Learning Situations

I have in my little library a copy of a Buddhist text, the Avatamsaka Sutra (also known as the Flower Ornament Scripture) It is a vast text, running to over 1500 pages. D T Suzuki speaks of it as follows:-

As the consummation of Buddhist thought, Buddhist sentiment, and Buddhist experience........here not only deeply speculative minds find satisfaction, but humble and heavily oppressed hearts too, will have their burdens lightened......abstract truths are so concretely, so symbolically represented here that one will finally come to the realisation of the truth that even in a particle of dust the whole universe is seen reflected....

"The thick textured foreground is symbolic of the barriers that conceal, and yet unveil, the Truths that set us free"

As a "humble spirit" myself  😎  I do indeed find many burdens lightened by reading and reflecting upon the words of this scripture. I relate it to the guidance of oya-sama, a Japanese word used to embrace the understanding of Amida, the Buddha of Infinite Compassion. "Oya-sama" has no equivalent in English. It means either a father or a mother and also both of them as parents; it has no gender. It is neither 'he' nor 'she'; it is the one whose heart is wholly occupied with looking after its own children's welfare. It is probably more motherly than fatherly in that it is not the mighty master or head of a family who reproves, chastens and punishes, but rather all-embracing love.

The most appropriate image of "oya-sama" I could find

Getting back to the Avatamsaka Scripture, its opening chapter, of over 100 pages, extols the virtues, the ways and means, of how enlightenment has manifested itself to infinite numbers of Bodhisattva's. For a Pure Land Buddhist like myself, it speaks of the infinite ways that Amida comes to the human heart, as oya-sama. Drawn virtually at random, here are some small excerpts from the opening chapter.....

The Buddha's ocean of unexcelled virtues

Manifests a lamp which illumines the world:

Saving and protecting all sentient beings,

He gives them all peace, not leaving out one

The Buddha cultivates an ocean of compassion,

His heart always as broad as the whole world

Therefore his spiritual powers are boundless

Buddha, observing the world, conceives kind compassion,

Appearing in order to aid sentient beings,

Showing them the supreme way of peace and joy.

The Buddha observes the world

The Buddha appears in the world,

Observes the inclinations of all beings,

And matures them by various means.

As the translator, Thomas Cleary, explains in the appendix, the "miracles of awareness and existence are 'miracles' of Buddha. They are constantly edifying in the sense that all things are always teaching. The miraculous transformation performed by the Buddha for the enlightenment of all is, from this perspective, the shifting of the mental outlook to experiencing everything as a learning situation".

It has to be asked, is everything a "learning situation"? When thousands are blown to bits in airstrikes, when a child is murdered, when infants die of hunger - what do they learn? If the reality of each begins and ends in time, exists only between birth and death, it is difficult to think that anything could be learnt from such events by the victims. Yet, in thinking about such, perhaps we can learn?

Well, possibly many will read of the "buddhas" of the Flower Ornament Scripture with sceptical ears. Myself, thinking mythically and translating Buddhas into an understanding of Reality-as-is, I have found that I can look back and see my life not as a "tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing", but as a gift of grace. Knowledge has not accumulated, bringing wisdom, but certainties and "answers" have been stripped away leaving me free to give an appropriate statement within each moment. It seems to me that Reality is neither entirely subject to a linear timescale nor is mind reduced to the bounds of our skulls. 

"To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour" (William Blake)

Anyway, to keep on-topic (for perhaps the first time), concerning learning situations, of everything being a learning situation. What is learning, what exactly is it we learn, and how do we learn? I think we learn what love is and we learn the truth of what the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said, that "love has no why".  I observe that people of all faiths, and people of no faith, people of academic learning and of no learning........seem to know. Know sometimes and not other times. All a bit of a mystery. In Buddhism, enlightenment is spoken of and "compassion" rather than love. Sometimes Buddhism speaks of a path.

Here are some instructions:-

Master, Master! What should I do to gain enlightenment?

Well, my son, to gain enlightenment you must rise in the morning, dress and then eat.

But Master, I do not understand!

Well, my son, if you do not understand, you must rise in the morning, dress and then eat.

I think the Trappist monk Thomas Merton was on the same track when he wrote that if we wanted to "find satisfactory formulas" we 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". 

So there are no formulas, but apparently we should just get on with living as best as we are able. Perhaps a final image is fitting, of a zen master tearing up the sutras........

Ah well, back to the Flower Ornament Scripture.