Talk: Other Power

This is sort of a talk in two halves, really, and maybe they'll tie together at the end, but if they don't, then you just get two for the price of one. Approaching this talk earlier in the week— well, let me go back even further. When we first decided what the theme was, I had a very clear idea of what I might say during this slot, but I didn't write it down, so it slowly sort of drained out of my brain as time went on. And then as we got closer to today, I noticed I was feeling a bit nervous. I couldn't really bring to mind anything that I wanted to speak about, or, or rather that I thought would be good to speak about. Um, I was feeling quite de-skilled, and I tried to sort of trace back, aware of these feelings, come from? Why am I suddenly feeling like I don't know anything about Buddhism, like I don't know how to sit in front of a group of people and speak? And earlier this week we had a first-timers practice, and in my mind, as I was running through the different elements of the practice and the different things that I might say about them, I remembered something that I have said many times about making offerings to the shrine, which is the idea that the shrine in the temple comes from the old tradition of setting an extra place at the table for people that died as a way of remembering them and bringing their spirit into the room. And then slowly that got formalized into kind of an ancestor shrine in the building. And then suddenly you've got the idea of shrines and bringing people's spirit into your life, which kind of makes sense. But I realized I suddenly doubted it. So I'll go Googling and looking at things and seeing if I can find like any connection between shrines and extra places at tables, and nothing at all appears. And there's a lot of things that— it's hard to believe this if you grew up with the internet, but there's a lot of things that aren't on the internet. So it doesn't mean that it's not true, just that I couldn't easily find it. And Google is much worse than it used to be, so it doesn't even mean that it's not on the internet. But that being said, I suddenly really doubted this fact. And I— it came from my old teacher, who I already have doubt in some of the things that I was taught. And I just felt really destabilized, like, oh, he didn't tell me a source for this fact. I can't check it. Maybe it's not trustworthy. What else have I been saying that isn't— that might not be true? And it was quite destabilizing. So to try and prepare for the talk, I started doing a lot of research. I was a bit unsettled, so I wasn't taking a lot in, but I was reading different Dharma books, trying to sort of find the nugget of wisdom that I could share with you. I looked on JSTOR, is that what it's called? The journal catalogue where you, since the pandemic now, you can get 100 free views of papers a month, which you know, if you write to the academics they will send you their paper without having to pay for it, and you know the journals in JSTOR make a lot of money and academics don't make any money, but that's a That's a different story. Anyway, I'd got hundreds of tabs open. It felt like if I printed them all out and put it down, it were like, funk, here's all the research I was doing. And, and I slowly, I did start to feel like I knew things. I was like, oh yeah, this is familiar, this makes sense, you know, joining up with things that I'd already been told and started to feel more settled. But I realized as a result of that process that I'd been taking refuge in knowing things, in knowing things about Buddhism, particularly knowing theory, doctrine, history. And also taking refuge in, and perhaps more taking refuge in, other people seeing me as somebody who knows things about theory and doctrine and practice, and taking refuge in the sort of person, being the sort of person who can sit here and give a particular kind of Dharma talk. And it is good to know things about theory and doctrine and practice. You know, Shinran was a great one for reading and collecting and creating collections of texts, but it shouldn't be what we take refuge in. There's a difference between knowing things and entrusting, shinjin, confidence. And it's not that we are entrusting ourselves to the things that we know, we're entrusting ourselves to the Buddha, which is to say the whole of life unfolding in the present moment. And when I think of that, I'm reminded of two phrases that Kūyō Kobosei used to say. One is "keep going," and I think something about my own shinjin has got that quality to it. Like, oh, I don't always feel like I know what I'm doing. I don't always feel like I'm in touch with the Buddha, but I do trust that there is something unfolding, and if I keep moving with it, actually, things tend to work out. I learn things. I land in places where I feel very connected. And the other thing was this phrase, becoming a better student, which is kind of ironic because I'm, I'm talking about, uh, holding knowledge lightly. But I think being a better student does involve holding knowledge lightly, and it involves not just being a student of how was Shinran the same as Tanran, and how was— why did Tan— how did Tanran bring together the Vasubandhu's ideas and Nagarjuna's that were quite different to each other? And it'd also be it what Shinran really practiced, as well as collecting all those texts, but what he practiced was being— paying attention to his own life and to the Buddha at work in his own life. And to me, that is also what being a better student is, paying attention to those things. So some of these things are starting to slot into place, and then I had a dream that I was decorating a house. And I woke up from the dream, like, oh, like the house is— and it was so clear, like whatever time it was, 3 in the morning— the house is like the actual Dharma that is solid and real. And I didn't build it, like I didn't make the house. And the paint almost is like, that's the Dharma that I've actually been taught, which is facts and figures and other people's biases and things they got right and things they got wrong. And it was— the house was decorated in one way, and now I'm redecorating it with a different colour paint, but the solid house is the same underneath. And that seemed particularly important. So self-power, I guess, is the painting, and other power is the, uh, the builders who were all Buddhas that made the house. So that's the first half, and this is the second half, which I think is some of what I wanted to say weeks ago when we set the theme, but I don't really know. I was just thinking about how the meaning of other power has changed through Buddhist history, and some of those early Pure Land sutras, like the Large Pure Land Sutra that Jaume has been chanting, have such a clear and vivid description of Amida Buddha and the Pure Land. Here is a Buddha that is enormously tall, the color of kind of red gold, glowing with light, surrounded by jeweled trees and bathing pools that are made of jewels filled with lotuses of different colors. There's invisible instruments that play music. And at the time the Large Pure Land Sutra was written, there was this sense of many different pure lands, each with their own vivid description. There's Medicine Buddha in their Pure Land. There's Kuan Yin in her Pure Land on the ocean. There's, you know, hundreds of different Buddhas and bodhisattvas in different places. At the start of the Large Pure Land Sutra, Ananda says to Shakyamuni Buddha, oh, you're really glowing today. Are you communing with all the Buddhas? And Shakyamuni says yes, and particularly with Amida Buddha. But there's this sense that the whole universe is full of enlightened beings. And in the Contemplation Sutra, which is the story where Queen Vaidehi ends up in prisons due to this kind of family drama, stroke political drama at the time. The Buddha goes and visits Queen Vaidehi, and she's really suffering. You know, she's— it's her son who's put her in prison. He's also— her husband's being killed, like all sorts of things are going on. And the Buddha's sympathetic because it's one of his cousins who's engineered this whole overthrowing of the royal family. And when she meets the Buddha, she sees that he's glowing with enlightenment, and she has a spontaneous vision of all the pure lands, and she chooses Amida's pure land to be reborn in after she died. And Ananda said, "I wish I could see all the pure lands spontaneously like that." And the Buddha describes a meditation, which we have done here one evening a few weeks ago. Imagine the ground is made of lapis lazuli. Imagine the sun, setting sun, like a tight skin of a drum in the sky. Imagine a golden net on the ground, and where the net crisscrosses, trees are picked, jeweled trees, and so on and so forth. And you build up this image of the Pure Land, which to me has the same feel as what kind of neo-shamans would call a journey to the upper world, where you go to Buddhafield and lie down in a tent and somebody plays a drum or puts on a CD of drumming and gives you a visualization that takes you into heaven. And both in those kind of very modern, westernized shamanic practices and in this very ancient Buddhist practice, there's a sense of leaving this place and going into the Pure Land, either in your kind of mind, whether it's like whether you're bringing a real place to mind or whether it's an imagined place, but you're leaving the present moment and and going into the Pure Land. And there you have an encounter with the Buddha, with all these beautiful jewels that deepens your faith, that transforms you somehow, that makes you feel more at ease, and you come back into your ordinary life. And when Honen was talking about the Pure Land, that's what he was talking about. There is somewhere that you go after death and that you can contact in this lifetime that has that kind of effect on you. And it said that throughout his life he had visions of this place, and when he died, in those last hours of his life, he was seeing bodhisattvas around him. He was seeing the Pure Land. And then Shinran comes along, and certainly modern Pure Land Buddhist priests and academics understand Shinran as somebody who says the Pure Land is the same as enlightenment, is the same as nirvana. And that's a shift, because enlightenment— some people would say enlightenment is somewhere that you go to and then come back from, right? But I'm going to say it isn't that. Enlightenment isn't another place that you go to and then come back. It isn't like going, having a conversation with somebody, and then coming back. It's something that happens in the midst of this life, in this world, in this realm. And what you wake up to is not just maybe the existence of pure lands and Buddhas, but you wake up to the whole universe, and you wake up to your own life in the midst of the whole universe, and you develop a compassionate response to the conditions of your own life. So there's this shift, subtle shift, from other power being, being something that is like an actual Buddha alongside you that supports you and brings you to enlightenment to other power being enlightenment itself, or the whole universe being seen through enlightened eyes. And the advantage of Shinran's teaching is that it teaches you that through the Nembutsu, or really that through entrusting, it's possible to have a kind of enlightenment experience in this lifetime. That Shinjin is a kind of enlightenment experience. Not that you get fully enlightened, but that you, you can accumulate more and a deeper and deeper experience of that. Through continued experiences of Shinjin, through continually deepening your faith. It is possible to become more loving and more kind whilst remaining foolish, but it's something that happens now in this moment rather than I'm going to take you there in a long time.. And that feels really important and vital to me. But I worried that the more and more my practice was like that, I worried, oh, but it feels like there's a loss because this kind of more quasi-shamanic experience of the Buddha being someone that I can go to and the Pure Land being a place that I can go to and come back from. And be fed by is really important. And actually, I don't want to lose that earlier understanding of what— of how the movement of the Nembutsu either. And yet, in some ways, ultimately they're both the same, or they're both— or the one can become a window onto the other. You know, I think, was it William Blake who talked about seeing the whole universe in the grain of sand? Or you could say that the Buddha is the grain of sand, and we see the world, uh, with enlightened eyes when we look at the world through the Buddha or with the Buddha alongside us. Like the Buddha is a window into seeing the whole universe, into seeing the whole of nirvana. And I guess that's what the earlier sense of nenbutsu was. Put your attention on the Buddha and ultimately it becomes a whole window into nirvana. And then Shinran was saying, well, the Buddha and nirvana, like, don't worry about them being different. Just really Just trust that nirvana is here. And I'm not saying one is better than the other, but just really wanting to bring to mind this sense of how the, the meaning of other power has changed through time, whether it's to do with, oh, this specific Buddha which has a limited body and is limited in space and time, like the Buddha that sits on the shrine. I can't see that Buddha that sits on the shrine if I'm not in this room, apart from imagining it. And Nembutsu brings that specific thing to mind, or Nembutsu is it allows me to open my heart to the whole universe, which isn't just that Buddha, which is everything. So you could say that for Shinran, the Nembutsu becomes the Buddha. Mahonon Nembutsu points him to the Buddha, and the Buddha is the window to enlightenment. For Shinran, Nembutsu is the Buddha that is the window. To enlightenment. And it doesn't really matter, but they do have different feels to them. And I think there's something about just in your own practice noticing like how you make sense of it, what works for you in this moment, how you make sense of all this mythological language, but also, but ultimately perhaps trusting or knowing that all of what I've just said is different ways of painting the building, that the house is underneath that. And whether you think it's this specific doctrine or that specific meaning, like, that's useful and it take— and supportive, but there is something beyond that. Which is the real meaning of other power. And even when I say that, you know, look at the universe with enlightened eyes, like, I can't actually tell you what that is like. You just have, you just have to have an experience of it. And you can't have that experience completely unless you're a Buddha. But we can trust that it is there, even if we're only half seeing it. I was going to say like looking through a glass darkly or something, which is— which is like, I feel like is a quote from the Bible and probably means something in particular, so I won't say that because maybe there's some association. I don't know that. So maybe that's left you more confused about what Nembutsu is. But in a way, that's kind of the point, right? That it has meant different things to different people throughout history. Very different things. There were, you know, people who really believed that the Buddha exists like in the Pure Land. Someone said to me, almost like it's just like another planet. Over there somewhere. And there's people who believe that it's just a way of speaking about the experience of enlightenment. And there's a value in both of them, and neither of them can be completely true because they all come from human brains. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. So we've got some time. I'm wondering if it's most helpful to have some space, or if it's helpful to have a bit of time just to check in with the per— with the person next to you and sort of see what's around. Yeah.