Orange County Buddhist Church  

A Way Of Seeing  (New Year’s Day, 2003)

    Ganjitsu ya                        New Year’s Day.
    Hogo mo tsukue mo          Scraps of paper, the desk -
    Kozo no mama                  Just as last year.
                                                - Matsuo

    Akemashite omedetoo gozaimasu.  Sakunen-chuu wa iro iro to osewa ni narimashita, toku ni watashi no Orange County Bukkyokai de no 25-shuu nen o iwatte kudasaimashita koto o kokoro kara aratamete kansha itashimasu.  Kotoshi mo mata doozo yoroshiku onegai shimasu.  Happy New Year!  Thank you all very much for all that you’ve done for my family and me this past year, especially on the occasion of the 25^th anniversary of my being enabled to serve Orange County Buddhist Church.  Please continue to favor us this year as well.

    The above haiku is from a collection of haiku translated by R.H. Blyth, although I’ve changed the translation just a bit.  Any mistakes are mine.  The poem does not mean a great deal unless you’ve been to our house and have seen the mountains of paper on our kitchen table and elsewhere.  Everyday I think to myself, “I simply must clear all this junk off the table, so that I can find things I’ve misplaced or lost, letters I might need to answer, bills I might need to pay, and because my wife would like some day to see the table itself one day!”  I really do think that!  It’s not a joke, or at least not completely a joke.  If all I had to worry about were the cluttered, dusty condition of the dining table and its load of junk, it might not be all that bad.  However, the poet, I think, is alluding to more than just the clutter on his desk.  To me, he is saying that the clutter and dust are a picture of the clutter and dust in my mind, and that that condition does not change much either.  Year in, year out, day in, day out, the nature of the clutter might change, but clutter remains clutter.  Nothing much changes.

    Issa, perhaps my favorite poet, wrote something similar but more directly to the point I want to make.

    Haru tatsu ya                            Spring is beginning.
    Gu no ue ni mata                       Ignorance again, and again
    Gu ni kaeru.                               I return to ignorance.

    Although Issa was a practicer of Zen Buddhism, many of his haiku, including this one, sound very Jodo Shinshu-like.  I read this haiku to mean, although a new year is beginning [spring and New Year’s are often synonymous in haiku], he has not changed a lot.  He is still an ignorant fool.  Gu, or ignorance, is the same situation as mumyoo, or unenlightened.  It does not mean stupid, although it is often used that way in modern Japanese.  From the Buddhist point of view, I am ignorant if I do not know what Buddhism is trying to say:  Everything is impermanent, subject to change.  Therefore, lusting after things is being ignorant, since every thing I get will change, causing me to suffer.  There is a situation free from suffering, but it requires that I realize completely that everything is empty.  “Realize completely” means not only that I understand that emptiness, but also that I embody it.  Because I am incapable of going beyond intellectual understanding, I am as ignorant as someone who does not understand it even intellectually.  Therefore, although a new year is beginning, I remain as ignorant as ever.  That is why I have no choice but to rely upon Amida’s Vow.  How about you?

Gassho,
Donkon Jaan, Rev. John Doami

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