Way of Oneness: A Sangha Podcast

Excerpt: At the heart of the teaching of impermanence is conditioned existence but what is conditioned existence? Conditioned existence is the reality that all phenomena, all things that exist  arise in dependence upon other phenomena: "if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist"  This is the heart of impermanence of all - because all things all phenomena arise out of conditions and when the condition causes it to arise, cease then, that which arose, vanishes or transforms into something different.   That is way the Buddha says, “All conditioned things have the nature of vanishing,” Let that sink in  Everything by its nature vanishes. In Japanese the heartbreak, the melancholy of the impermanence of all things is summed up in the phrase Mono no Aware.  Mono-no-aware can’t truly be translated. Any one who speaks another language understands this but it can be literally translated to “the ahhness of things” The isness of things or “the bittersweet poignancy of things.”   I remember some years ago reading the introduction to one of my favorite poets Eugenio de Andrade.   The poet writes from his love of the world and the grief and praise that come from its transience.  Something that I am learning as of late is that Grief and Praise are intertwined, as Martin Prechtel teaches us in his book, The Smell of Rain on Dust.  So too are impermanence and gratitude.  Now the concept of mono-no-aware is born from the teachings of shinto and Buddhism, and was first used to explain Japanese aesthetics to explain uch traditions as cherry-blossom viewing and haiku.  But this insight is much more than simply aesthetics.  Mono No Aware is at the heart of a meaningful everyday Buddhism.

In this talk we explore the idea of bonbu - of each of us being "foolish beings" and who this informs our community and practice. Excerpt "It is our studentship that we share, not our specialness or holiness. It is with humility being aware of our limitations. As I have said time and time again,  I too will be disappointed, and that I do not nor have I ever claimed to be a guru or a master, just a foolish being.  This idea of the foolish or ordinary being is the foundation to what we do.  And I want to continue our translation of the Shin Tradition. Today it is an idea that is very central in the Shin Tradition - called bonbu."

EXCERPT "Breathing in I am aware that I am breathing in, breathing out, I am aware that I am breathing out.  To really live life we can touch this simple reality with deep awareness – underneath my  stories, religion, ideas and philosophy –  I appreciate this so much,   At the time Akegarasu Sensei began teaching he was rather revolutionary, looking for a way to take the teachings of Buddha into people’s everyday lives. His language is different, more direct, less dogmatic and more personal Rev Akegarasu goes on to write in Shout of Buddha.  "Besides my own living I don't need religion, philosophy, and morality.  Religion, philosophy, morality, and art and politics, are not in the world of my living beside my living. Beside my being alive there is no God or Buddha. When I die God and Buddha will also die. Look at me.  What do you think his point is in these lines? For me it is the realization of Being Alive in the flow of now is more important the ideas of being alive – Life is more elemental, life is process, to live is a verb, it is the state of simply being.    

Excerpt "That aside, here I am driving to work or home from work, like I do every day and the reality that I want, the reality that I EXPECT  is the following:       no red lights,       goodly speeds,       graceful lane changes,       blinkers, yes blinkers.  I expect traffic to be light and if it is heavy, still moving efficiently.     But what happens when these expectations are dashed after the first right hand turn? Anger? rage?  We, I mean I become frustrated, my pulse races, my vision narrows.  I am assigning all kinds of character traits to people I don’t know. I transform into an enemy, one of Mara's henchmen. I have also noticed that since the pandemic it has gotten worse. I even noticed during the week as I was preparing this dharma talk, that as it says in the Dharma Highway Sutra,   “Even the virtuous follower can find themselves overcome  by blind passions when someone invades their lane of traffic  or crowds their rear bumper at high speeds.

Excerpt "The fellowship is our training ground in our practice.  It is where we come as we are and that means there is lots of opportunities to practice the virtues of patience, humility, compassion, deep listening, letting go of views and expectations  The practice of sangha can be very difficult because your come as you are is really screwing with my come as I am are right now.   The spirit of come as you are or sonomama in Japanese keeps us steadfast and open.  Over the years you have heard me compare the Sangha to a Rock Polisher, it is one of my favorite analogies.  The practice of Sangha is like an old rock polisher where all our sharp edges are crashed against one another until we both become smooth and shiny.  Come as you are opens our practice up to all within the sangha within the fellowship family, accepting each other as we are means we are taking responsibility for our own shit." Christopher Kakuyo Sensei

Here is the first of Eight Foundational Dharma Talks that share the teachings that make our community what it is and our tradition's expression of the Buddha Dharma and Everyday Buddhism.   This is a dharma talk that shares what we mean when we translate Namu Amida Butsu as "come as you are." What does that mean in a contemporary context?  I also share how the mythic Buddha Amida fits into it all and how this Buddha is relevant today, even for the more secular minded of the West.     

yearly before our Summer Retreat we review what going for refuge to the three jewels means. In this Talk Christopher Kakuyo talks about taking refuge in general and more specifically regarding taking refuge in the Buddha.  As westerns we seem to have a challenge taking refuge in the Buddha. This may be because of our Post Religious' Stress Disorder. We embrace the Dharma and even the Sangha, but the Buddha we keep at arms length, lest he becomes some sort of deity.  Christopher thinks, that by doing this we are doing a disservice to our practice.    EXCERPT By keeping this distance from the Buddha, we miss out on something; we miss out on the Buddha's personality, temperament, and example. We miss an intimate human connection to one of the most fully and realized humans.  I struggle with this.  There are times that I feel so connected to the historical Buddha and or the mythic Buddha Amida, that I find tears in my eyes when washing the statue'd face of the Buddha. I have found that my practice is easier and more natural during these times. I am easier to get along with, and when I feel disconnected from the Buddha, or the Buddha feels like nothing more than some dusty figure of history, my practice becomes more challenging if I am practicing at all.  I appreciate this from Subhuti, a Buddhist teacher in the Tritania order. Subhuti writes about re-imagining the Buddha and how we need to try to imagine the Buddha and his Enlightenment in a way that intellectually and emotionally stirs us.   Why emotionally?  Our practice is not just a practice of the mind but the heart-mind. In Chinese kanji, the symbol for heart and mind are the same; there exists no independent thought without accompanying feeling, no distinct feeling without thought, and no compassion in the absence of intellect—in short: no heart without mind or mind without heart. Our connection to the Buddha is intellectual and emotional at the same time so that we can mobilize our energies to Go for Refuge to him, to his teachings and example. How do we do that for us who have and will be taking refuge in the Buddha? He writes,  "We can only imagine the Buddha wholeheartedly by discovering his image in our minds, inspired and supported by the images around us. Images of this kind cannot be ordered or devised. They must live and grow and, like plants, they must emerge from their own natural environments: the psyches of the individuals in which they appear.   

We use an old Zen story to look at Doing Nothing as skillful action. Excerpt "A young monk is struggling and he goes to his master, telling him he is really struggling. So he asks his Master Ganto. When the three worlds threaten me, what shall I do?" Ganto answered, "Sit down." "I do not understand," said the monk. Ganto said, "Pick up the mountain and bring it to me. Then I will tell you." .. You can just see the poor monk, overwhelmed by the three worlds, which are the world of form, the world of thought and the world of desire… basically everything -  He is coming to the master for help – in my own translation, the young says again to Ganto, I am at my wits end, what the hell am I supposed to do.   Ganto looks him right in the face and says sit down.  Can you imagine, I don’t think it was what he was expecting – he probably was even more confused because  he was already sitting down....  

  Here is a dharma talk from one of the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship's community on Juneteenth,    Enjoy

From Already Broken a Dharma talk given Jan 24th, 2021 at the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship.   "Without an intimacy with impermanence, our whole lives are spent in what we can do or will do tomorrow or we spend time worrying about the past, not living in the here and now. The problem is that we think we have time. We don't. Living without an intimacy with impermanence, our lives lack a deep transformative gratitude and in its place, there is a subtle but stifling entitlement. Somehow we think that we are entitled to tomorrow. We are not. Without intimacy with impermanence, we take tomorrow for granted. How foolish we can be."   Christopher Kakuyo 

Excerpt   When I first started to explore and examine this precept, my first inclination was to feel guilt for taking paper clips from work or printing things for personal uses on my work computer.  Funny, that I found ways around it Like buying a ream of paper to replace the 40 pages I used. I started to make sure I paid for all of my Trax rides. I did start to examine some of my motivations for doing what I was doing, but for me, most of these simple practices were very superficial and more a residual of my old relationships with the Judeo- Christian commandments.  Again, we do not practice the precepts to appease a deity, or because it makes us a good Buddhist, but to help us gain insight into the mindset of an awakened being, a state of mind that is grounded in contentment. A practice-based on any kind of checklist is just a checklist and ultimately non-transformative.  There is a much deeper meaning in the second precept than simply not taking something that belongs to someone else. That is a legalistic approach.  Buddhism teaches that there are 10 fetters - mental chains that keep us bound - one of them is the dependence on moral rules and religious observances as an end in themselves – Being circumspect and never “stealing” even paperclips may be laudable but is it transformative in itself. Maybe.   From my life experience, the end of the second precept is not simply about not stealing, about observance a rule but about how we perceive the world and our place in it.  It is about cultivating a state of mind of contentment, of enoughness. Gyomay Kubose Sensei teaches us that an agitated mind cannot see things as they are, only a calm mind can. A continual sense of lack, a subtle greed, creates great and subtle waves of agitation. And over time this creates a subtle and pernicious sense of entitlement. At the heart of the second precept is an antidote to this continual refrain and rationalization of taking something not freely given, “I deserve this” or I deserve more than I am being given.  These are all manifestations of the poison of greed."

Even though the precepts were not directed to the community directly, they are all about community. The precepts are about action and intention.  I appreciate this from Wendell Berry, “ To act in short is to live. Living is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. And one does not live alone. Living is a communal act… He goes on to quote Emerson, “I grasp the hand of those next to me, and take my place in the circle, to suffer and work.” I love the lack of sentimentality in these words. For us, the suffering is the first noble truth- dukkha – the acknowledgment that in the midst of life there is suffering and for us, the work is the practice.  The precepts can be seen as the practice.  This is what we do as a Sangha, we take each other's hand in our suffering and do the work. And what precept is more at the heart of community than affirming life?  The first precept is from which all the other precepts flow.   

Excerpt from the dharma talk.   The heaviest burdens we can carry are the burdens of the past- either for something that was done to us or done by us, and we spend so much time there.   I have talked about this before, that we are constantly time-traveling from the past to the future and rarely present in the flow of now.  We fix ourselves firmly in the past or because our dissatisfaction with the present or our unwillingness to change in the present, we travel constantly to the future, where everything is controllable, and the outcomes can be as expected. As Gyomay Kubose Sensei teaches,    "Many people get attached to the past or to the future and neglect the important present. We must live the best "now" with full responsibility."    I think we understand this though many of us do nothing about it. I think that is why Gyomay Sensei ends his teaching with the idea of living with full responsibility.  

This is something I have been thinking about in our current environment. With so much polarity in our greater community, we stop listening to one another and when we do we start seeing one another as enemies. The Buddha taught 2600 years ago that hatreds never cease through hatred ... through love alone they cease. This is an eternal law. The challenge we face is that our own righteous anger can be a barrier to listening and close us off from love. Sometimes I think we fall into this trap when we see our anger as " righteous", a species of anger the embraces duality and sees only victims and perpetrators, and anyone of a different tribe as alien and a threat. Unfortunately for us all, regardless of what side of the polarity we abide, we are both complicit of such thinking. It makes me wonder how much of my righteous anger is more about my suffering and could the depth of my righteous anger be the level of my own suffering and more about me no matter how much I pretend it is about others? And if that is true should I not attend to that suffering within me that is overflowing?   I want to always remember that protective anger, it is not violent but assertive, not blinded by “righteousness”, not fickle, but determined. Protective anger is awake, intentional, wise and focused on liberating ALL beings from suffering delusion and stupidity   Namu Amida Butsu

From the dharma talk   "Many appreciate and value the teachings of the Buddha,  post endless memes with quotes he said and never said, there are some who have got out of bad marriages, bad jobs because of something they read or heard on a Buddhist podcast – and all this is the fruit of the teaching. At the same time, going for refuge is more than just an intellectual appreciation of the Buddhas Brains. Going for refuge is not simply an activity of thinking, of ideas or concepts but the walking of the path of the Buddha. It is an activity of the heart. It is important to note that in Chinese the same character is used to convey “heart” and “mind,” and that the two are seen by the Chinese as one inseparable “heartmind.” Taking refuge in the dharma can be seen as taking the teachings from the conceptual to the everyday – we take refuge in the dharma in our hearts."

excerpt...   "Awareness practice is not just breathing in and breathing out, it's not just noticing the breathing of your lover or the dharma talk of a meadow of wildflowers, it is also going down in the muck and mud of ALL of who we are, not just the curated parts of who we share on Facebook.   Awareness practice supports our aspiration to forgive and be forgiven, it is at the heart of accepting who we are as we are, and others as they are, and this aspiration is at the heart of come as you, is at the heart of namu amida butsu."  

  excerpt from the Dharma talk delivered May 26th in Salt Lake City.   "..that brings to my mind the Mojave desert at night - the Mojave Desert Preserve is also a dark skies Preserve meaning that any artificial list is restricted and it is one of the few places that you can see the Milky Way the way our ancestors did for millennium - Lots of tourist come get of the tour bus and look up at the night sky for about 5 minutes and say “that’s nothing I can see that at home”  disappointed they get back into the tour buses - The reason they didn’t see anything is that they didn’t let their eyes adjust to the darkness - they actually didn’t see anything - those that were willing to stop,  sit and wait in the darkness and let their eyes adjust - are shown the same view of stars that the first humans stood in awe of and made into the gods of their myths.   Are we not the same in our spiritual journeys - if all spiritual journeys start in darkness is not the first step not a step at all but to finally and courageously sit silently in the darkness and let our spiritual eyes adjust to the darkness -   Isn’t that what meditation is, it is sitting in the darkness of ourselves being still and allowing the darkness to show us the light of our inner luminosity?   For me it's similar to the lyrics from Leonard Cohen - but instead of all the cracks in the world letting the light in - I see all the cracks in the world letting the light out   May we all sit silently in the dark so we can finally see the light of our own Buddha Nature, show us the way to freedom. "