In this issue:
When external circumstances conspire to make me look down in a fog of anxiety and worry, those fundamental existential questions come up for me: What is the purpose of life? Why are we here? And the answer to what we truly seek always comes to me in two forms that were articulated by Rev. Master Jiyu: recognized reunion with the Eternal, and reharmonization of body and mind with the Eternal. In an earlier article in this newsletter Rev. Master Mokushin concisely described this longing:
Even if we are not fully, consciously aware of it, we undertake a spiritual practice to find recognized reunion with the “Unborn, Undying, Unchanging, Uncreated” or to use a more succinct version, recognized reunion with the Eternal. The practice of meditation and the Precepts helps us negotiate through our habitual ways of turning away from our True Nature, and thus obscuring our oneness with the Eternal.
Turning away from my True Nature has nothing fundamentally to do with external people and events: it is my choice and mine alone. External events might impinge on my psyche, but the response to them is my responsibility. If instead of meditative stillness and openness I respond with ignorance, i.e., greed to have external things be my way and hatred and fear if they do not, then I am turning away from my True Nature. And that only harms myself and does not improve the external conditions; if anything, it adds negative energy to them.
Another teaching that I recollect when I start looking down is the Four Wisdoms: charity, tenderness, benevolence, and sympathy-empathy. As Dogen says of them in the Shushogi, they “are the means we have of helping others and represent the Bodhisattva’s aspirations.” When we orient ourselves to the world with these as the touchstones for our acts of thought, speech and behavior, we are in harmony with our True Nature.
Finally, when I begin to be drawn out of myself and into the fracas of external events, a “mantra” of sorts that is strongly emphasized when we begin training, and that never stops being applicable, is: Do not worry about what others are doing, just do your own training. No external person or circumstance can take away our ability—and responsibility—to train ourselves in transmuting the three poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance into the spiritually life-giving elixir of compassion, love, and wisdom.