To a Vipassana Teacher

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janpeterotto
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Joined: Sun Nov 03, 2013 7:39 pm

To a Vipassana Teacher

Post by janpeterotto »

I have been seeing and listening to some youtube clips and having been a buddhist all my life, I reflect on how different our buddhist practises and beliefs are ! I like this diversity.

For me buddhism is not meditation or focusing on what goes on in body, mind, emotions. I know that will release us from suffering, and that was the original intention of Shakyamuni. So I can appreciate this practise for what it is. But for me it is the Pure Land that is the heart of my faith. That means relying on something else but our own practises and intentions.

I try to reconcile these two different paths, but I give up. The one is doing something, the other is resting in something. I can imagine that I would do some meditation pracises if I did not have faith in Amitabha but since that faith is so easy it is hard to do anything else. It may seem lazy to you, as it does indeed to some people.

Maybe we could say that the one looks at earthly matters and the other is looking to what happens after death? The ashes of my body at the funeral is not me. When a person dies he becomes Buddha according to our faith. While we are alive we listen to the wishes of Amitabha. We sing or say Amitabhas name in gratitude for everything. And when our earthly life comes to an end we are born in the land of Amitabha.

I am aware of a contradiction here. I wrote: "While we are alive we listen....and sing or say...." -- this can of course be understood to be a buddhist practise, common all over East Asia. But my feeling is that this is more of a resting or a reclining into gratefulness. It is not an effort as I suppose meditation is to you. But I may be wrong here.

I can imagine that "noticing my thinking" as a part of meditation will lead me to say that my faith in Buddha Amitabha is just "my thinking" and so this will probably create suffering, and so it would be a good idea to relax that thinking and just be aware of what is taking place. But for me it is not "just thinking". It is a whole way of life, where trusting the Vow from Buddha Amitabha is the heart. It involves both thinking and emotions of course, these are the tools we have, just as awareness and will power are good tools.

Sometimes I do think of Amitabha as a force or functioning, comparable to the atmospheric powers of the four seasons we experience here in Sweden. Buddha is like spring -- we all know it is coming in May. Some may doubt it, as of this year 2015 when it snows in Skåne, our southermost part, the 2th of May !! But we all know it is coming, we can feel and sense it in so many ways. Amitabha is not observed as a singular fact -- for exampel in a calm mind or in a slow breathing. It is much more like spring, unseend in itself but definitely coming with new life !

So maybe that is another difference between our buddhist faiths. Yours is in the visible, true, observable facts of peaceful body and mind, mine more of a spring-like manyfold experience of new life. The Vow of Amitabha is not one observable fact of existence but a springlike atmospheric season of my whole life. Not very exact comparisons, I know.
Yuren
Posts: 166
Joined: Thu Aug 08, 2013 1:39 am

Re: To a Vipassana Teacher

Post by Yuren »

Nice post. Thank you for taking the time to write it and share your faith with us! Much appreciated.
but since that faith is so easy it is hard to do anything else
In a way, it's easy; in the sense that saying Nembutsu of gratitude is obviously easier than sitting for hours every day in uncomfortable positions looking to locate your own mind through cessation and contemplation. Even from a merely physical point of view it's harder, let alone the mental effort involved. But on the other hand, the tradition also stresses the difficulty of coming to settled mind (anjin) or the true mind (shinjin) of faith; Shinran's KGSS:
"For evil sentient beings of wrong views and arrogance,
The nembutsu that embodies Amida's Primal Vow
Is hard to accept in Shinjin;
This most difficult of difficulties, nothing surpasses."
Here Shinran stresses the difficulty of realizing the settled mind of faith, a difficulty "surpassing all other difficulties". I think it's interesting.

I think it's there to remind us of two things;

1) not to take the Vow for granted and to always take it to heart and realizing the difficulty of coming to settled faith-mind; it's no small feat to come to non-retrogressive faith... sometimes people mistake the Vow to mean that anyone can be saved regardless of anything, but the Vow explains some conditions: one has to understand the purport of the Vow and awaken a mind/heart or rather one thought-moment of joy, faith and sincerity... an authentic event of reliance on Other-Power has to occur, involving those "three modes of mind" (joy, sincerity, faith) - which is transformative

2) that the calculative mind of humans is very prone to self-deception and also to "doing something"; even "not doing anything" or "relying" can become a sort of "doing something"; the discriminative, calculating mind is infinitely cunning so it would " rather desire Nothing itself, than not desire anything " as Nietzsche put it. So this is why it's so difficult for the narcissistic self to accept that his salvation is not dependent on what he does or thinks.
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