The Nembutsu.......Namu-Amida-Butsu.......Thank You..........Gratitude

"If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough."

(Meister Eckhart, Christian Mystic)

And so, with Pure Land Buddhism, the Nembutsu. Thank you. 

Found throughout time, in many ways.......

Finally, Amida, looking back..........

Bringing it all back home (revisited)

To finish up for now, to "bring it all back home", a home that will always be a journey.

Who wants to live forever?

No conclusions. 

And nothing is ever discovered by sequential thought.

I think too of the assertion of Carl Jung, that there is absolutely no truth that does not spell salvation to one person and damnation to another. All universalism get stuck in this terrible dilemma. 

Yet, really, is it so terrible? 

No universals

There is no teaching here, no intention to convert, only a collection of what I would call "Related Quotes", quotes related to my life. For better or for worse.

Beginning with some words of faith by Kiyozawa Manshi, who spoke of his "self" as:-

"none other than that which, following the way of suchness and entrusting itself to the wondrous working that is absolute and infinite, has settled down of itself in the present situation."

Who added that for him the Tathagata ( he who has thus come ) "is for me infinite compassion, infinite wisdom and infinite potential." 

Followed by the Japanese zen master Dogen, who, amongst many other things, spoke of "continuous practice".........

"On the great road of Buddha ancestors, there is always unsurpassable practice, continuous and sustained. It forms the circle of the way and is never cut off. Between aspiration, practice, enlightenment, and nirvana, there is not a moments gap; continuous practice is the circle of the way"

Moving on, the words of Thomas Merton, drawn from "Raids on the Unspeakable":-

......the deeper question is the nature of reality itself.

Inexorable consistency. Is reality the same as consistency?

The "reality" of the world of many is of consistency, but the reality of the real world is not consistent.

The world of consistency is the world of justice, but justice is not the final word.

There is, above the consistent and logical world of justice, an inconsistent illogical world where nothing "hangs together," where justice no longer damns each to their own darkness. This inconsistent world is the realm of mercy.

The world can only be "consistent" without God.

His freedom will always threaten it with inconsistency - with unexpected gifts.

A god who is fitted into our world scheme in order to make it serious and consistent is not God.

Such a world is not to be taken seriously, such a god is not to be taken seriously. If such a god is "absent" then doubtless the absence is a blessing.

To take him seriously is to submit to obsession, to doubt, to magic, and then to escape these, or try to escape them, by willfulness, by the determination to stake all on an arbitrary selection of "things to be taken seriously" because they "save," because they are "his affairs."

(Note that even atheism takes seriously this god of consistency)

But mercy breaks into the world of magic and justice and overturns its apparent consistency. Mercy is inconsistent. It is therefore comic. It liberates us from the tragic seriousness of the obsessive world which we have "made up" for ourselves by yielding to our obsessions. Only mercy can liberate us from the madness of our determination to be consistent - from the awful pattern of lusts, greeds, angers and hatreds which mix us up altogether like a mass of dough and thrusts us all together into the oven.

Mercy cannot be contained in the web of obsessions.

Nor is it something one determines to think about - that one resolves to "take seriously," in the sense of becoming obsessed with it.

You cannot become obsessed with mercy!

This is the inner secret of mercy. It is totally incompatible with obsession, with compulsion. It liberates from all the rigid and deterministic structures which magic strives to impose on reality (or which science, the child of magic, tries to impose)

Mercy is not to be purchased by a set way of acting, by a formal determination to be consistent.

Law is consistent. Grace is "inconsistent."

The Cross is the sign of contradiction - destroying the seriousness of the Law, of the Empire, of the armies, of blood sacrifice, and of obsession.

But the magicians keep turning the Cross to their own purpose. Yes, it is for them too a sign of contradiction: the awful blasphemy of the religious magician who makes the Cross contradict mercy. This of course is the ultimate temptation of Christianity. To say that Christ has locked all doors, has given one answer, settled everything and departed, leaving all life enclosed in the frightful consistency of a system outside of which there is seriousness and damnation, inside of which there is the intolerable flippancy of the saved - while nowhere is there any place left for the mystery of the freedom of divine mercy which alone is truly serious, and worthy of being taken seriously.

Then the two constant companions drawn from the poetry of W H Auden and T S Eliot.

First Auden:-

For the garden is the only place there is,

But you will not find it 

Until you have looked for it everywhere

and found nowhere that is not a desert.

Second, Eliot:-

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Finally, the very simple:-

Love has no why   (Meister Eckhart)

Electronics, nature and nurture and anything else

Perhaps an artists impression of a Portable Satcom

Back in the 1970's, working for an electronic  company, we in the office would always have a chuckle as one of our state of the art "portable" satellite communications units would be pulled through from the workshop on a trolley. Two large suitcases, but the suitcases did have handles, so yes, "portable" if you fancied your chances.

Technical details? One suitcase was virtually all satellite dish, which opened like an umbrella whenever and wherever you wanted to make a call; and much of the second suitcase was the battery.

Well, I can laugh now, but in those days many of  these units were used on the roof-tops of banks in Lebanon, most other means of communicating between the banks themselves  and the wider world destroyed in the civil war that raged in the country.

Calling almost anywhere

Now, holding just a tiny mobile phone in our hand we can chat with friends on the other side of the world, even see them at the same time. All taken for granted by the young who have grown up in this world of technological acceleration.

It is said that an infant taken from a cave in pre-historic times and placed in a cradle now, would develop much as any other child would in our own times. Which brings up the contrast and relationship between nature and nurture. Another aspect of  this can be introduced by consideration of my two grandchildren, both "nurtured" much the same yet different in many other ways. Genes acted upon by life unfolding around them, first in a totally receptive and passive way, gradually  transforming into decisions and choices as a "self" comes to be. All this is old hat of course.

But when "salvation" and "enlightenment" - even the path of "no calculation" - are thrown into the mix, it all becomes a melting pot of possibilities.

A melting pot, possibilities optional

For me this is when the parable of the dharma as raft comes into its own, a raft for crossing over not for grasping. Cling on too tight, identify too closely with beliefs, even justify ourselves by holding them, and the game is up. Living from them and as them, we could be anybody, born during pre-historic times, or born now. Switch the cradle, switch the "self". Yet prepared, often, to kill and die in defense of what we are, or think ourselves to be.

But to have no beliefs, no convictions,  to leap from the raft too soon, and equally, all seems lost. It does not seem to be an option.

Rafts in choppy seas

However,  what is claimed, at least by the Buddha, is that when the "other shore" is reached we have no need to carry the raft around with us any more. One assumes what is "right"  becomes spontaneous.

"What are the teachings of a whole lifetime?"

 "An appropriate statement".

Some of course fall back upon THE Word. The correct and definitive beliefs have been given, once and for all. All that then remains is to transfer the words, the commandments, from tablets of stone to those that become written upon the heart, fulfilling the great prophecy found in Jeremiah in the Old Testament. 

A depiction of Jeremiah, in less reflective mood

When I, in judgemental mode, look around me,  now and through history, both near  and far, I see such hearts, hear such appropriate statements, in many places. Certainly not confined to those of any one creed or Faith. "The Lord knows his own" is a common cry,  yet often those that we perhaps consider that the Lord "knows" always bare a striking resemblance to our very own self.

Which makes me think of the opposite (in many ways), of the beauty of difference, diversity. Where we can in fact be surprised by joy that others, of different ways, paths and creeds - and of no creed at all - give evidence of a true heart, of an appropriate statement; expressed in ways that are new and life giving. 

An appropriate moo?

As I see it, the starting point, the ground,  can never be restricted to just one book,  however "true" the word, but only to Reality-as-is. Our cosmos  is the complete  "revelation". Seeking to restrict revelation to words found just "here", interpreted in just "this" way, leaves us grasping at straws, seeking to justify creedal formulas that time will always finally erode. Not to mention wars and inquisitions. 

Well, I don't really think that I have solved anything at all about nature and nurture, certainly no conclusions. I'm consoled that even Carl Jung remarked once that many problems, personal and otherwise, are not so much resolved as just taken to a new level - where they can sometimes dissolve of themselves (And if we are to mention levels, I would definitely say new, rather than higher) Whatever, that would be the way of "no calculation", where the earth brings forth fruits of herself. How else, in an otherwise purely logical world, can faith deepen?

As an afterthought, this all seems  to relate to realisation rather than attainment, gift rather than prize, of whatever is of real value always being a by-product.  Trying to grasp "enlightenment", or morality, the "right" and the "true", simply makes them  disappear and slip through our fingers. A "by-product" of what? Reality-as-is. 

Carl Jung, looking for the next level, or perhaps just for his glasses

Related Quotes:-

If you want to find satisfactory formulas you had better deal with things that can be fitted into a formula. The vocation to seek God is not one of them. Nor is existence. Nor is the spirit of man.

(Thomas Merton)

A second quote is from Stephen Batchelor, from his book "Buddhism Without Beliefs". After speaking of a psuedo integrity that responds to a moral dilemma only by repeating the gestures and words of a parent, an authority figure or a religious text, Batchelor speaks of:- 

"(Sometimes acting)....in a way that startles us. A friend asks our advice about a tricky moral choice. Yet instead of offering him consoling platitudes or the wisdom of someone else, we say something that we did not know we knew. Such gestures and words spring from body and tongue with shocking spontaneity. We cannot call them "mine" but neither have we copied them from others. Compassion has dissolved the stranglehold of self. And we taste, for a few exhilarating seconds, the creative freedom of awakening".

Finally, the "Parable of the Dharma Rain" from the Lotus Sutra:-

I bring fullness and satisfaction to the world,
like rain that spreads its moisture everywhere.
Eminent and lowly, superior and inferior,
observers of precepts, violators of precepts,
those fully endowed with proper demeanor,
those not fully endowed,
those of correct views, of erroneous views,
of keen capacity, of dull capacity -
I cause the Dharma rain to rain on all equally,
never lax or neglectful.
When all the various living beings
hear my Law,
they receive it according to their power,
dwelling in their different environments.....
..The Law of the Buddhas
is constantly of a single flavour,
causing the many worlds
to attain full satisfaction everywhere;
by practicing gradually and stage by stage,
all beings can gain the fruits of the way.

Do we need an "umbrella"?

The autumn wind chills my lips

Old friends

 

Old phrases from the past often pop into the mind. Old friends that have been part of the journey but also "home". Journey as well as home. Words morphing and evolving, becoming new yet remaining the same.

In an introduction to Basho's "Narrow Road to the Deep North" I first found a little poem by Buson which had the lines:-

When I speak well of myself 

and criticise another

the autumn wind chills my lips

I think these words capture a possible reality. No choice is involved, there is no "morality" as such, yet words of condemnation, of judgement, simply wither on the lips. This is where "god enters in when the self goes out." Nothing actually changes, yet all things are new.

The autumn wind. Lip chilling?

Speaking in a more prosaic way, it can be the way suffering "ends". This can be likened to our hands avoiding a red hot hob. No one need tell us to keep our hands off. We know it burns. When the reality of any "immorality" is known, seen, it is over. No choice is involved.

I love the way words and quotes evolve. Returning to them as old friends they are yet found as new.

The evolution of words and communication

One saying from the Jewish tradition comes to mind, that "No one should be judged in their hour of grief." From the very beginning it appealed. Now, after so many years of the Buddha's  "pessimistic" statement that "all is suffering" the heart knows that each and every moment is an "hour of grief" and therefore all judgement of others withers on the lips.

Words are remembered, returned to, repeated, yet are always new.

A time of grief

What has helped me clarify this is reading up on Finnegans Wake, and James Joyces playing with words within his Nightmaze. There is no apostrophe missing from the title, simply because even just two words can be known, read and understood in so many ways. To "awaken", "a ships wake", Finnegan as one man, or as a family? Even the books title has not exhausted its "meaning". Has it in fact a definitive meaning or is it rather empty and therefore having the potential to be all things to each unique and precious human being? 

The uniqueness of each

It makes me now think of the vast difference between the Word made text and the Word made flesh. Of  the tragedy of  fundamentalist and literalists of all Faiths who seek to impose one meaning for all.

Another old favourite, Meister Eckhart's "they do him wrong who take God in just one particular way; they have the way rather than God." One way can be ours and  in a sense particular, yet if not clung to, identified with, if it is accepted in gratitude, and if we "kiss the joy as it flies" (Blake) then we do have "God"  yet never one in one particular way that we might be tempted to think must be for all.  The moment comes and goes, home but also journey.

"He who kisses a joy as it flies, lives in eternities sunrise"

What word would Joyce coin to express such a thing?

I am beginning to see the beauty of Finnegans Wake, even without ever having read it. Beginning to see the intent of  Joyce, and maybe why he was chuckling to himself long into the night while poor Nora was just regretfully kissing goodbye to the thought of royalties!

According to my Bluffers Guide, the Wake has two main characters, Humphrey Chimpen Earwicker and his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle. One game for those who actually attempt to read the book is to spot how the initials of these two constantly appear in various guises and transformations. "Here comes everybody" (HCE) is one such, and extremely apt given the way this particular blog has unfolded.

"Here comes everybody". One interpretation.

"We are all one, yet we do not know it.What we must become is what we are", as Thomas Merton ( or Father Louis, or Tom) said once in Bangkok not long before his death.

There is a beautiful word in Pali, mudita, meaning to share the joy of others. Mudita is one of the four divine abidings of the Buddhist Faith. Its opposite  can be thought of as jealousy. Mudita, "an inner wellspring of joy that is always available", just as God is always there to enter when we "leave ourselves behind". The Buddha also declared mudita as the "hearts release", and love (metta) as the "liberation of the heart".

Mudimetta

Thinking of "here comes everybody", our release is to be and share with others. Not just joy, but moments of grief, in fact all things.  Just as the words of Joyce blend into one another, amalgams of multiple languages,  often far more than merely two things becoming "as one."

At one time Joyce said that any reader of Finnegans Wake was "part of the process" and therefore not a passive observer; and that in fact no one could read too much into it. Samuel Beckett, who knew Joyce, said that Finnegans Wake was not about anything, but was the thing itself. 

The thing itself

Whatever anyone else makes of all this,  for me it all has resonance with "Love has no why". Bring in a "why" and all is lost; time and distance separate us from Reality.

Maybe to finish, a quick look at one or two words used by Joyce as he chuckled his way through the night. Let me leave for now the word Joyce coined for thunder (of which he was afraid) bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk, which would require far more than bluffs to consider, but start with optimominous, which is said to be "a typical human outlook on life", of  "hoping for the best or being optimistic about what is unfavourable, threatening or ominous" - as a Wakese Dictionary has it. Others maybe will have their own take on the word, however typical it might be or not be of their own outlook, whether upon "life" or anything else.

Thunder - leave it!

Then there  is hagiohygiecynicism, which the same dictionary tells me is a "fault finding contempt for the enjoyments of life", conjuring up thoughts of the puritanical and perhaps the sour faced.

James Joyce was also, possibly, the very first to mention television in a novel. He referred to it as a "bairdboard bombardment screen", seemingly already envisaging its potential to mesmerise, even if not then being able to anticipate having 100 or more channels to choose from.

A relatively early Bairdboard Bombardment Screen

Finally for now, virtually at random, "dawncing", defined as moving in rhythm or dancing "until the beginning of the day or dawn." Joyce loved to dance and often entertained his friends by doing so. His daughter, Lucia, before her troubles, was a talented dancer. 

Dawncing, dancing until dawn.

Related Quotes:- 

"Mutual forgiveness of each vice opens the gates of paradise" 

(William Blake)

"The moon and the sun are eternal travellers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home."

(Basho)

Postscript:- 

Finnegan's Wake, The Dubliners

Tim Finnegan lived in Walkin Street,
A gentleman Irish mighty odd
He had a brogue both rich and sweet,
An' to rise in the world he carried a hod
Tim had a sort of a tipplers way
With the love of the liquor he was born
And to send the man away each day,
A drop of the craythur every morn

Whack fol the dah now dance to yer partner
round the flure yer trotters shake
Wasn't/Isn't it truth I've told you,
Lots of fun at Finnegan's Wake

One morning Tim got rather full,
his head felt heavy which made him shake
He fell of a ladder and broke his skull,
So they carried him home his corpse to wake
They wrapped him up in a nice clean sheet,
They laid him out upon the bed
With a bottle of whiskey at his feet
and a barrel of porter at his head

His friends assembled at the wake,
and Misses Finnegan called for lunch
First she brought in tay and cake,
then pipes, tobacco and brandy punch
Biddy O'Brien began to cry,
"Such a lovely corpse, did you ever see,
Tim, auvreem! Why did you die?",
"Will ye hould your gob?" said Paddy McGee

Merry Murphy took up the job,
"O Biddy" says she "you're wrong, I'm sure"
Biddy gave her a belt in the gob
and left her sprawling on the floor
Civil did there engage,
t'was woman to woman and man to man
Shillelagh law was all the rage
and a row and a ruction soon began

Mickey Maloney ducked his head
when a bottle of whiskey flew at him
He ducked, and landing on the bed,
the whiskey scattered over Tim
Bedad he revived see how he rises
Tim Finnegan rising in the bed
Saying:" Whirl you whiskey around like blazes,
Me thunderin' Jesus, do ye think I'm dead?"

Time

Time makes many appearances in the works and life of James Joyce (when beginning his schooling, aged six-and-a-half, a teacher asked how old he was. "Half past six" he said, and this became his nickname for a while) Then again, possibly this can be said of most of us, if we work at all. Nowadays time is ubiquitous. It dictates when we rise and when we can retire to bed; it can makes us "late" and often it seems to stand between ourselves and fulfilment. Linear time.

In a past blog I spoke briefly (time wise) of a "bluffers guide" to Finnegan's Wake and I really had, at that time, no intention of downloading it, even at the small price demanded. But after giving consideration to dinner parties and the need to impress I began to see that a few bluffs would perhaps be beneficial to an upwardly mobile Pure Lander. So I have invested my money and had my "15 minute guide" to the Wake.

Bluffers?

I was surprised. It was a fine little introduction with sections on the what, why, where, who, when and how of Joyce's book (if "book" indeed be the word) One particular sentence that caught my attention (aka "just take what you need and leave the rest") was what led to this particular blog.

To quote:- "Time can be defined as that which keeps everything from happening at once." 

Bill Cliett, the author of  the 15 minute guide, does in fact precede those words with if,  so  obviously he did not see such a definition as totally exhausting all the possibilities of Time. But I was quite taken by the words; they drew  me in and I saw at once the potential of future bluffing at Dinner Parties and even of Blogs. But bluffing or not, time and all things West began to occupy my mind.

Time casting a shadow?

There is a fine little quote from the pen of St Augustine on the subject:-

 "For what is time? Who can  readily and briefly explain this? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not; yet I say boldly that I know, that if nothing passed away, time past were not; and if nothing were, time present were not. But if the present, should it always be present, and never pass into time past, verily it should not be time, but eternity"

St Augustine, perhaps pondering on the nature of Time

Mentioning eternity, often I think that many have absolutely no grasp of eternity at all. Eternity for some would seem to be merely endless time, time going on and on and on. One prominent Christian evangelist once said, when it was suggested that he might well become bored in heaven, that he could not envisage becoming so as "there would be work to do for God". Astonishing.

Which makes me think of an old story, of a man who dies and finds himself in a land flowing with milk and honey, where virtually all that was needed just grew on trees. Plus a servant on hand to supply all else. Well, what a life! But eventually it all began to pall just a bit and at last the man said to the servant:- "Please can I just have one or two tasks to help me fill the day?" Alas, the servant replied that such was the one thing he was unable to provide. "Then I think I would rather be in hell" the man said, to which the servant replied:- "Where do you think you are then?" Which has its lessons. (Maybe there will be work to do for God!)

Not always so easy to tell the difference

James Joyce spent seventeen years writing Finnegan's Wake. His much loved wife Nora referred to it as his "chop suey" book, and asked him "Why don't you write sensible books that people can read?" A good question, and maybe she had her eye on the potential Royalties. But no matter; Joyce, undeterred, stayed up long into the night while writing it, often chuckling merrily to himself. 

A typical Irish folk band

"Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake" as the old Irish folk song goes.

Is our own life "fun"? Joyce referred to Finnegan's Wake as being in one sense a dream world, and used a newly coined word "nightmaze"to describe it; therefore, a nightmare with the suggestion, or at least the possibility, of being unable to find our way out. 

Though just perhaps it is not really a case of trying to find a way out ?

A nightmaze?

Pure acceptance seems, at least to me, to take the linear direction of "time" out of the equation, yet without eliminating transformation. I remember again the words of Lama Govinda,  that "the only extension to the present is intensity".

What exactly is "intensity"? Straining the will to deepen commitment to a path; trying harder; making constant resolutions to change? For me it never seems to work. But in letting go, in acceptance and gratitude - no matter what the moment holds - strangely, over time, transformation can  be recognised and known beyond all calculation.

"Intensity" and gratitude?

Related Quotes:-

When a hideous man becomes a father
And a son is born to him
In the middle of the night
He trembles and lights a lamp
And runs to look in anguish
On that child's face
To see whom he resembles.

 (Chuang Tzu, translation by Thomas Merton)

The best use of life is love. The best expression of love is time. The best time to love is now.

(Rick Warren)

Nothing endures but change

(Heraclitus)

Our real journey in life is interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts.

(Thomas Merton)

A world of grief and pain
flowers bloom -
even then

(Issa)