Monday, 10. March 2008, 09:27:06
A summary of Dharma Talk on Harmony in Buddhism by Dharmavidya
Broadly speaking Buddhism has developed a reputation for cultivating peace both individually and collectively. The intention is to create peace and harmony. The Buddha was very practical man and his attitude was to engage in a practice that works. If you've got to repair something then use whatever tool you need to do the job.
He gave many of his disciples very different practices. For example, one disciple came from the highest caste and had spent his life being waited upon and living in comfort and so when he asked the Buddha what practice he should do the Buddha gave him many ascetic practices. Another man came along some time after, who was a low caste man, always struggling and scraping to put two pennies together and serving others wanted to know what practice he should do. He said he saw so and so doing ascetic practices and should he go and do the same thing. To which the Buddha replied, 'no no, don't do them, they won't help you.' And the Buddha put him in charge of organizing others: in a position of authority, taking care of others.
So you might choose a spiritual path that gives a broad framework of peace and harmony but the practice depends on you and what you need depends on what you’re used to. The point of spiritual practice is to round people out. It's about going out of your comfort zone and challenging yourself to be in a different kind of situation. And it’s not only solitary but social, it might be that what one needs is to go out and develop different kinds of relationships with people.
There is another sense in that the spiritual journey has nothing to do with the individual. In our morning service we do walking nembutsu and we weave in and out of the rows of cushions at one end of the room then around the statue of the Buddha at the other end of the room back down towards the rows of cushions while chanting Namo Omito Fo. This is enacting a piece of theatre which symbolizes the individual journey: a circuitous and tortuous journey toward whatever is holy and sacred and you pass a lot of people along the way; some going this way, some going that way, and you can’t always tell which ones are going which way but they are all going around. You can think of it in a linear way, but what happens when you get there? You get sent back. This loop, you can think of that as repetition, is very much part of the Bodhisattva ideal. Every religious system revolves around a story, and the Pureland one contains the Bodhisattva ideal.
The Larger Pureland Sutra is a story about Dharmakara, and in this story are a number of vows, prayers, resolutions, intentions, however, you want to see them. The setting out of 48 affirmations does a number of things; the first batch gives you a manifesto, a picture of PL Buddhism, that has an aspect of creating a better world. The next little batch are about the Buddha and how he will welcome whoever goes to him; when you get there it doesn’t matter who you are, rich or poor, good or bad, etc.The Bodhisattva vows are the next batch, and their vow is not to stay with the Buddha but to go back into the world of suffering and save all sentient beings. So the pattern or archetypal spiritual journey is that your spiritual path will bring you closer to the something sacred but then you make your way back to the mundane to do something. A Bodhisatva is someone who doesn’t stay up there with what is good, beautiful, true, holy, etc. They receive something through that but then they must do something with that. They give back what they've received and spread it around and as they spread it around they may make their way back up and then come back again.
There is another kind of journey, which is a collective one where we’re all moving. During our walking Nembutsu you could take a snap shot and see some people close to the Buddha and other people at the far end of the room where all the cushions are and at that point in time you may be here or there but it's not a fixed point. From a worldly point of view, looking at that snap shot you could say that there are those higher up the mountain and those at the bottom and the ones at the top are the 'best' practitioners. But the worldly way is a gradation, a vertical scale where we measure and judge whereas the spiritual way is planar, a horizontal scale, there are some people over there and some people over here but it’s always changing. So after a bit it doesn’t matter where you are, what matters is the fact there is harmony. And when we fall into harmony, people are pretty much evenly spaced as they walk around the room, so we're all going at the same pace, people are in harmony with one another and the chanting sounds beautiful. One is not trying to be the best chanter or turning on their neuroses and changing the melody according to their tastes, they are all part of a harmony which is going on and in this way one becomes less self. In a very practical way, non-self is seen when we are part of a larger harmony. This is enacted in something like the walking meditation practice, plus it’s also enacted in this community, people making food, someone else laying the table, someone else telling people that it's time to eat and then everyone else gathering together to eat. Everyone is playing their small part in order for something bigger to happen. At the apex it doesn’t matter who is doing what.
In Chinese Buddhism the Pureland is called harmony land. The Chinese character has its origin in music and it's a complicated Chinese character. You can see that harmony involves everybody. It doesn’t matter who you are because it’s a blending of different people working together to create a harmony. And of course, it’s not about everybody singing the same note, that would make it monotone. Each person has something different to add but not just anything as you can see the difference between people going off on their discordant notes and people using a range of different notes based on what is in their capacity and blending together.
While doing the practice one can then observe 'Where is your mind?' At worst it will be saying, 'look how good I am or I hate chanting.' A little better and it might be in a state of rapture: you might be taken up by your spiritual feeling which is certainly a spiritual state - and that individual enthusiasm is good but what is even better is that you are listening to others because at that point you dissolve. It’s not the product of making something happen but it just comes together when people listen to each other and play their part.
You can’t force harmony to happen. It is really a matter of letting other power work through us. Something ironic is built into the universe and it’s another power, if we do our bit somehow it comes together.
