Faith is Practice

 

(A follow-up to my last post, and somewhat related to this post too.)

The single biggest mistake that I used to keep making in the Dharma way was to underestimate times where I felt at low ebb or out of balance. Such occasions are when we often tend to blame the practice, or the teaching and teachers, and start scrabbling around in what I call the self-power tool box. “Maybe a bit of zazen will fix the problem, maybe if I count my recitations of the nembutsu, maybe, maybe, maybe,” we think.

Perhaps though, after following the path a while, we get a bit more sophisticated and we realise that the problem lies not so much in the forms of the path but in ourselves. All that does is raise doubts though; “Maybe this isn’t the right path for me, maybe it doesn’t suit my personality, maybe it doesn’t suit my life style, maybe I’m just stupid, maybe, maybe, maybe …”

What we tend to forget though is that we feel out of balance for a reason. We feel or sense that condition precisely because of the reality of the Wondrous Law, the Dharma, Amida’s Light … So long as we are human beings living in this world then we will continually, over and over, fall into rigid habits of speech, thought, and action. We will always find that things become reified and our behaviours become stale and artificial. At the same time though whenever that happens it always becomes abundantly clear that it is happening through the naturally aware light of the True Dharma.

This being so times of low ebb and unbalance come to be something that we welcome and give thanks for. Like winter preceding spring they are the harbingers of renewal and creative rebirth. As such when we hit a low point in our daily practice we don’t need to change anything in ourselves or in our rituals. We have at that very point already been given our ‘wake up call’ and can therefore simply carry on with our daily lives full of confidence in the illuminating reality of Amida’s Light which shows us ourselves and our relationships to all with which we are connected.

This is why in our tradition it is said that ‘faith is practice’.

 

Looking back to look forwards

Welcome back to Echoes of the Name - a blog that has been through many permutations and has been frequently disrupted by my lack of certainty about what it was designed to achieve. To be honest I am still uncertain about this. (In the past I tried to post useful information about Jodo Shin which I had gathered during my studies of the tradition and many of these posts are still available via the archives.)

As a child I was raised, or indoctrinated, with the best of loving intentions into another religious tradition which I now find absurd, theologically obscene and emotionally destructive. There have been a number of consequences of this upbringing.

(1) Although I was instructed in the ways of religious and self/other reflection, for which I am deeply grateful, this was coupled with practices based upon emotional affectivity which often caused my reflection to be easily contaminated. What I mean is that reflection was undertaken in circumstances where emotions were heightened - for instance by music - and were often then taken as religious experience itself. As a result I am at once extremely susceptible to the emotionalism of the Jodo Shin tradition and at the same time wary of it.

(2) Secondly, because my prior religious and reflective framework was imparted to me out of genuine and unconditional love - and in the context of familial and fraternal relationships - there are issues of trust and collateral damage. The love of friends and teachers isn’t enough to actually put the stamp of veracity on what they want to share with us, and conversely to diverge from what they percieve as true can damage those relationships.

(3) Finally, because of the preceeding two factors I have a tendency to engage in calculated and aversive acts of self-correction where I swing wildly from the emotional, ‘heart’ side of perception to the extreme rational ‘mind’ side. These swings aren’t entirely without value, in that they are often corrective and help me identify clinging to ‘views’ and ‘forms’, but they do have the tendency to push me off the other side of the middle path. From a self-satisfied oasis I end up in the desert of asceticism and doubt.

Right now I’m recovering from yet another one of those ’swings’. What is reassuring however is that once I go so far I don’t keep on falling away from the middle but naturally return. For instance I have been dodging my daily gongyo for weeks feeling that to do it would be an empty lie and then suddenly today I just felt the necessity of just sitting there and chanting and saying nembutsu. It was unavoidable.

If the Dharma, whatever it is, is what regulates that natural and delimited cycle of self-being and reflection then all we need to do - although it is nowhere near as simple as it sounds - is stop trying to give it a helping hand and over-egging things. Maybe what we receive, joy or emptiness, is enough already when we know that the pendulum will inevitably find its way back to the middle again.

 

Faith & Doubt

Beneath the Clouds this week has a moving and insightful reflection on doubt and faith in the light of a passage from Master Rennyo’s Shoshinge Tai’i. It reminds me a lot of one of my favourite Pure land writings, Master Genshin’s Yokawa Hogo. Here’s an extract from the latter:

“Delusion is the nature of ordinary beings. Apart from delusion, there is no mind in us. If we recite the Nembutsu while resigned to the fact that we are to remain ordinary beings full of delusion until death, we shall be received in welcome by Amida; then, as soon as we mount the lotus seat, our mind of delusion will be turned into that of Enlightenment. The Nembutsu that is uttered with the mind of delusion is like a lotus flower unstained by the muddy water. There should not be any doubt as to our attainment of birth.”

Namuamidabutsu.