I have had a new article published. It is titled, “The Role of the Good Friend in the Gandavyuha Sutra.” For those who are familiar with the Avatamsaka Sutra, you will recognize the Gandavyuha Sutra as the thirty-first and final book of the Flower Ornament canon. My article is about the conception of the “good friend” in general Buddhism and in the Gandavyuha specifically. It was published under the 14th Issue of the Bodhi Journal as part of a series on Buddhism and Self-cultivation. If you are interested, the link is here. Simply go down to “Reflections” and click on the article with my name.
We hope to know and express the Name, and we hope to touch the Presence. We want this for our own liberation, and for the benefit of other sentient beings. But what is it like to know the Name? Can anybody say with confidence that they know exactly what the Presence is whispering to their heart?
The Buddha is always present, everywhere. But how are we to be more aware of it? Let us recall that the mind is the basis for all thoughts, speech, and actions. The Perfection of Wisdom Sutras state that the mind that realizes emptiness is “purely luminous.” And what else is Amitabha, the Name, except Infinite Light? Therefore, the Buddha’s Presence is the energy of the awakened mind within you. As Thich Nhat Hanh writes:
“Whatever has happened, this problem or that event, should not cause you to lose your happiness and peace, because you have the Buddha, the energy of awakening, within you. The Buddha is with you when you smile mindfully. The Buddha is with you when you walk mindfully. The Buddha is with you when you drink tea peacefully. You know you’re capable of drinking your tea that way. You’re capable of walking that way, and you’re capable of breathing that way. Don’t think that the Buddha is abstract. The Buddha is very concrete” (Thich Nhat Hanh, 2007, p. 184).
When you are aware of yourself and your thoughts, speech, and actions, the Buddha’s Presence becomes easier to abide in. And if they are good thoughts, speech, and actions, then you are dwelling in the Name, in the Buddha. All it requires is a cultivation of mindfulness, awareness, and compassion for oneself and for others. It is about facing reality, for reality is Buddha, the Name. But the practice that attunes us to the Name most powerfully is the Buddha-invocation, or to recite “Namo Amitabha Buddha.” For it unites the revealed Name and mindfulness together, awakening the enlightened mind in a single liturgical tradition.
Of course, I am a Mahayana Buddhist because I think it offers sentient beings the greatest spiritual freedom. I would not be a Mahayanist if I did not believe this. I am able to embrace the skilful means of the Name, without having to explain away other wisdoms and traditions of the world as “false” or the works of an evil, divisive force. There are aspects of the Name in everything. Through the Name’s skilful means, I can see his words engraved on every tradition that honours its ageless principles of compassion, love, and insight. It is true freedom to devote one’s life to Amitabha, and the next, and the next, and with one’s bodhisattvahood, reveal the Name to the myriad suffering beings in the many universes scattered throughout the fabrics of reality. This awareness of one’s “debt” to a higher power, to the Presence, is accepted in many faiths. The very name of Islam means “submission” - submission to what is truly real. St. Paul writes of freedom through subservience to Christ - where one loses nothing and receives from Christ a hundredfold through one’s obedience. In a similar way, so too does the Presence of the Name permeate a single blade of grass with enlightenment, in which samsara is already liberated - it only needs to remember, to re-awaken itself to the sacred, holy syllables of “Namo Amitabha Buddha.”
I have long been fascinated by the Name, which is perhaps what draws me to Pure Land, a tradition that reveals the Presence of Amitabha through the Name. Many people contemplate and wonder about what they call the Divine, and why. Many call him God. Many others call her Goddess. Some express it through the sacred name Yahweh, or Jesus Christ, or Allah. Speaking from a Pure Land perspective, I simply use “the Name” interchangeably with Amitabha, the Buddha, the Presence, and the Nature. With my sutras and my prayer beads, I invoke and commune thus:
1. the Name
2. Amitabha Buddha
3. the Buddha
4. the Presence
5. the Nature
These are my five names of the inconceivable Name. What are yours?
The Nature is present in all things. It dwells in every breathing creature. It is dormant in every fluttering heart that beats with life in this universe. The Nature is that of the Buddha, the latent potentiality of supreme, unsurpassed enlightenment and bliss. This is a truth that must always be proclaimed for those who teach, counsel, or are involved in personal development. We must remember these cardinal points:
“When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending.” - Thich Nhat Hahn
“Deep down, no one is unworthy.”
“The Nature is within all.”
“Sometimes it’s not just good or bad. It just is. Turn it into good, for the sake of enlightening others.”
“Buddha Nature reveals itself in many aspects: Gods, titans, lesser divinities. They all point to the Nature, to the Name.”
I am not a Catholic, but I have read many of Pope Benedict XVI’s works, and read them thoroughly. I have a respect for his depth of thought, clarity in communicating theological ideas, and his unusual combination of scholarly crispness and poetic expression. In some places I do think he grows a little vague and generalizes the opinions of others, and although I disagree with him on many points about religion and ethics, I am a “reader” of Pope Benedict XVI - perhaps more so than any other Christian author except for my favourite Catholic monk: Thomas Merton.
An interesting passage from the Pope is his warning against living as if there was no God, that is, living life disregarding religion as a part of life and not as the ground of life itself. I would agree with this very general assertion since religion tacked on to life is more of a gimmick or an escape from boredom or misery, whilst life lived through authentic, mindful (and not fanatic or close-minded) religion is true life. Here, I would like to bold a sentence that, to me, speaks of the Pope’s implicit affirmation of a Buddhist truth that goes “beyond” God:
‘Theology must go back to being truly “theo-logy,” speaking about and with God. The one necessity (unum necessarium) of man is God. Everything changes, whether God exists or not. Unfortunately, we Christians also often live as if God did not exist (”si Deus non daretur“). We often live according to the slogan: “God does not exist, and if he exists he does not belong”‘ (Moynihan, 2005, p. 88).
Everything changes - no contingent things are permanent or last in themselves. This is the fact that Buddhism takes as a basic doctrine of its philosophy and no matter how one chooses to speak of God, gods, or anything else, one must first acquaint and familiarize oneself with impermanence. Knowing impermanence cultivates courage, open-mindedness, wisdom, and compassion. Impermanence, as envisaged in the Buddhist teachings, is a universal spiritual truth that all spiritual leaders, including the Pope, have no choice but to acknowledge. Does this make spirituality an exercise in futility? Does it render the idea of God powerless? Or does the truth of impermanence point toward something higher, something greater than the travails that we project onto this universe?
One cannot transcend life if one does not first know what it is. In the first place this transcendence is not a negating of life, but a completion of it - a completion of many kalpas of practice and what can be nothing less than living. Let us put this into perspective:
There are four different lengths of kalpas. A regular kalpa is approximately 16 million years long (16,798,000 years), and a small kalpa is 1000 regular kalpas, or 16 billion years. A medium kalpa is 320 billion years, the equivalent of 20 small kalpas. A great kalpa is 4 medium kalpas, or 1.28 trillion years.
From this all-too-brief overview, it is evident that Buddhism is a religion about living - and living a lot. The question is how to ensure that all this living is humane, gentle, and full of love and meaning? I would like to reiterate Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s approach to this issue:
“Buddhism, dismissed as passive and world-weary, is on the decline because in looking for deliverance from existence, it overlooks issues arising from existence. Truly, how can Buddhism be accepted by society, if it departs from the reality of life and becomes unpatriotic, unfilial, and unfriendly?” (Fu Chi-ying, 1996, p. 154).
A Buddhist is a vehicle first for the living, and then for the dead. It is the living that need Buddhism most urgently. Only by attending to the living with our full strength can we attend to the dead competently.
I borrowed a book by David Brazier recently. It’s called simply “Zen Therapy.” I greatly admire it. It really highlights, for me, the vitality of the Endless Knot: the union of discerning wisdom and warm, unclinging compassion in helping patients recover from mental illness. Here are some passages that I felt were particularly inspiring and insightful.
“Shunyata is innocent. A child picks up an unfamiliar object and turns it over in his hand. He looks from this side and from that. We can do the same. Pick up a stone. Turn it over in your hand. Become familiar with it. Notice its colour, its contours, its crevices. As you do so, the stone becomes real for you. It becomes something… Thus tenderness grows. We start to care about the stone. Just like a child, we invest caring in the object. From a materialistic viewpoint this is absurd. The rock has no monetary value and minimal utility. But is this not precisely the nature of caring? We do not care in order to get something back… We simply appreciate the thing itself. In some ways a stone is particularly easy to care for since it asks nothing in return” (p. 206).
I would like to add to this that Buddhism has always cherished and treasured the individual sentient being as it is, not for any other reason like utility or usefulness within a “system.” Such mechanisms belong to the world of business, the military, mass entertainment, and politics. In other words, everything that if taken to their extremes, will simply kill the sentient individual in more ways than one.
“Allison told the therapist, at the end of a session, that she was going to commit suicide. The therapist was immediately filled with strong feelings and said that he would not allow her to do any such thing: that, if necessary, he would not let her leave his office. She protested that it was none of his business whether she killed herself or not. He retorted that it now felt like it was very much his business – how could he live with himself if he let her go and she were dead the next day? Eventually she promised not to kill herself before seeing him again and left. Later she told him that this encounter had made a great impression on her because she realized that her being alive made a difference to someone else. She stayed alive that week because she did not want to inflict hurt upon him. In due course she found more reasons” (p. 198).
Our prayer beads should be worn around the pulse of time. That is, our prayers and good deeds must embrace the entirety of human history and the worlds that transcend history. At its most basic level, then, we must aim for a humane vision above a vision that idolizes creeds. Therefore, Bodhi Boulevard takes after Fo Guang Shan’s “checklist” of Dharma propagation and seeks to be:
1. A contemporary religious body and system with
a) gender equality in hierarchical advancement
b) harmony between the clergy’s teachings and the aspirations of the devotees
c) a solid foundation of religious activity
d) notable cultural and educational achievements.
2. An international Buddhist network which include:
a) branch temples and centres
b) international conferences
c) non-sectarian communication and exchange
3. A community of humane spirituality, characterized by:
a) Dharma for everyday life
b) family Buddhism
c) social application
d) diverse and vibrant activities
4. A bridge that encompasses East and West and remains at the cutting edge of philosophy, psychology, teaching, and ministry.
Every writer strives to provide good reading as opposed to awful reading in their publications. Their final decisions on “good” or “unsatisfactory” works is often founded on personal criteria based on past experiences of published work, subjective taste in literary aesthetics, and the importance accorded to whatever subject that may be at stake. However, as with everything else in the considered and thoughtful life, careful and compassionate reflection on one’s basic criteria can yield deeper insights into whether or not one is true to one’s principles of truly challenging, engaging, and fulfilling a prospective reader. Good reading is reflective of good writing, and good writing can only blossom from what is nothing less than systematic, philosophical deliberation on what constitutes quality compositions.
To begin with, I pose this question: what would happen if an author substitutes the word “good” with “beneficial?” When she decides on an essay, article, or book to compose, her primary concern would suddenly be to ensure the benefit of the reader first and foremost. What needs to be expressed? What current of thought merits at least some degree of public coverage and communication? What positive change – or simply enjoyment – can this exposure bring about in the individual who chooses to give time to her publication? These questions and re-aligning of priorities is based on the presupposition that is a privilege for a fellow human being to sit down and devote even fifteen minutes of time to absorbing something that a writer feels that must be communicated. Imagine the immense honour that is, or should be, accorded to an author when a reader snuggles in bed one cold winter night with the intention to get through at least a third of her book. It is all the more extraordinary when such a book concerns philosophy and religion, what Paul Tillich called an individual’s “ultimate concern.” To touch the hand of Infinite Light, to live in accordance with the higher precepts, or simply to live a humane life – it would appear that to write of these endeavours is to contribute in a very important way to the fulfilment of such aspirations, because barring the physical destruction of civilization and the inevitable impermanence of all contingent things, religious and philosophical writings will remain of intellectual and spiritual benefit to others long after their authors have departed. Why else would such composition be written unless it was for the benefit for sentient beings? Perhaps a self-dialogue or the clarification of the writer’s own understanding, such as Shantideva’s Bodhicharayavatara, would be a wholly legitimate reason.
But even with this qualification, a clarification of the author’s own understanding through writing would correspondingly be of benefit to her.
So we have benefit as the first criterion of what can be considered worthwhile writing. Is there another criterion catering more specifically to the reader’s casual taste, namely that of entertainment? Unfortunately, good writing does not necessarily have to mean good entertainment. But perhaps that is a happy fact. To benefit a reader already entails some effort to engage them, to invite them to be interested in one’s subject matter. In works that are meant strictly to entertain, there is complete license for not only humour, but a degree of cool nonchalance that allows it to fulfil the role of entertainment, to be able to be presented in a manner that can be held on to perhaps more loosely than subjects dearer to the heart such as politics or euthanasia. Religion and certainly modern religious writing and teaching can (should?) have a degree of humour, but it cannot be the least bit nonchalant because nonchalance denotes indifference, and indifference is something to be totally avoided by all authentic religions. Religion is not intended to be an opiate, but aims to penetrate into the deepest facets of reality with the aid of narrative, metaphor and symbols, though this is far from the complete story. Religion cannot be a sentimental retreat for our good feelings about ourselves and superficial charity and witty personalities. As Thomas Merton aptly pointed out, the mark of true life is effervescence transmuted into lucid direction and passion sublimated into tranquil mysticism. We religious authors might do well take heed of his advice.
Perhaps there can only be two fundamental things that an author can control: how beneficial her composition can be to others and how closely it corresponds to a work of pure entertainment. But she must ask herself: does she merely want it to entertain? Is entertainment benefit in its strictest sense? Or is there, perhaps, a subtle distinction that can contribute to her criteria of good writing?
Raymond Lam