Orange County Buddhist Church
Orange County Buddhist Church
A Way Of Seeing (2007)
Akemashite omedetō gozaimasu. Sakunen-chū wa iro-iro to osewa ni narimashita. Kotoshi mo mata dōzo yoroshiku onegai-itashimasu.
Happy New Year, everyone! Thank you for all you did for me and my family last year. Please continue to favor us again in this Year of the Boar, 2007.
After spending a couple of days reading a lot of haiku, looking for just the right one to begin this, I’ve given up.
However, in that search, I found something more that I did not know: Robert Hass, editor of The Essential Haiku, says, “…the haiku [is] a poem centered in an individual human consciousness.” This is true of most, if not all, poems, but he is making a connection to Buddhist time when he says that. Hass puts it this way: “In Bashō’s best poems, each individual moment of perception is all there is – or what there is, and at the same time, it isn’t anything at all.” [This is beginning to sound like a lecture. Sorry.]
Remember, if you will, the analogy I made about Buddhist time and a movie film. Only the frame immediately in front of the lens/light is seen on the screen. That is all that exists; the past frame is gone, and the future frame has yet to come. Without the past and future, there is no sense in speaking of the present. Yet the present is all there is. What is being said here is simply that, because there is only the present, we must live our lives to the fullest in each absolute moment.
If we stop and think about it, surely we can see the truth – maybe reality is a better way of saying it – of this.
We cannot change the past; we can change how we see it, and we can change the present to fix the past if it needs fixing. Of course, that’s easier said than done.
We can affect the future to some extent, although we will not know whether our plans have come to fruition until the future becomes the present, and that present might be too late or too early in terms of our life. Further, those plans might turn out to be wrong for the future present. However, since all things are impermanent, it might be possible to change those plans as we approach the future present, if we see that they need to be changed.
Of course, since all things are interdependent, it is not easy to see that something needs to be changed and, often, harder still to actually change what needs changing. Changing one thing very often means that some other thing also needs to be changed. Ad infinitum. After all, the Buddha said that we must change if we want to be free from suffering or, at the very least, if we want to live meaningful lives.
He gave us the Eightfold Noble Path, which seemed enough, but, then, others saw that that was not the case and came up with many more practices. By the time the Buddha Dharma came to Honen and Shinran, the changes were beyond human capacity, and so Honen and Shinran made it possible for us today to live full lives, through the wisdom and compassion embodied in Amida’s name, Namo Amida Butsu.
Gasshō,
Donkon Jaan
Rev. John Doami
January 2007
