Caspar and another Buddhist minister discuss ordination, vows, and spiritual commitment through Pure Land and Zen perspectives. They share how ritual and community help sustain practice, and describe leaving and reforming Bright Earth Buddhism to honor their vocations.
Chapters
Great, thank you. Welcome everybody. So I wanted to say a little bit more about ordination and commitment and rebirth and some of those themes and see what emerges. Can't help remembering my own ordination as well, back in 2006, I think. 2007, one of those years. Um, and a couple of things stand out to me from that time. One is the chanting retreat that I did a few weeks before my ordination, where I just lived in a basically a garden shed at the bottom of the garden for 5 days and recited the Nembutsu from waking until sleeping. So meals were brought to me and so on. I did walking meditation in the garden. Very powerful process, the kind of sort of lots of life stuff floating to the surface and getting processed, things I hadn't thought about before. And I went into that retreat pretty materialist, consciously. I, I had quite a spiritual youth, but I'd sort of swung into, I'm only going to believe things I can measure with a tape measure that I can touch. I was really holding on to that quite tightly, and about halfway through The retreat, the experience— I'll just describe it clearly. This didn't happen in real life, but the experience I had was like someone hitting me on the top of the head and my skull cracking open in a pleasant way. Um, and it felt like it was a sort of crack in that rational armor. And what it opened me was not like, oh, there's definitely there's more to this than meets the eye, but just the possibility of, oh, there's probably more to the world, to the universe, to the spiritual life, and all the— than just things that can be measured. And of course, the word I'd been chanting, Amitābha, means immeasurable light, the light that can't be measured. So that was a very powerful moment. And now when I reflect on it, what I notice is actually almost like there were two layers of consciousness, and underneath there's this spiritual awareness that gets covered up and locked in, and then it gets opened up again. But the some— the more fundamental thing didn't disappear, it was just shielded from me. In Zen, Buddhism, and I was sort of ordained in a synthesis of styles of Pure Land and Zen, but in Zen particularly, they emphasize that awakening is passed down from person to person. So the Buddha woke up 2,800 years ago. He did— he created the condi— he didn't just create the conditions for his disciples to wake up in. There was something that was actually passed on person to person, a moment of my enlightenment as the Buddha going to my enlightenment as the disciple. Famously, there's the story story of the Buddha holding up a flower and Maha Kashyapa going, oh, I get it. And in Zen Buddhism, this is really emphasized, and you have a private ceremony before the ordination where the preceptor, your teacher, gives you the list of all the people in the lineage, all the names. So they'll say, you know, I'm ordaining you, I was ordained by such and such, who that transmission was from such and such, that transmission was from such and such, an unbroken line line back to the Buddha, generation after generation after generation. Of course, when you actually examine those lists, what you find out is that some of those people weren't alive at the same time, so it's a little bit of a reconstruction. And yet there is something powerful about the story and meaningful about the story of transmission, even as we know there's a few gaps in the historical record and a little bit of fudging the account. In Shamanic Bones of Zen, Zenju Athan Manuel describes, I think, similarly, like something sort of hitting you on the head and it's like, and that it does come from person to person. And actually, for her, in that tradition, that's the only way you can get it, from another person. Pure Land Buddhism does things a little bit differently, a little bit like the Protestant Revolution in Christianity that did away with— you needed to get— if you wanted to pray in Catholicism, and I won't get this exactly right, you know, you get the priest to pray for you. That's the really powerful way. The priest stands between you and God. And part of the Protestant Revolution was saying, no, you can have a direct relationship with God yourself. You can read the Bible in your own language. You don't need to know Latin. Priests will speak to you in your own language. And similarly, in Pure Land Buddhism, the emphasis is on your relationship with Amida Buddha, who is not an historical Buddha but stands for the energy of enlightenment that is available in the present moment in the world. So when we sit in front of the shrine and become ordained, that's the relationship we're emphasizing, that enlightenment is sort of flooding in from all around us all the time. And the ritual demonstrates a kind of opening up to that. And that's why we included the earth as the fourth refuge, because as I said this morning, although we have a specific set of teachings that come from the Buddha— the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, karma, dependent origination— the truths point to reality as it is. The map is not the terrain. And so actually, by paying the right kind of attention to the world— Buddhism teaches that by paying the right kind of attention to the world, it's possible to get enlightened outside of any Buddhist community. Then you become— I think the word is pratyeka Buddha. They're pretty rare, but it does happen. And in this community still there's a bit of both, like clearly we're learning from each other and real people, and we're emphasizing that connection to the Buddha, to the world. How can my heart become open to these universal spiritual truths, to the presence of loving kindness and compassion that's in my own heart, that is fundamentally in the hearts of all beings, and as Dogen said, is in the mountains and grasses and streams. The other thing that stands out to me about when I was ordained was that in the days before, I had quite a lot of doubt. I remember pacing up and down the shrine room, putting my— leaning against the wall with my forehead like, ah, what's the right thing to do?. And I'd been pretty clear earlier in the year, but as the date approached, this doubt grew and grew and grew. But the doubt was not doubt about being committed to the Buddha or the Dharma. It wasn't doubt about opening my heart to those teachings or to spiritual reality or to the world even. It was doubt about vocation. Is this, is, is this the form that I want to put around that spirit? Is this the right community? Is this the place that I want to be? Um, I was ordaining as a celibate monk, not really an issue for me in my life at that time, to be honest. But the, um, the whole of the, the precepts around monkhood, living in community, that depth of practice, um, not earning a, a wage— is that what I wanted to commit to? And I hear again the difference between kind of fundamental spiritual reality that we can commit to being in relationship with, and the way that we live our lives, the choices that we make in our actual lives, which are related but not the same. The more committed we are to Amida Buddha, let's say, the more our lives will naturally follow the precepts, but there will still be choices that we can make. The difference between the Dharma and Buddhism, if you like. When I first became a Buddhist, there was quite a lot of chatter in Western Buddhism about the difference between Dharma and Buddhism, because people were quite uncomfortable with the idea of organized religion still. So they wanted to sort of extract the truth and said, oh, we'll just call this Dharma. And you know, the Dharma means both the words that the Buddha spoke and the truth that those words are pointing to. And that project was a little bit successful, but really what they did was just picked the bits of Buddhism that they liked. But again, it highlights that there is something slightly different about Buddhism, which comes from a particular point in history with those cultural associations and changes as it moves across the world. You know, you could look— we were talking about For the Hanamatsuri Shrine, traditionally there's a bower over the Buddha, which we weren't able to construct this year, which is in the shape of a Japanese pagoda. So it kind of has that sort of shape to the roof. And the Japanese pagoda is an evolution from the Indian stupa, which, which began life as just a dome of earth that the Buddha's remains were buried in. Or some of them, because they were sent to lots of different places. They built these mounds of earth over them and went over to pay homage to the Buddha, to the teachings, to practice mindful walking around these mounds of earth. And slowly different bits were added. Some of them you see then like they have a cube and the steeple on the top. And as the architecture moves through Tibet, China, Korea, and into Japan, it becomes— well, you see it in China and Korea as well, these pagodas. So the shape is always changing, but the spirit is the same. And that's true in our lives as well, right? We make a commitment to something. The choice we make on how to honor that commitment can be different at different times. There's an honorable tradition of disrobing in Buddhism. It isn't necessarily seen as something that you do for life. Honen, who started the first independent Pure Land School in Japan, said, if it helps you to say the Nembutsu to be then ordain. If it helps you to be a lay— if it's better— if you— if it helps you to settle in but to be a lay person, then be a lay person. Like, what is the right choice for you that's going to keep you connected to Amida Buddha, which is to say keep you connected to that sense of unconditional loving kindness? So when I'm thinking about all these, I probably read this in practice, it brings William Stafford's poem "The Way It Is" to mind. I just suddenly thought, Satya's chosen some poems to read, I hope it's not this one. "The Way It Is." There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change, but it doesn't change. People wonder about what you're pursuing. You have to explain about the thread, but it's hard for others to see. While you hold it, you can't get lost. Tragedies happen, people get hurt or die, and you suffer and get old. Nothing you can do can stop time's unfolding. You don't ever let go of the thread. I could just have read that instead of doing the talk, I think. So I did ordain in that particular community, and I received huge amounts from it. And then a few years ago, I left that community, and we had a ceremony in the summer here a couple of years ago where we reconfirmed our vocation as priests and ministers, but under the new name of Bright Earth Buddhism. And, and in that ceremony I read out a personal vow, and in my original ordination ceremony I read a personal vow, and those vows were different because I'm a different person, the world I'm living in is a little bit different. The things that were speaking to my heart were a little bit different. Also, my original vow included a line about diving into shame, which is like— I can see is really problematic now, but felt— what I meant by, of course, is becoming more intimate with my bambu nature. But there was— there is a little bit of an edge in Pure Land Buddhism sometimes. I don't think it's just the translations where they talk about human beings as evil beings, that it is a little bit unhelpful, I think. And I was a bit caught up in that, so I've let that go over the years. And actually, the vow that I made a couple of years ago was simply to remember the nameless name, which just points back to everything I've been saying, right? That there is something fundamental, profound, real, shot through with loving kindness, things as they really are. And that the form doesn't quite— the form of Buddhism can never quite capture it because it is infinite and expansive and can't quite be pinned down. And also, when I went through the ordination ceremony, I felt different coming out of it than I went going in, because even though it— we can't quite capture it in words and forms and rituals, They don't mean nothing. They are an enactment of something profound, and the spirit is transmitted through them. And some words and forms speak to our hearts more than others, but we need both of them. So it— so the spirit is important. And how do we keep holding that thread? And one of the ways we keep holding that thread is by choosing the right conditions around us, by making the right choices in our vocation. That, that keep us supporting, holding the thread. Because you can do it through all of the travails of life on your own, but it's easier to do it if you're in community with other people that doing it, if you have practices that support you, if you're connected to teachings that support you. So both of these things together change and something that doesn't change. Many, many rebirths in the course of one lifetime, and the thread, the constant thread that you don't let go of, that is the same through all of those rebirths. So I suppose when we're inviting you to reflect for yourselves Or even as you're listening, these things might be being stirred up already. It's like, well, what is my own feeling of what that thread is that I'm holding on to? What choices have I made? What are the different phases of my own life? Has that thread been consistent through all of them? Yeah, maybe beginning to think about some of those things in your own lives as well. No, no need to go.
Thank you, Caspar. So I've got a poem by William Stafford called— no, I haven't. So I will be talking about my own thread, and I'm going to begin the story at a time when I was probably more desperate than I've been in my life. But before I do that, I want to read you a poem by— she's called Norma Wong. Her full name is— she hasn't got her full name. She's a Hawaiian Buddhist minister, and she's an indigenous woman and Zen. And yeah, this book is really good. And the poem, you have to know something about the final word because you can't do punctuation when you're reading things out. So the final 'what' has a question mark and then an exclamation mark. 'What?' And the first 'what' is just an ordinary 'what.' What to make of falling apartness. What to do, to feel, to have. Too many wants. I'm afraid in this falling apartness, a hollowing out of what we thought, believed, hoped so amazingly from all sides. The right and the left, all sides unexpectedly caught beyond guard, rails falling in this apartness. All sides are— something stirs in this one possibility, the rising as in yeast, dormant until spit upon with a bit of sugar and warm water. Something stirs when no thing, absolutely no thing, works. Something stirs if and only if We see what cannot be seen and hear what cannot be heard. A stance unfolds, a threshold appears. What? So this poem is speaking about a falling apartness, and the book is called When No Thing— When Nothing Works. Um, so when I was 30-something, I'd been in a relationship with my partner. We'd lived together for 11 years. Um, and it took me quite a long time to realize that he was alcoholic. And his alcoholism also worsened. And over the years, I, I, I tried all sorts of different things to try and help him, to try and change him, to try and control him, to try and cure him. Um, I have always been, I've had lots of people that know IFS, I have lots of manager parts. So I've always been very, uh, good at, at achieving things and func— being functional in the world. Um, but all of my energy was going into trying to be okay in relationship with him as the chaos got bigger and bigger. And try and think of a way to save him. And it took a very long time for me to get to a point where I began to feel like no thing was working. And I remember, I remember the feeling now of walking into my first support group, 12-step group for people affected by other people's drinking. My heart was banging. Um, I can remember the room. I can remember there were about 10 people there, just desperate to get the answers so I could go back and, and fix my ex-partner. And I was in that place where I was desperate. I was desperate. And because I was desperate, when I listened, I began to hear something that I hadn't heard before, that I hadn't admitted before, that I hadn't considered before. And some of that was about the way that I had been colluding with, uh, and, um, kind of unintentionally supporting the alcoholism and, and about the depth of my own dysfunction, which was quite a surprise to me. Um, and some of it was that people kept talking about their higher power. I thought they were completely crazy. I was atheist. I didn't think that there was such a thing as God or anything spiritual. Um, but what, what kept happening is that the people I really admired, the people that seemed to be having really good lives, they were doing really well in their life, They were the ones that, that mentioned higher power more often. And so I started asking them questions and asked for someone to be my mentor, to be my sponsor. And it wasn't as, uh, dramatic as a crack over the head. It was more like, uh, maybe something being poured over some ice on my head, like a baby, like the tea, sweet tea, melting, melting, melting. And, and what got in was the Buddha. I didn't call it the Buddha at that time. I called it higher power, still higher power, but the Buddha got in. And I found my thread, and I realized that I'd been looking everywhere for the answers to this awful, awful problem, and I was already holding it. It was there, it was there all along, but it took that desperation to see it. And I held on to that thread, and I held on to the wisdom of other people. And then gradually started reading. I discovered Pema Chödrön's writing. Eventually found myself turning up at the Buddhist house and opening the door to a very skinny young monk, celibate monk. Which is another story for another day. And so the thread took on different language and forms, and it's really helpful for us all to have a form that we can share. I remember hearing a story about spiritual community. I don't know if it's true or not, but there were so many different forms and ways of connecting with whatever it is that everyone was— nobody was doing anything together because it was all just, you know, they were doing their own thing. So it's great that we all just, you know, like wear the same regessas and say the same words here because then we get to speak in unison. But the Buddha speaks through us all. In a very unique way. And we maybe call it the Buddha, or we maybe call it the Divine, or Gaia, higher power. And I remember my ordination. I don't remember much. What I can remember more than anything is shaving my hair off. 'cause I had really long hair and, um, I just wanted to do something that kind of was a visual display. It felt quite scary. I'd never had a shaved head, but it felt so important. I wanted to look really different and I gave it to the charity for cancer, the people that make wigs for cancer children who've got cancer. And by then I was already married to the Buddha, but that was the public— that was the public confirmation of that. And I did that partly for me to, to kind of, um reaffirm my own commitment. But really, because finding that thread was so amazing, and because living in relationship with the Buddha changed everything in my life, I just really wanted to share it. I just really wanted to find ways of inviting other people to have an experience of their own. And in some ways, that's— it's really difficult to do that. If I was to go out there and say, 'We've got something happening in the temple today, we've got this statue, and we've got some cold tea,' I can't imagine that many people would be rushing in. Um, and I'm thinking about Becky, who was one of our sangha members who died, um, a few years ago now. Yeah, yeah, 4 years ago. Yeah. And I'm remembering sitting in a circle like we'll be doing later and sharing with each other, and she said she came because she had anxiety and a kind of a mind that was buzzing and she wanted a bit of calm. But what she found 'Ah, was the Buddha, was, was something divine. I don't know how that happened, really. It wasn't really anything to do with me.' It wasn't, and it was, because this building has been a place where people have found the Buddha, and the people that make it possible for this building to run are involved in that. Katie, who did the beautiful flowers for us this morning. Dave, who did the flowers on the shrine and did the bells. Kema, who paid for the floor, for the carpet. Very important. Yeah, thanks, Kema's dad. Dhyarmay's friend who painted our beautiful mural on the wall. All these little objects and all this work that people have put into this room over the years, it all adds up. Wendy, our old sangha member, who did us a painting and wrote a poem. And you, you're all that person too. Andy took the photo that we might have, you know. Oh, Keima took, you know, we'll have those photos. It's all weaving in. So maybe that's what happens to the thread, is that it, it's our thread, but it also becomes a beautiful tapestry or a kind of a something that, that is bigger than our individual threads. And different people have different threads to offer. I'm looking forward to those biscuits. I was going to be offering some vegan biscuits. That's a special thread. Biscuits are very important in Buddhist temples. So we all bring our own threads and we all have responsibility for looking after our threads. And I think that the decision for me to move out of the temple and to have a separate space to live is me looking after my thread so I can— when I come, the thread's really in good condition and I can make good offerings and clean offerings. So as Casper said, different people, different contexts work for them. But sometimes it takes a bit of a jolt, or it takes some seeping, something seeping in over time for us to really come back to our own threads. I think that's it. I didn't know what I was going to say, but that's what I've said. So we have an invitation for you now, whether you're here in person or whether you're watching us later on YouTube, to spend 20 minutes in groups of 3 with people, ideally with someone you don't know, talking about your thread. So what is it that is meaningful for you? Doesn't have to be a religious context, it could be animals, or could be, could be anything, and just kind of share, share what your thread is and how you look after it. Like, how do you, how do you keep it, how do you keep it shining? Do you want to add anything to that? So do feel free to, once you've chosen your people, do feel free to stay in here or go into the dining room or go downstairs into the living room or library. Um, we will come back here. I think if we come back here at 10 past—
it's 22 now.
Yeah, we have a break as well, or come back at— how long? Because that 20 minutes might not be enough. I think if we come back here for 10 past, if you've run out things to say, then come back earlier, go and have a cup of tea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or you could use the garden if you want to go in the garden. Yeah, so back in here for 10 past 12. Namaste.
