived life that transmits the Dhamma. Concepts are secondary faculties. Useful to study, enable you to express and help sentient beings. But the core is to live life. Live an innocent life.

I'd like to offer you a flower. I haven't got one.

I like the idea of leaves. I'm really planning leaf cutting.

I could see Kemra was planning.

I was imagining, you know, the card. Is it called filigree? I was thinking, oh, we need some of those. Those lovely, like, skeleton leaves that you get.

Artists can make them.

Yeah, of course.

The simplest, you just cut a lozenge shape, like a leaf. But you make it more complicated if you want to, with the stems. And often they're done in this— in Japan, they're often in this It's a very pretty printed— they've been taken out of a large design, so each one's a little bit different because they come from a different bit. You know, if you cut up the thangka into lozenge shapes, each one would have a bit of beauty on it, you see, which would be different.

There is an opportunity— on a related note, we will be making a little shrine for the Earth just in front of the shrine. Before we do the chanting.

Yes.

And if people do want to go and fetch, uh, natural objects, natural objects, you're very welcome. Of course, a leaf or stone or—

well, anytime between now and midday tomorrow, anytime.

Yeah, there'll be space on the shrine. So if you want to make one, you can squeeze that in.

Do they ever use natural leaves? Is it always a made leaf?

Well, you know, they're made.

It's always made.

Because like in Dogen's text, he says, you know, the flowers fall from the sky, but then they have effect here. They're not the effect of something else, but they do have effect here. A life that shines with the Dharma, then it has a consequence. You're not involved with it particularly, but it does have consequence.

Unintentional.

Yes, that's right. Ripples out. Things are affected, people are touched. When they're expecting retaliation, it doesn't come, and so they have to think, 'Oh, what happened there?' Or whatever.

I have a question.

Yeah.

I'm trying to formulate it in my mind. Something in my work with people who've experienced a lot of trauma.

Yeah.

And this idea of innocence and, you know, encountering the world as it is with simplicity. And I'm thinking about, um, people who, who experience, I don't know, flashbacks, and, and, and where that is so overwhelming that they then somehow need to kind of take themselves away.

Yeah.

And I, and I hear sometimes my clients grapple with this idea of wanting to remain open-hearted because they know that their life has been— because of their experience, have been closing down, and they want to stop feeling and living, but whether it's kind of overwhelming and they can't cope, and as a way of coping they still need to go and distract themselves somewhere.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, I'm sort of in the area that you're talking about. Yes, yes, and of course I've had a lot of dealings with it myself. But you see, I think a lot of flashbacks and nightmares and all these sort of symptoms of post-trauma This is the mind's attempt to arrive at a point where it has confidence that were such a thing to happen again, it could cope. And the majority of people who have had some— been involved in some trauma, they do arrive at that. It happens quite naturally. And so they don't have post-traumatic effect long after. Maybe a few weeks after, but not long after, because they achieve, they arrive at this confidence. But if you— but some things are so horrible that it's much more difficult to arrive at a confidence. And of course, if your mode of believing you can cope is that you can control, then actually you're never going to arrive at this, because you can't control it. You can't stop the football stadium burning down or somebody who's bigger than you thumping you. It may still happen. So, in a sense, the more innocent the mind, the sooner the trauma, traumatic effect will go. Because the person will have a sense, "Oh, deal with the next thing, it's the next thing." Each thing comes as a new thing, not as a repetition of the old thing. And some things are painful, some things are pleasant. The innocent mind just rolls on from one to another. Whereas when we try and stay in control, we are bringing forward this past experience and in a sense imposing it on everything that happens after. So there are different styles of trying to get to that point of, 'If something happens again, I can control it,' or, 'I can cope,' you see. And the ultimate, of course, is death. You see, we're all going to die. We're all going to meet this, what could be considered the ultimate trauma. And are you okay with that? You see, like that. Spirituality is being okay to die. And some people are and some people are not. If you can arrive at that point where you're quite happy to go, then many other things just fall away naturally, because this is the ultimate, in a sense. But different people have different styles, and I think that does affect how long these these things go on for. But a certain amount you can't avoid because we're human, we're bound, the mind is bound to go over these things. It's like in your sleep, you'll go over it. But the mind is trying to get to that point where it's confident again, the same confidence that a child has. You can see that little children who are brought up in very bad circumstances, they lose their innocence very quickly, and they become over-controlled, and they're always on the watch out. You know, they have a sort of frozen awareness, we say. And this can be the— adults can get into this state too, if they've had some traumatic experience. But again, in principle, the secret is to return to innocence, but of course, easy to say. Namah Amitabha, the original and sacred vows. Harmony means consensual grace by which to enter the pure land.

Therefore, with body, speech, and mind, we are devoted to teachings that all merchants speak of grace.