Link: “you gotta be sick of your self”

Dosho Port’s teachings, rooted in his encounters with the late Dainin Katagiri, have a strong other-power flavour and are often very pertinent to our own Jodo Shinshu path.   His latest post on the flaws in “my way” Dharma offers sound direction to all way-seekers.  Extract:

“Our way.” … I see quite a lot of air being used to champion the notion of self-styled (a.k.a., buji) Zen. If such people were dharma teachers you might come to the conclusion that the dharma requires a very worldly focus – we ought to pick and choose practices that seem right to us and we ought to do practice in a way that we like and we don’t need to make a commitment to go deeply into any one tradition because teachers are bums and make mistakes and so it’s best to dig many shallow wells.

In contradiction, and imHo, all the old ways teach that a precondition to really beginning to practice Buddhadharma is to recognize that “our way” is the way of suffering and the necessary (but insufficient) first step on the path for both home leavers and home dwellers is some form of renunciation, a dropping our self-styled ideas and taking up the way of freedom.

In other words, you gotta be sick of your self to begin practice.”