One more memo

 Well, here I am again. It is raining so unable to take up my seat on the bench beside the river. Maybe for the best......yesterday a little wagtail appeared looking for crumbs and I had nothing to give. His/her chirps were in vain.

I live in a small retirement complex, about 45 apartments. All self-contained, it is not a care home. We have a two bedroom groundfloor apartment looking out over a park.

Feet first

It is the sort of place where, as I observed once, you can only exit feet first. From a Buddhist perspective, the whole ambience assists with daily contemplation of one's own mortality. Possibly this can be deemed morbid but in fact I find it life giving. Insight grows into the reality of thankfulness for the present moment, whatever that moment holds. Insight grows slowly, very slowly at times, but grow it does - which nourishes faith in the grace of Reality-as-is.

Thankfulness

Every so often another resident exits feet first, or takes a tumble, or has time in hospital. You remember them when they are gone. For me, often, I recognise that the time you saw them stumble by, or welcome their grandchildren, or join in the christmas sing-song, that you were seeing their "golden age". That recognition helps me bless the moment now.

While I can acknowledge that some might see all this as cheap platitudes, for me they do not come cheap. The cost can be seen as infinite, a price only Reality can "pay" or even understand.

We all have to speak from our very own Pure Land.

Another Memo

 More from the Pure Land.

Empty spaces

Coffee in hand, pissing down, seeking to draw comfort from "what does not destroy us makes us stronger", I read a few bits and pieces from Stephen Batchelor. A man who advocates no position.

He speaks of some obscure Tibetan "view" on "emptiness".....

".....the emptiness of inherent existence is a simple negation as opposed to an affirming negation. This means that the absence opened up by emptiness does not disclose and thereby affirm a transcendent reality (like God or Pure Consciousness) that was previously obscured by one’s egoistic confusion. It simply removes a fiction that was never there."

The Buddha spoke of "dwelling in emptiness". As Mr Batchelor says, "emptiness is first and foremost a condition in which we dwell, abide, and live."

Stephen Batchelor goes on:-

Rather than being the negation of “self,” emptiness discloses the dignity of a person who has realized what it means to be fully human. Such emptiness is far from being an ultimate truth that needs to be understood through logical inference and then directly realized in a state of nonconceptual meditation. It is a sensibility in which one dwells, not a privileged epistemological object that, through knowing, one gains a cognitive enlightenment.

As a Pure Lander I identify with the above and would call it Faith. Always open to the simple hearted. Very egalitarian.

Faith has no content. "Though He slay me yet will I love Him" as theists might say - thus pointless in many ways. It offers nothing. Mocked by many. Yet I find it more and more life-giving.

"What are the teachings of an entire lifetime?" Answer, "An appropriate statement."

Yes.

Yet another memo

 

Not much to report this morning from the Pure Land (AKA the park bench or wherever) I have been ploughing my way through the Dhammapada over the past few days. The translation is fairly dry to say the least but gems appear from out of the mist. A little phrase....... "Day and night, the mind delights in gentleness." The words struck me and stuck. They have already saved me from a few mental diatribes aimed at Boris Johnson - the mental processes mercifully cut off at the second or third "bastard". After which, the delight in gentleness! For a few moments at least.

Almost through the Dhammapada now and moving on to the Flower Ornament Scripture. I have often dipped into that in the past. D T Suzuki says of this work.....(he gives it its posh name)

“As to the Avatamsaka-Sutra, it is really the consummation of Buddhist thought, Buddhist sentiment, and Buddhist experience. To my mind, no religious literature in the world can ever approach the grandeur of conception, the depth of feeling, and the gigantic scale of composition, as attained by the sutra. Here not only deeply speculative minds find satisfaction, but humble spirits 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 a realization of the truth that even in a particle of dust the whole universe is seen reflected—not this visible universe only, but a vast system of universes, conceivable by the highest minds only.”

Humble spirits? Now there's a thing! As Thomas Merton once said, "we can never be humble enough."

Nevertheless it is a fine scripture. Still, if a scientific treatise is preferred or the morning paper, that's the way it goes.

The rain has held off. The forecast is that snow is on the way.