The Buddha Appears through the
Individual
A talk given at the
48th London EZA
Kemmyo Taira Sato
The
title of today's talk, The Buddha Appears through the Individual, actually comes
from something my master, Venerable Chimyo Takehara, said at one of the daily
meetings held at our temple in Japan.
It is not, therefore, a learned, academic
pronouncement, just something culled from ordinary, everyday talk. I feel, however,
it reveals something important of our daily experience. The word individual in
Japanese is kojin which can also mean human or person. In my translation I have
chosen the word "individual" in its ordinary sense, meaning a single
person or human being. By 'individual' in this context I mean a human being with
self-awareness or self-relatedness. In Buddhist philosophy, as you know, a human
being is never an indivisible entity. I will go into this latter point in more
detail later on.
Buddhism teaches that a human being becomes a Buddha. In Buddhism
all sentient beings are believed to have the possibility of attaining Buddhahood.
Seen from this perspective there seems to be nothing special about the statement
that the Buddha appears through the individual.
In Buddhism, however, there
are many different schools that appeared in the course of this religion's long
history and each of them has its own interpretation of the instructions given
by the Buddha. Although they are all confident of the basic teaching that a human
being becomes a Buddha, their interpretation of this crucial point does reveal
subtle variations.
In Shin Buddhism, the tradition to which Three Wheels belongs,
people do not say "I am a Buddha" or "I have become a Buddha,"
during their lifetime. What they believe is that, on attaining Birth in the Pure
Land, they will become Buddhas.
In Pure Land Buddhism in general, Birth in
the Pure Land refers to Birth that takes place at the very moment of death. According
to Shinran Shonin (1173-1262), the founder of Shin Buddhism, the phrase "Birth
in the Pure Land" has two meanings: 1) the attainment of faith in this life
and 2) birth in the Pure Land at the moment of death. What is all-important in
Shin Buddhism is the attainment of faith whilst living in this world. This is
called the instantaneous attainment of Birth in the Pure Land, based on a phrase
from The Larger Sutra of Eternal Life: "When they desire to be born in the
Pure Land, they will immediately be born there and abide in the stage of non-retrogression."
This phrase is considered to be the most important phrase to describe the attainment
of faith in the here and now. Once faith, the first Birth in the Pure Land, has
been attained, there is no problem about the second Birth to be attained at the
moment of death. The latter is believed to take place very naturally, no matter
how the person may die, insane, agonized, unconscious or mindful of the Buddha.
Why
is the experience of attaining faith called 'Birth in the Pure Land'? It is because
the faith-experience includes a sort of mental death. Faith-experience is birth
after the death of a selfish way of living. In the course of my talks I have been
saying faith is awakening in Buddhism and with this awakening our selfish lives
are brought to an end and we begin a new way of living, living by the nembutsu.
Saichi (1850-1932), a devout Shin Buddhist poet, declares:
Having finished
his death and funeral,
Saichi lives in this world with Namuamidabutsu.
Saichi
is Amida,
Amida is Saichi.
Amida's Name having come to Saichi,
And finished
my last moment,
How relieved I am in the nembutsu-
Namuamidabutsu,
Into
which I've been called, taken by you.
Buddhism says that we should go beyond
our selfish lives in order to live our lives more happily. At the start of his
book entitled An Open Heart the Dalai Lama declares: "I believe that every
human being has an innate desire for happiness and does not want to suffer. I
also believe that the very purpose of life is to experience this happiness. I
believe that each of us has the same potential to develop inner peace and thereby
achieve happiness and joy."
I very much agree with him about this. Buddhists,
because of their desire for inner peace and happiness, are acutely conscious that
life is full of suffering, something that prevents inner joy and happiness.
There
are many kinds of suffering or distress that make us unhappy and frustrated. If
you examine all these forms of suffering carefully with calm and deep contemplation,
you will find that their main cause lies in your attachment to your own self,
to your selfish desires or your self-centered views, based on those desires. If
you continue to be attached to your own world and insist on your opinion, it will
make not only you but also others unhappy and distressed. The more selfish attachment
you have, the more afflictions there will be in your life. Such an agonizing life
will hurt those around you too and the damage you do to yourself will be further
magnified through the harm it does to others. Sufferings based on our attachment
give rise to negative feelings such as anger, hate and revenge, leading eventually
to quarrels and wars. No war born out of hatred and the desire for retaliation
can ever be approved and such a war will only bring about more misery for mankind.
How
can we free ourselves from this sad situation? Firstly we should recognize the
reality of suffering; secondly we should become aware of its cause. A clear understanding
of the reason for our suffering is the way to abolish it.
There are innumerable
paths in Buddhism that will lead us to this end and Shin Buddhism is one of them.
In Mahayana Buddhism they are closely related to the philosophy of Emptiness (sunyata
in Sanskrit).
I am afraid I have no time to get into anything but the barest
details regarding the philosophy of Emptiness. Roughly speaking Emptiness can
be explained in the following three ways: 1) Nothing has any intrinsic existence,
2) Subject and object originate [or disappear] interdependently and 3) All the
phenomena of this world are interdependently related.
1) Nothing has any intrinsic
existence and everything is made up of different elements. What is called the
self, for instance, is not an eternal entity but a composition of the five aggregates
(skandhah in Sanskrit): form, perception, mental conceptions, volition and consciousness.
Not only the self but also the five aggregates that compose it are without substance.
The self is empty of substance or intrinsic existence. There is no eternal entity
like atman or soul. What we call the self is only a lable.
2) Concerning the
eye-consciousness that there is a rose, for example, this consciousness is a result
of the interrelation between a sense-organ (the eye) and a sense-object (the rose).
If either of these were missing there would be no such consciousness. So it is
said that because there is A (the eye) there is B (the rose) or because there
is B there is A and at the same time because there is not A there is not B or
because there is not B there is not A. Emptiness is the realization of this truth.
Emptiness is the Vacuum where all the phenomena of the world originate and disappear
interdependently.
3) Based on the philosophy of Emptiness, the philosophy of
perfect interpenetration was developed, as seen in the Avatamsaka Sutra: in an
interdependent and interpenetrating relationship each phenomenon bears a dynamic
relation to all other phenomena and each experience contains within itself all
other experiences. For instance there is a formula: All is in all, all is in one,
one is in all and one is in one. It should be understood that this dynamic interpenetration
all takes place simultaneously.
The philosophy of Emptiness is the profound
thought process by which an Indian philosopher, Nagarjuna (born around 1st or
2nd century), tried to explain the truth of Buddhism, the content of Gautama Buddha's
Enlightenment, based on his own experience. Emptiness stands for the way things
are or for the truth known as tathata, which is usually translated as True Suchness,
Thusness or As-it-is-ness. This is the spiritual world of infinite light.
Usually
we ordinary beings live our lives beset by illusion far removed from this fundamental
truth. As mentioned before, at the core of our illusions is our tenacious attachment
to the self or to our self-centered view of the world. The reality that we consider
to be true is nothing but illusion. If you would like to use the word reality,
you can call it reality but only in the sense that it is the reality of our illusions.
Everything is impermanent in the flux of change, but we tend to think of things
around us as being ever-lasting. All that we can understand about an object is
just one tiny part of the object, because of the limitations of our cognitive
abilities, our five sense organs and our intellect, but we think and indeed insist
that our understanding is not illusory but true and that what we understand exists
quite definitely with its own intrinsic substance. The structure of our self-centered
consciousness prevents us from realizing the importance and vastness of the invisible
part of an object.
Because of our attachment to our selves and our self-centered
views of the world, we are ensnared in darkness by negative feelings such as suffering,
agony, anger, hatred, revenge and violence. Eventually we end up hurting both
ourselves and other people too in this world so full of discrimination and opposition.
How
then can we escape from this dark world of duality and reach the spiritual world
of infinite light where we can share happiness with others? How can we leave this
world and reach the other shore? These two worlds seem very different. Is the
spiritual world, the land of infinite light, very far away from the world we inhabit?
In as long as we are suffering in this world of illusion, the world of Enlightenment
or Emptiness appears infinitely remote. But it is a kind of mental distance. This
world of illusion has its being inside the world of Emptiness and the latter is
the foundation of the former, because Emptiness is the principle by which to explain
our illusions. Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form, as expressed in the Heart
Sutra.
As mentioned above, there are many ways to reach Enlightenment. In Pure
Land Buddhism it is Amida Buddha that connects the dark world of illusion and
the spiritual world of Enlightenment. In other words Amida Buddha is the working
of Emptiness that emerges from the spiritual world to save us from suffering in
this world of illusion.
In Mahayana Buddhism there are two kinds of Buddha-kaya
(Buddha-body): 1) One is rupa-kaya and 2) the other is dharma-kaya. Shakyamuni
Buddha is a good example of rupa-kaya (form-body). Whilst rupa-kaya refers to
a Buddha who appears in this world by taking on form, dharma-kaya (Dharma-body)
refers to the content of the Buddha's Enlightenment, which is formless and synonymous
with Emptiness. This dharma-kaya is further divided into two: "Dharma-kaya
as Dharma-in-itself and Dharma-kaya in its manifested form" (The Commentary
on [Vasubandhu's] Treatise of the Pure Land by Tan-luan (476-542)). In this context
"Dharma-kaya in its manifested form" stands for Amida Buddha and is
also called sambhoga-kaya (Recompense-body) in the sense that it is a Buddha-body
in recompense for the Buddha's Original Prayer. Let me quote from The Commentary
on the Treatise of the Pure Land: "The two modes are distinguishable in the
Dharma-kaya, whose manifestations are Buddhas and bodhisattvas. One mode is the
Dharma-kaya as Dharma-in-itself; the other is the Dharma-kaya in its manifested
form. The manifested form exists depending on the Dharma-in-itself, and the Dharma-in-itself
is known by expressing itself in its manifestations. These two modes are distinguishable
but are not to be regarded as two independent existences. They are one and yet
not to be identified. Therefore, they are to be understood as the interfusion
of the general and the particular under one word, Dharma. If the bodhisattva fails
to understand this interfusion, he may not be able to work out the self-benefiting
and the others-benefiting."
This quotation is perhaps a bit too long and
too technical for today's talk. My intention in reproducing it, however, is simply
to show that Amida Buddha is a manifestation of the Dharma itself. D. T. Suzuki
states in the Buddha of Infinite Light, "Amida Buddha is shown to represent
this altruistic impulse that is deeply rooted in human nature, perhaps rooted
in the cosmos itself." Amida Buddha is a manifestation of the Dharma as the
working of unconditional love that comes from Enlightenment.
In Shin Buddhism
we take refuge in Amida Buddha in order to free ourselves from the misery of this
world. With great penitence for our grave karmic offences when we have hurt both
ourselves and others, we entrust ourselves to Amida Buddha. At the moment of entrusting
ourselves the wall of our self-consciousness collapses and Amida's light comes
pouring in and pierces through our consciousness. The Meditation Sutra states:
"It embraces us all and abandons none." One who attains faith in Amida
Buddha is filled with joy at being freed from selfish attachments. All this is
the natural working of Emptiness itself or the Dharma-body. It clears all the
selfish attachments from our minds and leads us to realize that we are all interdependent,
in other words, through the experience of Emptiness we come to understand the
reality of interdependent origination. We become aware of how much has been done
for each one of us. It fills our minds with pure light. Thus, when we see a person
attain faith we also see the Buddha appear through that individual person.
If we are happy to have attained faith or Enlightenment we will want others to become happy too, so we try to be altruistic. But I feel very sad to find how difficult it is for me always to love others. Nevertheless on this path to the Pure Land I am very happy to find myself surrounded and supported by good friends and good relatives. Although interpersonal relationships are never easy to perfect, I am sure that through true encounter with a single individual, whether teacher or mental friend, we can come to find those around us as Buddhas and bodhisattvas.