A Fistful of Sand

Visit the Hongaku Jodo Website Click here to subscribe to our newsletter. The experience of stress, pain, suffering is not a simple thing. The Buddha once observed, we respond to its complexity in two ways: And what is the result of stress? There are some cases in which a person overcome with pain, his mind exhausted, grieves, mourns, laments, beats his breast, & becomes bewildered. Or one overcome with pain, his mind exhausted, comes to search outside, ‘Who knows a way or two to stop this pain?’ I tell you, monks, that stress results either in bewilderment or in search.  — Anguttara Nikaya 6:63 The problem is that the bewilderment often guides the search, leading to more suffering and stress. To resolve this dilemma, the Buddha devoted his life, after his Awakening, to showing a reliable way to the end of stress. In summarizing the whole of his teaching, he said: Both formerly & now, it is only stress that I describe, and the cessa...

“Deny the passport, throw it away and make a great decision that you will not leave this shore until and unless you have liberated all the human beings." — The Buddha This quote is all over the internet, usually without citation. There is a good reason why there is no citation showing the source of the quote. It is virtually impossible for the Buddha to have said this. First because it contradicts everything the Buddha said, but it also ignores the nature of mind. The quote is said to come from the Diamond Sutra. Well, what does the Diamond Sutra really say about this?  “If a Bodhisattva announces: I will liberate all living creatures, he is not rightly called a Bodhisattva. Wherefore? Because, Subhuti, there is really no such condition as that called Bodhisattvaship, because Buddha teaches that all things are devoid of selfhood, devoid of separate individuality. Subhuti, if a Bodhisattva announces: I will set forth majestic Buddha-lands, one does not call him a B...

Nagarjuna urges us not to mistake the finger for the moon. He tells us not to confound words and meaning, that is, not to mistake the secular words that are used to point to ultimate truth for that truth itself. We are able to see the moon because of the finger. However, we should not look at the finger and think that it is the moon. This is the meaning of the phrase, “Rely on the meaning, not on the words.” Here, the topic of our discussion is the significance of symbols. Dr. Nubuo Haneda got himself into considerable controversy and argument with some of the hard liners in Jodo Shin Shu (True Pure Land school) people a few years ago by advancing the idea that Amida was a symbol and not to be taken as a literal being living out in space somewhere. At the time I had already been teaching that message at a Zen center I worked at. I likened Amida, Tara, Manjushri and all the Cosmic Buddhas and Bodhisattvas to Jungian or cultural archetypes, though they are not exactly the same. Late...

Visit the  Hongaku Jodo Website Click here to subscribe to our newsletter. We observe reality from a point denied by our species (and cultural, and individual) makeup, our observations can only be made through representations, and representations always both add to and subtract from what they represent. —Derek Bickerton The idea of a skillful desire may sound a little off beat, but a mature mind intuitively pursues the desires it sees as skillful and drops those it perceives as not. As the Buddha explains when discussing Right Mindfulness and appropriate attention, a skillful desire is a way of fabricating a better delusion, one that is helpful to us on our journey towards the other shore. Fundamental to all living beings is the desire for happiness and avoid pain. Every other desire can be seen as a strategy for attaining that happiness. You want a new car, a better job, a sexual partner, or even have the desire for inner peace because you probably think it will...