lotusinthemud

Do not criticise, accept everything ~ Dharmavidya

Dharmavidya writes:

There is a wonderful text that records the saying of the Desert Fathers or Abba. The Abba were hermits who lived in the desert of North Africa in the early Christian period. The stories are of a similar genre to the Buddhist stories of enlightenment encounters that one reads in the records of the transmission of the Dharma.

Here is one of the Abba dialogues:

Abba Poemen: Tell me how to become a monk.
Abba Joseph: If you want to find peace here and hereafter, do not judge anybody and, always ask yourself, “Who am I?”

What is Poemen really asking? The term monk came to mean a person living by a religious rule in a monastery. However, the Abba were in a period before monasticism had fully developed. The great Christian monastic orders did not yet exist. So Poemen is surely asking something more fundamental than how to fulfil a religious role. What is the fundamental meaning of being a monk?

The word monk is closely related to the Greek monos meaning singular. It seems quite likely to me, therefore, that Poemen is asking about something rather close to the Buddhist notion of ekagata. It is quite possible that the abba were influenced by Buddhism and that their concerns were similar. In any case, whether there was influence or not, this is a fundamental question. How can one become alone, not merely in the sense of going into one’s cell and closing the door, but in a more all encompassing manner relevant to every situation in life. A Christian might say, how can I be alone with God? How can one be alone with one’s faith. In Buddhist terms, how can I take refuge completely and be liberated from all the other ties that pull at me, all the internalised voices that chatter on the periphery of the mind, endlessly trying to seduce one into less worthy avenues?

Joseph clearly grasps the nature of Poemen’s concern and agitation. The reference to "peace here and hereafter" tells us that the peace that is sought goes beyond mere happiness here and now. What is being sought is something more basic and enduring, something beyond transient conditions. This tells us something more about the nature of being a monk. The monk’s mind is quiet in a way that is not just an exercise. It has a deep assurance. We can say that the monk entrusts himself to his faith, but even this, perhaps, gives too active a colouring. Grace comes to him, fills him, encompasses him, if he will allow it. Amida descends. But how does one allow it?

So Joseph provides a very practical advice. He says, “Do not judge anybody.” This is the same as the Mahayana precept, “Do not be proud of oneself and devalue others.” It is the real meaning of what in Buddhism we talk about as love and compassion. We are here talking about complete acceptance. It is difficult to convey exactly what this means, because we are so used to living in a world where everything has a positive or negative valuation attached. To accept the bombu nature of another person just as it is is enormously challenging when one has spent one’s whole life assuming one knows what is good and what is bad. We tend to assume that compassion is a matter of discerning what is wrong and removing it in some way. If the other is anxious, we assume, without a moment’s thought, that the best thing would be to remove this anxiety. We take it that that is what would be compassionate. If the other person is dejected, likewise. Similarly if they are angry, jealous, envious or any number of other common human modes of being. This way of understanding compassion, however, is superficial. There is a deeper compassion that accepts the whole person, warts and all. The warts may not be socially approved, but they are what make the person spiritually interesting. All these expressions are saying something about the inner state. When we criticise and think that this or that aspect of a person should be abolished as soon as possible, we are missing a lot. Furthermore, it is not just the other person who experiences such states. We all experience them.

So how can one break the habit of a lifetime and let it go? By reflecting that one is no better oneself. This is the meaning of Joseph’s last remark, to always ask oneself “Who am I?”

Joseph is not here advocating long introspective searching for one’s supposedly true nature or anything so grand. He is just suggesting that if we are honest with ourselves, we soon realise that we are in no position to criticise others because we have all the same impulses within ourselves. They manifest from time to time according to conditions. When the balance of conditions changes, one’s state changes. If one were able to live within the conditions that bear on the other, one would understand.

These days I do a lot of writing. If somebody tells me how brilliant my writing is and how totally thrilled they are with it, I feel my body responding. I try to keep a moderately cool demeanour, but inside the child in me is already jumping up and down with glee. Or, on another occasion somebody remarks that my latest writing is boring, off the point and has completely missed what is important about the subject. Again I try to keep my cool, but inside something is shrinking. I wish it were not so, but there is nothing I can do about it. Well, there is something I can still do, and that is that I can learn from it that this is how it is for every human being. We are all inwardly equipped with a set of reflexes of this kind. We might train ourselves to overcome them to the extent of not acting them out in an embarrassing or destructive fashion, but they are still there.

At the time when one is inclined to criticise or blame somebody else, one has conveniently detached oneself from such self-knowledge. For a short time one implicitly entertains the delusive notion that one is completely immune oneself from the kind of folly that is being made such a show of by the other person. The truth is otherwise. Who am I to criticise?

In Christianity, this message is closely related to the story of the occasion when Jesus came across a group of people who were about to stone to death a woman who had been caught in adultery. Jesus said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Nobody moved, and the woman’s life was saved.

In Pureland, we talk about bombu nature. It is the same message. When we say, “Namo,” we are referring to our own guchi nature. Guchi is a Japanese word with several meanings. The relevant one here is that it refers to a foolish person, especially the kind who is likely to grumble about everything. When we say “Namo Amida Bu” there are a thousand meanings, but one of them is that we offer up this internal grumbler to the Buddha. The Buddha is always completely full of warm acceptance and blesses our grumbler just like an innocent child. In this way, the nembutsu brings the grace of Amida to our side, reassuring us that all shall be well and there is no need to worry.

So even if we are not going to go away and live in a monastery nor adopt a religious rule of life, we can all aspire to be monks in this sense of following the path of ekagata. Aware of our own human nature, we can let the grace of Amida provide a little comfort for our internal grumbler, the critical mind that disturbs our peace. We can know that the real peace is not just a matter of the present situation, but is something that transcends all particular conditions, here and hereafter. When we know this we can relax. Circumstances no longer seem so irritating and faith grows.

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Vehicle and Skilful Means ~ Dharmavidya

Dharmavidya:

Religion as a Vehicle
The Sanskrit word yana means vehicle. Buddhism is broadly divided into yanas. A yana may encompass a variety of denominations, orders or sects. Different yanas are characterised by some common broad orientation, so the term can sometimes be used for the attitude rather than for the grouping.

The two best known yanas are Hinayana and Mahayana. Sometimes a third, Vajrayana, is added. Ambedkar, leader of the untouchables, also spoke of a Navayana, or “new vehicle.

I will say something about the yanas in Buddhism and also extend the term to a more general consideration of inter-religious study.

Loose Definition
Hinayana and Mahayana are are generally distinguished by the attitudes they represent and these are two of the fundamental options in the spiritual life, whether Buddhist or any other. These options are (1) salvation as purity and (2) salvation as altruism.

In Hinayana there is an emphasis upon the necessity to take personal responsibility and walk the path alone whereas in Mahayana there is an emphasis upon generosity of spirit and altruism. The latter has further developed into an emphasis upon being saved by the Buddhas rather than saving oneself. After all, if the aim is altruism and if the Buddhas are the supreme examples, then they must be busy helping us. In a way, this development represents a third attitude. One could, perhaps, consider the other power approach to be a distinct yana.

Other Yanas
Vajrayana is basically Mahayana plus Tantra. Tantra is the idea that all human energies can be transformed into elements of the spiritual path. It is thus a yoga of sublimation. Navayana is the term given by Bimrao Ambedkar to the movement that started in the 1950s to convert untouchables in India to a new form of Buddhism that was as much concerned with social emancipation as with spiritual salvation.

This suggests at least five different basic orientations that a religion might have: purity, altruism, entrustment, sublimation and social emancipation. No doubt there are others, but not an unlimited number. There are, surely, only a certain number of options.

Classification of Schools
Buddhist schools are often classified as being either Hinayana or Mahayana. In this case, Theravada is the primary Hinayana school. It has as its ideal the arhat, a saint who has overcome all spiritual obstacles and thus gone beyond desire. In the orient, the Vinaya School and some other small schools are also classified as Hinayana. Thus there are Hinayana schools in all the Theravada countries: Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, where they are the predominant, and also in China and Vietnam where they are less major. Hinayana in Japan and Korea is purely academic. Tibetan Buddhism is virtually all Mahayana (or Vajrayana, which can be seen as a sub-category of Mahayana) and most of the Buddhism of China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan is Mahayana. In India Buddhism of both types has been reintroduced in the twentieth century.

It can also be clarifying to classify schools as belonging to the Indian cultural world or to the Sino-Japanese. This would give us a broad classification as follows:

	INDO	SINO
HINAYANA	Theravada	Vinaya, etc.
MAHAYANA	Tibetan	Pureland, Zen, Hua Yen etc.

Vehicles
Vehicle is a useful idea. Whatever system one follows, it is a vehicle. Some vehicles go faster than others, some are more comfortable than others, but most will get you there. This is quite a good way of regarding different spiritual systems, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. Religions are artificial. Like cars, they are created by humans. They are human attempts to reach toward what is beyond our mundane, conditioned, materialistic existence. This is true even if one believes that at the centre of one’s religion there is an omnipotent power, still the religion itself is our attempt to reach, serve or worship that power.

The spirit attempts to go beyond. Certain individuals in history have become exemplars and each has spoken of their experience in terms more or less accessible to the culture that they lived in, Jesus among the Jews, Buddha among the Indians, Lao Tze among the Chinese and so on. Traditions then form around their words, different ones emphasising different dimensions, and these traditions become useful vehicles for later seekers and practitioners. Buddha no doubt taught purity, altruism, faith, sublimation and emancipation and for him they were all part of a single vision, but we followers tend to separate the strands of the plait out and see contradictions where he saw facets of a unity.

The words can never be more than an aid, a vehicle, but they are useful nonetheless. We may each be on our singular journey, but sharing travellers' tales is an essential element in the art of navigating the mountains.

Skilful Means
In some Mahayana literature we encounter the idea of three vehicles called the shravaka vehicle, the bodhisattva vehicle and the Buddha vehicle. This approach is most developed in the Lotus Sutra, which is often seen as the pinnacle of Mahayana. Evidently, the shravaka and bodhisattva vehicles are Hinayana and Mahayana respectively. This then is an attempt to say that these two are only provisional steps toward a higher vehicle, that of the Buddha’s themselves. This idea then becomes the foundation for a theory of skilful means that suggests that everything that Buddhas do and teach is to be thought of as skilful means toward the liberation of beings.

My idea in this article is essentially the same. Extending it to all religions, we can see that each religion or each major section of any great religion, constitutes a yana. One could make such an analysis of Christianity, with its protestant, catholic and orthodox yanas. The tragedy has been that too often in history people have fallen to fighting and cruelty through a failure to see that these are all just skilful means.

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The Wish to Practise a Religious Life ~ Dharmavidya

Commentary upon the Summary of Faith and Practice, part two.

Text: wishing to practise a religious life

A Foundation
The wish to practice a religious life is the foundation of meaning and happiness. Nowadays, many people have no idea about living a religious life and view religion with suspicion. This is basically because religious institutions have, in many cases, been corrupted and this has got religion a bad name. A further cause has been the fact that throughout history there has been an on-going tension between secular and religious power and in modern times the secular state has very much come out on top, so that religion has become a personal matter, often seen as something of an eccentricity. Secular administration is good and necessary, but it can never yield the kind of ultimate satisfaction that the heart longs for. In the modern world, a religious life is certainly the kind of eccentricty that we should adopt.

Beyond Anomie
In parallel with the decline of the religious sense, there has been a general increase in narcissism, with its accompanying discontent, and, most importantly, in anomie. For the narcissist nothing is ever quite good enough and whatever satisfactions there might be pale very quickly. Anomie is the sense that nothing means anything, that there is no fundamental reason to bother about anything. Anomie can easily lead to a broad degeneration in morale. In order to prevent anomie leading to chaos, governments now have to keep the population happy in a secular way by holding up for our imitation a life of self-indulgence and distraction, delivered by big business corporations. All this is, however, circular. More distractions make life even more meaningless and more meaninglessness calls for more distraction.

Ultimacy
Religion cuts through this futility. By a religious life, one means a life directed toward ultimate purpose. Even if one only has a hazy notion of what the ultimate purpose of life is, the sheer fact of trying to turn toward it, even into a thick “cloud of unknowing”, can have a radical effect upon the tenor of one’s existence. Often enough, a religious life is substantially a search: a serious attempt to penetrate the mystery of ultimacy. In fact, a first and vitally important step can be the act of admitting to oneself and huge extent of one's ignorance. Strangely, it is by admitting that we are hopeless cases that new possibilities open up.

The Teleological Eye
In this search, however, we are not completely at a loss. We have some strong intuitions. We realise that what we are looking for has some close connection with beauty, truth and unconditional love. Simply knowing that what we are talking about is an End rather than a means tells us a lot. We could say that a religious life is one lived teleologically: it has in view ultimate ends. We cannot define ultimate beauty, ultimate truth or ultimate love, because ‘define’ means delimit and the ultimate does not have limits. Nonetheless, we can let the intuition of it into our lives and letting it in turns everything upside down.

The Big Picture
All of this naturally means taking a much longer and larger perspective. The self-indulgent approach looks for gain or profit immediately, or in the very near future. The religious person looks for a benefit that exists ultimately. This means that such a person will not “sell their soul” for a short term benefit. They live their life according to what they understand to be of ultimate value. I say, “what they understand to be” because we are in a process of discovery. Our understanding is continually being extended by experience and later may be better than it was in the past.

Faith & Experience
The truly religious person is not the one who clings to an unchangeable dogma, but rather the one who is willing to really experiment with his or her life in such a way that faith evolves on the basis of what is found out through the test of putting life on the line. Faith and experience feed each other. According as we put something to the test, so we come to have more or less faith in it, but we only take on such tests because of the faith that we have in the first place. The truly religious person is, therefore, always finding out more about what is true and beautiful, about love and what lies beyond conditions.

Nirvana
The Buddhist term nirvana refers to what is beyond conditions. In ordinary life we are surrounded by conditions, depend upon conditions and do what we do conditionally. This is inevitable. However, while we are inevitably living in the conditional world, it is possible to have a vision that goes beyond it and to make that the anchorage point of our life. A person who has such a sense of the beyond and takes that as the centre of gravity of their life is a religious person. Such people may have different terminologies, different ways of conceptualising what they are doing, different theories or philosophies, but they have something fundamental in common, and such people, if they are true to the ultimate vision rather than to the words and concepts that it is wrapped up in, can never be fundamentally at odds. Nirvana is, therefore, also peace in this world.

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Vidya is Authenticity ~ Dharmavidya

Authenticity & Freedom
I have been reading some existentialism. One of the key concepts in existentialism is authenticity. This goes with another key idea, which is freedom. These ideas reached a high pitch in the work of Sartre who had lived through the experience of the Nazi occupation of France during WWII. At that time staying alive often depended upon acting in inauthentic ways and there was an acute sense of loss of freedom. Sartre, however, maintained that a person always inherently has freedom, even in the most dire circumstances. Whatever befalls us, we still choose how we respond.

Hypocrisy
This led the existentialists to a critique of bourgeois society, where even without the threat of gestapo violence people still spend much of their time and energy on posing in hypocritical ways. Of course, this is not a new observation. The Taoists, the Stoics and the early Christians had all made similar observations. The existential twist was to say that the reason for such inauthenticity was fear of freedom. When we realise our freedom we experience the anxiety of choice. Much of the time we would rather either operate on habit, or pretend that we have no choice.

Vulnerability
Along with freedom comes risk. If I am free to choose then I am vulnerable to making mistakes. In other words, I may betray myself as a fallible, foolish, human being. This seems awful and unacceptable, so we pretend that we are not so vulnerable and that any mistakes are due to factors beyond our control. We will go to considerable lengths in this strategy, not excluding alienating from ourselves our own characteristics and failings, as when a person says, “I have to drink because I am an alcoholic,” or “I always lose my jobs because I have an authority problem,” as though the "problem" had an existence of its own.

The pathologisation of many behaviours under the rubric of mental so-called illness has helped to extend this kind of inauthenticity and non-responsibility into many areas of life. People who do not have any serious form of insanity still regularly use such labels as a way of lessening their awareness of the freedom that they have. The impulse to hide is understandable. When we acknowledge our freedom we also acknowledge the hovering presence of panic not far away. Many people go through life hardly ever, if at all, making a genuine decision. The book by Kundera, The Incredible Lightness of Being, is a telling, existential story of a man who lives a socially successful life without ever deciding anything for himself until the Russians come along and invade, when life starts to become more unavoidably real.

Holy Poses
Inauthenticity is also rife in the religious/spiritual domain. We do not have to go back to the Pharisees in the Bible to find plenty of examples of people posing as more holy, more respectable or more enlightened than is actually the case. Taking on a spiritual persona can be a first-class strategy for avoiding one’s humanity. If one has some status in a religious group, other members also put pressure upon one to act in sanctimonious ways. Unfortunately this not only deceives others, it is also, all too often, a case of deceiving oneself and this very deception constitutes the avidya that Buddha referred to as the root of all our trouble. One can summarise Buddha’s enlightenment as his realisation that all our poses have their roots in avidya, the refusal to look at the reality of life.

Waking Up
Thus, Buddhism, even though it has a different flavour from existentialism, is existential philosophically. It shares the same diagnosis and suggests a rather similar remedy: the diagnosis of refusal to look and the remedy of waking up. What we wake up to is the reality of life and death, joy and suffering, freedom and risk, love and its disappointments; in other words, to our bombu lives in an imperfect world, longing for something better, sometimes glimpsing it and sometimes seeing it slip through our fingers, but much of the time playing posing games, more concerned with how we appear (rupa) than with reality (dharma)..

Thy Neighbour is as Thyself
In his early life, Sartre saw the demands of freedom and authenticity in purely individualistic terms. Later he came to see that one has an inevitable responsibility toward others. Buddhism starts from that point, seeing authenticity - vidya - as the foundation for compassion. When I face the reality of my life, I face the reality of all lives. When I see my own fallible mortality, I see that of my neighbour too. Before such an awakening everything seems to be arranged on a vertical scale from worse to better. After it, everything is horizontal - we all walk in similar moccasins.

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A New Year & an Old Piece of Wood ~ Dharmavidya

It is the beginning of the Jewish new year. It begins with a month of repentance. This is rather like the Buddhist idea of always beginning anew. Beginnings are dedicated to  Vajrasattva who is the bodhisattva of purity. It is a common idea that things start off pure and then get soiled later and every so often one has to wipe the slate and begin again.

At the same time, there is, in Buddhism, also the idea that we only exist because of past karma and karma is inherently problematic precisely because it is what ties us to samsara. So here there is a kind of opposite ideal picture that one starts off as a mess and gradually lets go of the habits and compulsive tendencies that keep the wheel turning.

Living in relative isolation in my hermitage I can appreciate both ‘models’. With our Western cultural history we always tend to think that the right and good course is to do something. By doing something we hope to heal the sick, relieve poverty, end wars and make everybody happy.. However, there is a lot to be said for desisting from doing things, too. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. There are many situations when restraint is the best policy. Sometimes it is true that “least said, soonest mended,” and many things sort themselves out better when we give them the space in which to do so.

Self-restraint is something that the Buddha emphasised strongly. To exercise it takes faith. One has to trust that the universe can manage without one - that one is not so important. Spring comes and the grass grows by itself, as it says in the Hsin Hsin Ming.

There is a middle path. When doing things, it generally works best when one can co-operate with natural processes. Here on our land nature is always busy changing the balance of things. We add a few touches here and there, but it is hopeless just making a plan in the abstract and ignoring what nature is up to. It is better to give a fair amount of time to simply watching and contemplating. then one can see what is possible and when one does act it is in some harmony with the natural grain of things.

This morning I needed a baton for a piece of woodwork and did not have one of sufficient size for what I wanted. I thought to put it on my shopping list. Then, walking across to the shed, I saw the heap of old timber that we turned out of the barn ages ago. I pulled out a piece. It was much bigger than the baton I needed and it was partly rotten. I took it back and cleaned it up. Out of it, eventually, I got my baton and it looks a lot better than a machine cut shop one would. The twists and scars all add character.

This old piece of wood is hardly ‘pure’, but I can ask Vajrasattva to bless it nonetheless. It is starting a new life now and I, repenting of my over hasty wish to impose my plan on things, am delighting in this new old bit of timber. It certainly must be carrying a lor of karma, but therein lies the beauty. We can learn a lot from that.

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Fragment Of A Conversation ~ Dharmavidya

This is out of context, but it contains some points that others might find interesting or might like to comment further upon thus enriching the conversation.

Correspondent: I never asked myself the question why fundamentalism exists.  You are right, it isn't just Christianity... It seems to arise everywhere.  I intuit that it has something to do with fear, possibly fear of death— some variant of the bargaining with God that can happen during grave illness or other life threatening situations.  A need to exert control in a world where none actually exists.  A desperate need for control can easily lead to violence.

Ah, interesting.  If this is the case then PureLand, as you conceive it, is the antithesis of Puritanism or fundamentalism in that it insists on acknowledging the fear, the lack of control, the foolishness right up front.  It doesn't need to be pushed into the subconscious where it can wreak havoc. There are rituals but they are performed as acts of love, without terrible worry about getting them wrong.  It is such a different thing performing ritual as an act of love.  

Which begs the questions of whether aspects of daily life, other activities, even lovemaking can be regarded or entered into as ‘ritual’, a kind of sacrament, an act of worship.  

Something about Puritanism seems like the diametric opposite of love.  

Love and fear as polar opposites—more fundamental perhaps than love and hate.  Dig under hate and I suspect you will find fear...

An rather big area to explore around life and death and fear and what it is to be human on this tiny planet hurtling through an infinitely mysterious universe.


Dharmavidya: I’d like to make some points about definitions. One of my hobby horses is the danger of losing important linguistic distinctions through the process of popularisation. Many old words need to be recovered and restored to their proper meanings or we lose the ability to talk about things with due care. 

Fundamentalism, puritanism and dogmatism, for instance, only equate in common usage. In the strict meaning of the terms all three have their separate positive aspects. Fundamentalism should mean adhering to what is fundamentally true rather than being superficial. Puritanism should mean being purified of inessential elements so as to concentrate on the one thing that matters. Dogmatism should mean staying close to the original message rather than temporising in order to accommodate popular prejudice. Dogmatics strictly speaking stands in contrast to apologetics. Preaching is a matter of creating a bridge between where the audience is and where the source of the teaching is. If you start from the audience end, that is apologetics. If you start from the source, that is dogmatics.

The point about whether everything in life could be considered to be a sacrament is very interesting and throws some light on the material about Dogen that I am translating and commenting on. In a certain sense all of life is ritual. The question is how you do it and how you regard it. Some ways bring out the spirit, some don't.

Going back to 'puritanism', I have found through my frequent travels back and forth east-west that the West seems much more moralistic than the East. We in the West are much more concerned about being justified which I supposed comes from the 'fear of God'. In the East, being personally justified is often regarded as a lost or hopeless cause. You try to fit in and do your duty, but humility is required because (a) you will never fully succeed and (b) the world isn't constructed to make it really possible anyway. In the history of the West it was often a life and death and then a salvation/damnation issue whether one had been righteous or not. But in reality, nobody really is, so what is really required is not punitive coercion, but fellow-feeling and sympathy.

Hence, in the East, there is more emphasis - as in Confucius - upon right performance than upon saving one’s soul. This has pros and cons, just as all philosophies do. It does, however, mean that all of life is a ritual. Much modern Western social thinking has been an attempt to get away from ritual. We are all much less formal than we used to be. I hardly ever wear a tie these days whereas when I was young one had to do so for many occasions. However, this does not mean that ritual has gone away - more that it has changed its form. Correct dress is now ‘casual’ in many situations where it used to be ‘formal’ but this is still ‘correct form’ in a new context. Much about modern life is like that - a kind of self-deception in which we pretend to be liberated but are really just as conformist and caged as before.

Sometimes it seems that we just pour the same wine from bottle to bottle and pretend that it is new.

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Religion or Psychology ~ Dharmavidya

QUESTION: Is Buddhism a religion or a psychology?

SHORT ANSWER: Both and more, but religion firstly.

LONG ANSWER: Buddhism is first and foremost a religion, and as such it has given rise to culture and civilisation, including systems of education, psychology, community building, politics, arts, literature, poetry, and so on. If Buddhism were not a religion then it is rather unlikely that it would still be in existence today, or that it would have come into existence in the first place. One would not go through what Siddhartha went through simply for the sake of an academic or professional discipline.

Similarly, Dr. Ambedkar was the leader of the untouchables in India. He saw that the caste system was (and is) deeply embedded in Indian society. He tried to get rid of it through politics and failed. In the end he decided that only a change of religion would be sufficiently fundamental to bring caste to an end so he converted to Buddhism. Religion is most fundamental. People dedicate their whole being for religion and that vis what Buddhism takes. You can take it as only a psychology, or only an education, or only a culture, but you will not get the heart of it that way.

Buddhism has come to the West through a variety of channels, but it is often appreciated here for its psychological aspect. Of course, we also appreciate its arts and its influence for peace in the world and other fruits that it has borne. However, none of these would exist if it were not fundamentally a religion because only a religion leads people to dedicate their whole lives in the way that Buddhist monks, nuns and priests do. They are not just doing a job. Thinking of Buddhism as psychology may well help a Western person to understand some important aspects of it. It can be a way in, but that way goes a lot further if one is willing to follow it all the way.

Modernism has given us much, but it also has some pernicious aspects. One of these is its tendency to fragment and then asset strip. It tends to plunder rather than deeply appreciate the culture it encounters and turn their fruits into consumer goods. People who are only casually interested may well appreciate Buddhist art or may well benefit from the latest meditation exercise without having to make any serious commitment of their life, but if nobody makes such commitment then the wonderful fruits of Buddhism will soon not be there for the picking because the root and trunk of the tree will be dead. 

In my own life, Buddhism has always been firstly a religion. I became a social worker in order to practise ‘right livelihood’ because I was Buddhist. I got involved in various forms of social action for similar reasons. That led me into psychotherapy and, naturally, I wanted to apply my Buddhist principles in my work. That led me to write books about Buddhist psychology. Foremost, however, I am Buddhist and that is what I teach and advocate and that is what has provided the inspiration for all my most important work. Namo Buddhaya. Namo Dharmaya. Namo Sanghaya.

 

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Prayer and Devotion ~ Dharmavidya

(Not exclusively Buddhist, of course, but pertinent to our practice)

Dharmavidya writes:

IT IS GOOD TO PRAY

It is good to pray. There are many ways and many meanings and I shall describe a few. When you organise your living quarters, make sure you include a place for holy things. When you arrange your garden, create places for contemplation that are inviting to yourself and others. It is good to have places for prayer, places that are especially conducive, yet it is also good to pray anytime, wherever you are. Both are good, each in its special way. To create a prayer place is itself a prayer. To enter such a place and stand there at least a moment and feel the presence, is a prayer. Prayer does not have to be words, necessarily. To pause in the midst of a busy day and turn one's mind momentarily to sacred things is similarly holy. Make a habit of prayer and all of life is richer, finer, deeper and more true.

Prayer & Grace
Prayer is not difficult. People of great or little education have been doing it, both deliberately and spontaneously, since time immemorial. Prayer takes many forms, but is an attitude, a direction of mind as well as being something that, like the weather, is always present, but only sometimes imposes itself with force. Prayer involves body, speech and mind and goes beyond them. The best part of prayer is to receive the influence of the Holy into one’s being and one’s life. This is a grace. It cannot successfully be forced or demanded. Basically, one has to be willing. One can do some preparation. It is like gardening: the ground can be prepared and the seed sown, but the action and result are in the hands of a greater power. As Kipling pointed out, the work of the gardener and that of the religious are done mostly on one’s knees.

Learning as One Goes Along
It is good to pray, good for oneself and good for the world, but principally just good, good in itself. It is the deepest point of life and it is good to visit that place as often as one can. Over the years I have gleaned a little about the matter. I hope to encourage others. Let us explore the matter as far as we are able. We can rely upon our own experience and also upon the wisdom given to us by others who have walked this path. Prayer is a path. Many have walked such a path. We can, therefore, learn a great deal from those who have gone before us. However, there is no substitute for experience for it is in experience that the sacred presence speaks and informs one. Formed by angels we are as much as we can be.

Opening onto a Broad Vista ~ Dharmavidya

Many Modes of Spirituality
The contemporary world is such a confusing place. We have available to us a greater plethora of ideas than perhaps any previous age. The spiritual treasures of the whole world and much of history are spilled out at our feet and we do not know how to choose from amongst them. Actually any single jewel may be sufficient. It is surely not a matter of finding the right one any more than it is a matter of quantity. Sufi, Buddhist, Catholic, or even agnostic-yet-spiritual... there are many modes. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, said Shakespaere, but if one wastes so much energy disputing the name that one never stops to savour the aroma, the point is missed. They are all modes of expression of our deepest longing, our prayer and it is important that that longing find expression one way or another.

Loving the Divine No Matter the Creed
There are a growing number of people whose spirituality transcends the boundaries of traditional religions. They might be those who, like myself, practise one specific creed and benefit hugely, yet still know that it is just one vehicle and that many other vehicles might have done passably well; or they might be people who have never really settled in any one confessional community yet still harbour a strong spiritual sense of life. Such people, and there are many, find themselves at home with others who have fallen in love with the Divine no matter what their creed, but are less at ease with those who claim that one single interpretation of ultimate truth and one single book and church are exclusively right, all others being wrong and blameworthy, even if the church in question is our own – what embarrassment – and even if the creed is called "science" and the book was written by Darwin.

it needs saying - buddhism is a religion

:: link: Dharmavidya David Brazier - Tricycle:

It should not need saying. After all, it's obvious. Nonetheless it does need saying. It needs saying because it has been denied by so many people including many who are eminent and even some whose own roles, behavior, and faith contradict what they are saying. It needs saying clearly, that Buddhism is a religion.

Further, this is the right time to say it. The bandwagon of secularization of Buddhism has gradually gathered momentum to the point where it now threatens the whole basis of what the Buddha bequeathed us. Buddhism is becoming popular, but it is doing so in a form that is a new creation. This new creation is not the traditional Buddhism of Asia and it is not the Buddhism of Shakyamuni Buddha, the founder, either. This new creation is an artifact of modernity and postmodernity using elements abstracted from Buddhism, tailored to gain popularity by satisfying contemporary prejudice.

Having said that, we must add that there is nothing wrong with adaptation and creativity. Many of the new manifestations and applications of ideas and methods derived from Buddhism are intrinsically valuable and can stand on their own feet. Buddhism is like a copious spring, the water from which can be gathered and poured into many different shaped containers. What is problematic, however, is that the reductionist philosophy by which such artifacts are being generated threatens to poison the spring from which the water is flowing. It is a kind of asset stripping, or, we could say, it is like taking the fruit while killing the root.

The basic reductionist principle that informs this process is itself the opposite of dharma. It is precisely the kind of blindness that dharma teaching exists to awaken us from. This is why a warning bell needs to be sounded.

I have played a role in the propagation and popularization of Buddhist psychology so I have a personal part in this process. As somebody who could be seen to be one of the culprits I have, perhaps, a double onus to keep the record straight. Buddhism developed a sophisticated psychological approach two thousand years before the modern world discipline of psychology was invented. Psychological investigations have gone on throughout Buddhist history and the result is a gold mine of knowledge, experience, theory, and practice from which we contemporary people can learn a great deal, but although Buddhism has given rise to this treasure, Buddhism is not fundamentally or exclusively a psychology.

:: continue reading here

David Brazier (Dharmavidya) is president of the International Zen Therapy Institute and head of the Amida Order, a Pure Land sangha. His last article for Tricycle, “The ‘Inner Logic’ of Other Power,” appeared in the Spring 2015 issue.

Adapted from Buddhism is a Religion, by David Brazier, with the permission of Woodsmoke Press.