"All is suffering" claims the Buddha. Just how pessimistic can you get? But to walk the path is to seek the heartwood of the Dharma, perhaps even to find that the walk is the heartwood itself.
The Dharma claims that to see rightly is to know the end of suffering. To know it, be it and share it; more, to see and know it in this world. Just how much better can it get? What is being said is that if we truly see Reality for what it truly is we shall be free of suffering - and this without any betrayal of this world for any imagined other. What a wonderful affirmation of Reality, our cosmos, our home.
Searching for Reality |
Thus "maya" is not that this world is illusion but, as far as the Dharma is concerned, the claim that to see and know this world falsely is to suffer.
Maya |
It has been interesting recently to dip into a few books concerned with "zen cosmology", particularly in the thought of the 13th century Japanese thinker and zen practitioner Dogen. Early reports of this man suggested that he liked to sit on cushions and meditate his life away, perhaps a challenger to Bodhidharma whose own preference was to stare at walls. I am now finding that Dogen was often on the move and loved the Lotus Sutra, its metaphors and imagery; loved words in fact. That he would have echoed the thought of Paracelsus....."As you talk, so is your heart".
For Dogen the Lotus Sutra expressed his very own take on Reality, of the liberative qualities of spatiality and temporality. I too like such metaphors and imagery, especially when they transform the heart. Bodhisattvas of healing. Well, they sure beat charging around on a horse wielding "rods of iron" to "smite the nations". I was also reading recently of a Church in Pennsylvania where the congregation were asked to bring along their AR-15 semi-automatics to a "Blessing Ceremony". Such weapons, said the Church Elder, related to the "rods of iron" mentioned in the Christian Book of Revelation.
Another take on the "rod of iron" |
"As you believe so shall it be unto you" as the Good Book says. Yes, continued the Church Elder, when Christ returns he shall bring with him his very own rod of iron.
Each to their own.
Getting back to the Lotus Sutra and its own Mahayana imagery, such imagery "expresses the vastness and the immanence of the sacred in space as well as time and breaks open limited, conventional, linear perspectives of both space and time." (Dan Leighton, in "Visions of Awakening Space and Time")
For various reasons I see the "linear perspective" as being the one to go, at least as being a sole perspective. A simple example of such a perspective is that the progression of time will provide the only final answer to suffering; the "world to come"; rewards, compensations and punishments. In simpler terms, that we can really start living once we are dead. This is not to mock but to recognise that "now is the time of salvation".
Read all about it ( or listen ) |
No comments:
Post a Comment