A Fistful of Sand

Hongaku Jodo Website Click here to subscribe to our newsletter. Dr. Masaru Emoto has experimented on water for more than a decade. He proved that water can sense, comprehend, see, and listen. It seems that water can understand our minds. He found that water can respond to writing, language, music, and even peoples’ minds. If someone feels love and writes the word “Love” in different languages and stick the paper on a bottle of water for water to “see” it and later freeze the water bottle. When looking at the water under a microscope, we will see beautiful water crystals. If the write the word “Hate” in any language, the water crystals seemingly become ugly to some people. Water also seems to listen to & understand music. When classical music is played the water crystals become beautiful. Say words like, “I hate you” or “I don’t like you” to water, the crystals become what is usually described as ugly. This seems to prove, at least to some, that water is a living org...

Click here to receive or newsletter or Check out our Website One of my favorite lines from college freshman English literature is still etched in my mind. It is James Joyce’s novel The Dubliners and reads, “ Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” Mr. Duffy was a one-dimensional bureaucrat who lives an unattractively plain, colorless life. He represents the post-modern everyman: cut off from his feelings, defined by rules and protocols, and lacking purpose and meaningful connections. Buddhist practice is often characterized as being completely rational and firmly implanted in “reality” (whatever that word might mean to you). The popular image is that it leaves no room for sensitivity. There are many people who self-identify as Buddhists of one sort or another that live in their heads finding the distance to their bodies a long walk. In classes I’ll sometimes ask a student how far away he is from his feet. I often get an answer like “five and a half feet or so”...

Hongaku Jodo Website Click here to subscribe to our newsletter. I used to live in an apartment that was built in 1921. It was a cool place with a small landing and stairs going down four flights into the alley. With restaurants on either side of the apartment some of the neighbors thought we had a “rat problem.” One day the building management decided to resolve the problem: they poured concrete into the rat burrows, destroying the rats’ homes and suffocating the rats that were in the holes. The night of the day this happened I came home from work and was a little surprised to see this was done. I hadn’t seen but one or two rats the 8 or 9 years I lived there. The something caught my eye. One of the surviving rats was frantically digging at the hardened cement.  I thought I heard him crying.  Oddly enough we seemed to bond at that moment. My heart went out to the rat that lost his home and family through the cruelty and misunderstanding of a few busine...

Hongaku Jodo Website Click here to subscribe to our newsletter. I hate to be a downer but the facts are there is no one who has been born that can avoid sickness, aging, weakness, separation from and death of your loved ones, loss of wealth, and the hate and harm of your enemy. The poor want to become rich, the childless want to have children, the unemployed want to have a job, and so Saṃsāra goes. How many of these desperate dreams will come into being? It often seems like there is no solution to our problems. People all over the world are dying in terrible ways, car accidents, terrible diseases, mudslides, violence of war, violence of poverty, many in hopelessness take their own lives. We are constantly threatened with human extinction through nuclear, biological or climate catastrophe. Unexpected death is facing us everyday. We are taught that even though a living body can die consciousness never dies. The person manifests around this consciousness and a persona...

Hongaku Jodo Website Click here to subscribe to our newsletter. "Intention, I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, & intellect." Anguttara Nikaya 6.63 "'I am the owner of my actions (kamma), heir to my actions, born of my actions, related through my actions, and have my actions as my arbitrator. Whatever I do, for good or for evil, to that will I fall heir'...   "[This is a fact that] one should reflect on often, whether one is a woman or a man, lay or ordained...” Anguttara Nikaya 5.57 If the road to hell is paved with intentions that are careless, lustful, or mean; then the road to nibbana is also paved with skillful intentions.  Good intentions are proportionate to their goodness tend toward the pleasurable heavens. This means not all intentions are equal, not all good intentions are especially skillful. Even if a person means well, their actions can often be misplaced and inappropriate...