thank you everyone good evening it's really really wonderful to be here and get this opportunity to share the Dharma with you and get to talk a little bit about the tradition that I am a practitioner of thank you very much for the introduction you gave some good key terms I don't have to worry about do they know what I'm talking about with that word my name is Harry Gyokyo Bridge and I I've been a minister now for about three years for the Buddhist Churches of America. And there's so many places you could possibly start. I think where I want to start is maybe just a kind of a little overview of Pure Land Buddhism to start out with. you know, not as well known in the United States or in the West as some other forms of Buddhism like Zen or maybe Tibetan Buddhism or even Theravada Buddhism like Vipassana and that kind of thing, Vipassana.

[01:05]

Pure Land Buddhism is a kind of Mahayana Buddhism with roots in India. Whether you believe scholars or practitioners, you know, scholars will say probably around the time of the birth of Mahayana, whenever that is. Zero... century or two before zero, right? It's kind of developing in that time period. Practitioners will say, of course, that it goes to Shakyamuni's words, you know, that the historical Buddha preached these sutras about Amida Buddha, about the Pure Land, and then, of course, that this is kind of, well, not necessarily primordial enlightenment, but, you know, something not just rooted in our own time, sphere, reality kind of zone, right? That Amida Buddha is a Buddha in a pure land, this kind of Buddha land in the western direction, and that his, you know, he began as a prince or king, sounds kind of familiar, right, with Siddhartha Gautama maybe, and then meets another Buddha and realizes, I want to be Buddha too.

[02:11]

I want to attain enlightenment, but I want to have the best possible pure land or Buddha land. kind of place where people can go to listen to me preach to be able to perform Bodhisattva practices and advance on the path to enlightenment and so contemplates for a really long period of time this is this Bodhisattva Dharmakara Bodhisattva and makes vows right depending on which text a different number but 48 vows is kind of the standard number and then practices puts all this into practice, contemplates, meditates, performs dana and bodhisattva activity, and then the sutra jumps back and Ananda says, so what happened? Did he become a Buddha? Yes. Yes, Ananda. That bodhisattva, Dharmakara, became Amitabha Buddha, or Amitayus Buddha, Buddha of infinite light or immeasurable life, and now resides in this western land, in his pure land.

[03:16]

and part of the mechanism of this kind of system then is that people can go to be born in that land right people if they do certain things and the sutra has all different kinds of things that you can possibly do but that that's one goal right is to go and be born in this pure land this land of bliss and think that the Pure Land tradition develops in a lot of different directions it develops together with a lot of different kinds of Buddhisms because it's not till Kamakura period that everything really splits off right and becomes only this or only that right Pure Land Buddhism is Mahayana Buddhism that's coexisting with or just not even coexisting like it's just a part of this Mahayana Buddhism and just Buddhism in general maybe that's developing one important part of Pure Land practice is visualization and it goes up into Central Asia and they think that that may have been kind of a place where visualization practices really developed and you know you think of like the massive Buddha images carved into walls and cave paintings of you know mandalas and all these different Buddha images may have been aids to Buddha visualization.

[04:39]

So one a very important practice for Pure Land Buddhism is historically in general, is this visualizing Amida Buddha. I'm going to say Amida Buddha. That's the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit, or the Indian language. Amitabha would be infinite light, Amitayus, which are two names for the same Buddha. And so I'm just going to say Amida Buddha just to make things simple. So there's one sutra, the contemplation or visualization sutra, that teaches all these different visualizations to do in order to be born. in the pure land starting with looking at the setting sun as it's you know this red disk and then being able to visualize that because it's in the west right so you're focusing towards the western direction towards Amida's land and then visualizing the different adornments of the land like the pools and the trees and the palaces and then finally actually visualizing avala kiteshvara mahasthama prapta the two bodhisattvas and then Amida Buddha and

[05:43]

know these visualizations can be very visual right like his size right or that the different marks right on the body but then it does get into kind of visualize each of these 84,000 beams of light in detail with like 84,000 transformed Buddhas coming out of each one you know so it gets very hyperbolic right going beyond maybe what we could do in a kind of normal objective sense So that's one, the visualization sutra is one really important sutra talking about these visualizations. There's another kind of, different kind of maybe bringing the Buddha to mind is maybe a way to put it. This is a very visual way, right? Imagining this Buddha. But there's also an idea of bringing the Buddha to mind, being mindful of the Buddha. right which I don't know if we really even know what that means right does it mean a picture does it mean just thinking about him does it mean thinking about his qualities I'm not really sure but one of the vows says if you bring the Buddha to mind Amida Buddha ten times and aspire to be born in his land sincerely with sincere mind then it's in the words of a vow so if if someone does that and doesn't get born

[07:06]

then Dhammakara Bodhisattva says, may I not attain supreme enlightenment. This is one of his vows. So if someone does this, brings me to mind ten times, aspires to be born on my land with sincere mind, and doesn't get born there, then I will not attain perfect enlightenment. But, as the sutra says, he did attain perfect enlightenment. Therefore, this vow mechanism means that anyone that does that will be born in his land. So there's this kind of mechanical side to this vow. What happens, and this is an area I'm interested in, I don't think anyone really knows when this develops, but this idea of saying the name of the Buddha happens. There's these Buddha name recitation sutras that get translated into Chinese and Of course, we think of mantras, right, if you've studied Tantric Buddhism at all. But this idea of bringing Amida to mind at least 10 times or up to 10 times gets later interpreted as say his name 10 times.

[08:10]

So anyone that recites his name up to 10 times will be born in his land. So I mentioned the visualization kind of Nembutsu, right, but in the Jodoshinshu and some of the Japanese schools like Jodoshu, this reciting the name of the Buddha becomes the main kind of practice. For centuries, people are doing both. They're doing all of it. They're not only doing Pure Land stuff. They're doing everything. But this idea of reciting the name, the Nenbutsu, it becomes really important for our school and for some of the schools in Japan, Kamakura period, Japan. So you might think, okay, reciting the name of Amida Buddha, so if I say Amida Buddha, that should do it. But the name is actually Namo Amida Buddha. I take refuge in Amida Buddha. Or Namo Amida Butsu in Japanese. So it's kind of interesting where it's not just Amida Buddha, but his name is actually Namo Amida Butsu.

[09:15]

I take refuge in Amida Buddha. And this... Buddha name recitation is viewed as an easy practice. Obviously, this visualizing, this very complicated image is not the easiest thing you can do, not something that just anyone can do. Performing good acts might get you to the Pure Land. There's all different kinds of practices. Generating bodhicitta, generating the mind aspiring to Buddhahood, could be another thing you could do to get to the Pure Land. but it's this Namo Amidabutsu reciting the name of the Buddha that becomes a really important practice in Chinese Buddhism or Namo Amidabutsu or different pronunciations of it you know all these East Asian pure land kind of schools of Buddhism so fast forward to Kamakuri period Japan which you probably have heard at least, right, because this is kind of the hotbed where Dogen comes out of, Nichiren, Honen, Shinran, Ippen, all these different really important figures in what's sometimes called new Japanese Buddhism, right, after this is what, 1100s, 1200s, maybe even into 1300s.

[10:36]

And Japanese society seems to be doing so great there's a lot of wars going on there may be famines and really kind of difficult social circumstances and so this is where those exclusive schools really kind of seem to develop like just sit right or just recite the title of the Lotus Sutra or just recite Namu Amida Butsu that's all you need don't do that other stuff right just do that exclusive practice schools and it's interesting because all those people came from Mount Hiei right? All those people were Tendai monks. They're all monks at the same place, right? And they all leave the mountain. Honen leaves, Dogen leaves, Nijiren leaves, Shinran leaves. Shinran is a monk for 20 years. So Shinran Shonin is the founder of the Jodo Shinshi scroller, Luktu as the founder. And he's a monk for 20 years and finally kind of, I think, We don't really know, but it seems like he realizes the harder I practice, the harder I try, the worse I get.

[11:41]

And he's actually interesting because he's maybe the first monk in Japan to get married publicly. It seems like people were doing that in Mount Hiei at this time, but that he kind of publicly does it. He's still a monk, but he's married. And so part of it may have been sexual desire kind of things that he was having problems with on here. It may have been problems of not reaching any kind of attainment through the various practices. But he leaves the mountain and encounters Honan, who's one of the Pure Land teachers, and encounters this teaching of just saying nimbutzu. Just saying nimbutzu. You don't have to be a good monk. You can be a bad monk, right? You don't have to be smart. You don't have to be rich. You don't have to be a man, right? It's a teaching, a universal kind of teaching for anyone that Honen and Shinran encounters. And so he realizes, whoa, this is the teaching for me, and becomes a disciple of Honen.

[12:44]

Honen has a lot of disciples. So if you go, if you look, I'm part of the Jodo Shinshu school, one branch of it, but then there's Jodo Shu also, which just means pure land school. So Jodo Shu looks to Honen. And even within Jodo Shu, there's different branches that some emphasize much more other practices like meditation or monastic precepts, while others may look a little more like Jodo Shinshu. So Honan had a lot of different disciples. They actually get excommunicated, exiled, sorry, and defraud because of an incident that happens with some of Honan's followers. So Honan and seven others get defraud and sent to the barren wastelands of Japan. Two of his followers are executed, beheaded, and so the Nebutsu teaching gets persecuted during this time period as well. So there's kind of this persecution thing going on in Jodo Shinshu to a certain extent too, or at least in Shinran's writings. But they get reinstated, it's politics, right?

[13:48]

I mean, you know, right? We wish religion could just be this pure, wonderful thing and we could leave the world of politics, but it's following us around politics, economics. It's all always kind of churning away there. So they get pardoned. Shinran is way up in northern Japan and comes through modern-day Tokyo, the Kanto area. He could have gone back to Kyoto, but it seems like he realized there's people around here that need Buddhism. So I'm going to stay and I'm going to preach to them. I'm going to try and help them. stays there for for many years but then it finally does return to Kyoto and ends up dying there and then his children or his his descendants which is weird right because it wasn't he a monk but no he was married too so he has children and these descendants mold the institution that becomes the Honganji the temple of the primal vow and all kinds of political misadventures and um you know the end of the um right before tokugawa period 1600 this might be more japanese history than you want but um 1600 tokugawa period starts the great peace before that is all the warlords and everything nobunaga hideyoshi right the the warring kind of um states one of the last holdouts was jodo shinshu

[15:03]

They had the Osaka Castle, and they had a whole bunch of peasants, and they were one of the only ones that could hold out against the warlords. And so finally, though, they give in, and the 1600s, almost 300 years of peace follow. And then Meiji period, 1868, right, late 19th century, America forces Japan open. right and they start looking to the west and a lot of Buddhist scholars go to Europe and America to study and a lot of them were Shinshu scholars it seems and there's a university called Ryukoku University that actually started right when Harvard University started in like 1608 or something like that so they're kind of like sister schools and so these scholars go out and learn European techniques of scholarship a lot of the Japanese Americans that emigrated from Japan to other parts of the world, North America, South America, Brazil. We were talking about that at lunch, right? Or dinner. They went to Brazil, they went to Canada, they went to Hawaii to work on farms and everything.

[16:05]

So United States, they come and then around 1899, there's a lot of men over here working and getting into trouble maybe after work. you know, bath houses and gambling halls and all this kind of thing. So some people invite some Jodo Shinshu ministers over from Nishi Hongganji. There's two Hongganjis. There's Higashi Hongganji's east and Nishi's west. They were actually split by the warlord in order to split the power base so that you didn't have, you know, 50,000 peasants. You had 10,000 here and 20,000 here, whatever. And so Nishi, but a lot of the people that came were from Hiroshima and that came from Japan during late 19th, early 20th century were from the strong Shinshu base areas in Japan. And so for some reason, they invite these people over and begin the organization. And so BCA, although it wasn't called that, but looks to 1899 as the founding of the mission here in this country.

[17:13]

And they built temples. It looks like the first generation Japanese-Americans, the temple was really like the center of their social life. So that, you know, after farming seven days a week or, you know, I guess if you got to get Sunday off, you went to temple and met other people like you. And, you know, they sent over ministers from Japan for decades. World War II, the internment, Japanese-Americans get put in the camps. in this country. And a lot of the ministers were actually put in special camps for really dangerous people because, oh, these people must be spies, right? And so the ministers were really looked at as dangerous people. But the faith managed to keep going during that time. And I think Buddhist Churches of America was formed as an organization during that time. And after the war, people came back and hoped that their church had been boarded up and kept safe, which Many of them were, some of them weren't, I think, but it kept going. And gradually, so it's still very Japanese-American, very ethnic kind of thing, especially after the war and after that experience, there was, I think, not like this open arms, everybody come on in, come with us.

[18:29]

It was more kind of keep your heads down and let's just kind of keep our group here. You know, but over the past 40, 50 years, probably since the 60s, 70s, 80s, up until now, it's gradually been opening up and other people, non-ethnically Japanese people, have been coming in. Still depends, I think, on where the churches are. So there's churches all over California, LA, San Francisco, and then east, like more of the kind of farming areas. Fresno, Lodi, Stockton. Sacramento's huge. Also, you know, Washington and Oregon. I was just in Utah visiting the Salt Lake City Buddhist Church. There's a fellowship in Las Vegas, which is always fun to go visit. And then even New York City, Chicago. Actually, a lot of the Japanese Americans after the war relocated to New York City or Chicago for some reason. And so there are temples there. There's a new one in Virginia, Ekoji, which I've been lucky enough to visit a few times.

[19:32]

And that's a very different, that's a much newer temple, so it has a much different, more diverse kind of congregation. So, let's see what time it is. Oh, we've got plenty of time. So that's kind of history, huh? I did it. India to now, in 25 minutes, I guess some of the more doctrinal kind of issues being, one, that it's a Buddhism for anybody, right? So farmer, warrior, prostitute, nobleman, bad monk, good monk, right? Anybody can be a part of this practice. All you have to do is recite . That's it. No precepts required. No monastic rules. Just look at the founder. He got married.

[20:33]

He's still a monk. He still shaved his head. He still wore robes, but he's married. So Japan is going through some really weird stuff at this time, right? Kamakura period and Mount Hiei and just the politics and everything and the social upheaval. So no precepts. No meditation. That's another big one. That's probably the biggest one, huh? Yeah, the precept one's pretty big, but not for Japan, maybe, but no meditation, for the most part. There's different interpretations, but it seems, I think, one of the big emphases of Japanese, this Honen's dream of Nembutsu and the Pure Land teachings is that it's for people who can't meditate, almost. Now, Honan is known to have said, if meditating is good for your Nembutsu practice, then meditate. If not meditating is good for your Nembutsu practice, then don't meditate. If keeping the precepts is good for your practice, keep the precepts.

[21:36]

If not, don't keep the precepts. Don't bother with it. So Honan seems to have been very flexible. As long as it was Nembutsu-centric, that whatever it takes for your Nembutsu to be strong, do it. But it seems like some of his followers, you know, take the ball and run with it, right? And develop more maybe intense, I was going to say extreme, but I don't want to say that, more intense, intensively exclusive versions of this. One of the big issues is how many times should I say Nembutsu? There's that issue of up to 10 times or even 10 times in the sutras. But then it kind of becomes an issue of, well, if one Nembutsu is good, 10 should be 10 times as good. A thousand should be a thousand times as good. So I'm going to try to say it as many times as possible. And incredibly copious amounts of Nembutsu recitation seems to be one stream in Pure Land Buddhism. Chinese, too.

[22:37]

I don't know if you've ever seen, but there's pictures of maybe it's like a ship or Amida's in it and Kanon's in it and it's got this big sail and all these little circles so fill in a circle for every hundred Nembutsu you say maybe ten or a hundred so that by the time you filled this out you said Nembutsu a lot that's a good thing right that's beneficial because each Nembutsu is so powerful but then there's another school that says not so much the mechanism, not so much the technique, the technology of nembutsu that's important, but it's the state of mind that you say it in. So one nembutsu said with the right frame of mind, with the right mental state, is a million times better than a million nembutsu said mindlessly. Does a parrot go to the Pure Land if you can teach it to say nembutsu? That is an issue, right, that comes up in text sometimes. So then this state of mind becomes important.

[23:39]

But how do I generate this state of mind? What do I need to do to do that? And Shinran's interpretation, I think, of experience is that actually he's not the one generating the mind. If it was up to him to generate the right mind behind the nembutsu, then, I mean, he's already left Mount Hie, right? His ego is always intruding. He's seeing that he can't generate that kind of... pure spiritual mind so then but all is not lost that mind can come from Amida Buddha that mind is actually transferred from Amida Buddha so that the mind of Amida Buddha comes to the practitioner and becomes one with the practitioner's mind so that Nembutsu said after that experience is then said in gratitude mind and then it gets into the self power versus other power is one of the dynamics that comes up Chiriki and Tariki and so this Tariki other power a lot of people don't like the term other power I don't mind as long as you understand that it means Buddha power right or vow power so that it's not my limited mind but that it's something coming from Amida Buddha so this gets played out in

[24:59]

you know, the theater of all these different followers and everything. And this mind then is called Shinjin. And it's foundational for Jodo Shinshu. It's the kind of core religious experience, this Shinjin. What's Shinjin? We speak English, right? So it seems like people early on translated it as faith. So faith in Amida Buddha is what some of the early 20th century English translations become. lot of people don't like that though and so there's another more recent movement saying just call it shinjin just do romaji right just leave it as is because you can't capture the essence of the the word in some just one single English word it's always going to be kind of wrong so let's leave it as shinjin we'll hope it catches on like sushi or something right some Japanese words have caught on in our culture right I think that's kind of extreme in the other direction because then, you know, it's a foreign word.

[26:01]

It's just automatically, from the beginning, it's incomprehensible. So there's another of a more literal translation, maybe. The jin, shinjin, right? So jin is actually another shin. It's kokoro, mind, or heart and mind, right? The first one is shinjiru, or in modern Japanese would be to believe. Shinjirarunai, can't believe it. Just totally everyday language. But here is looking towards a more Buddhist kind of understanding of entrusting is the word they like to use. Entrusting in the Buddha. So here, if it's the mind of entrusting, maybe with an other power understanding, the mind that's been brought to entrust in Amida Buddha. It's not something I can say, okay, I'm going to trust in Amida. trust you Amida you know that I can generate this right that it's it's it's other power right so it's it's the mind that is brought to entrust in Amida Buddha so this is the said to be the core of Jodo Shinshu the core experience of Jodo Shinshu practitioners but it's really really difficult and miss difficult to understand I think

[27:21]

Can you understand it? It's something you have to experience, right? But kind of misunderstood, probably both in Japan, because, you know, it's using everyday Japanese words, misunderstood here, too, that it's very difficult to talk about it in a general sense. So, then another big question, we were talking about this in the car, is, okay, if I can get this shinjin, what happens? What does that entail? What's the experience of Shinjin? And a lot of it is put in terms of birth in the pure land. Right? That Shinjin is what's important now, but what's really important is that I get born in the pure land so that I can attain Buddhahood. And this Shinjin is, one aspect of Shinjin is that it's assurance of birth. If I can attain this state of Shinjin, if you're being endowed with the mind of Amida Buddha and this other power, mind of entrusting, that my status has kind of changed and I will be born in the pure land.

[28:26]

And Shinran uses all kinds of interesting terms like, you are like Maitreya. You're like a Bodhisattva. Which is really interesting when you consider that he's telling peasants this. Or people that were normally downtrodden, farmers, hunters, fishermen, people who were kind of outcasts in this society. You are like Maitreya. bodhisattva you're like a bodhisattva and so it's really powerful imagery for the time but is that all you know is it okay great so I'll get to the Pure Land in the next life you know that can become this kind of next life centric kind of Buddhism maybe right so it just get this you'll get the ticket and then and you can you don't have to worry about it anymore Be an upstanding member of society. Don't revolt against leaders. Follow the rules. And when you die, you'll be born in the Pure Land. Won't that be great? Right? There's one way maybe it could be interpreted. But it seems like there's also another understanding in Shinran's writings of some kind of transformation, transformation that occurs in the person.

[29:32]

And well, that image of Amida Buddha's mind and the mind of the practitioner becoming one is really powerful, I think. Does it mean that the practitioner becomes Buddha? I think no. In this school, no. It's still understood. You still see yourself as a foolish being. But Shinran gives us a really nice metaphor where the passions, the defilements, anger, desire, ignorance are like clouds obscuring the sky of Shinji. So that the Buddha's mind is light, light, wisdom. But that wisdom light is obscured by the passions, by our ignorance, by our anger. And yet, just like on an overcast day, it's still light. It's not like nighttime when there's clouds. The sunlight can still come through.

[30:33]

And so similarly, Shinjin is always... part of our life. The light of the Buddha can manifest somehow, I think, in the life of the practitioner. And yet, the passions are still activated. Passions, defilements, kleshas, right? The three poisons, right? We're still stuck with them while we're in this life. So it's kind of an interest, I mean, I think a lot of the Buddhist schools kind of have to deal with that, right? When you have some kind of enlightenment awakening experience, do you become Buddha? You become a fully enlightened one, awakened one. And I think some schools said, yeah, sokushinjoobutsu, like in the esoteric schools, attain Buddhahood in this body, that you do become Buddha. But I think that for Shinran in the Pure Land schools, it's kind of a recognition that karma is powerful, the passions are very, very powerful and aren't

[31:34]

unfortunately aren't so easy to just sweep away right and then to just wake up into perfectly enlightened existence and so Shinran always writes about that the joy and the gratitude that he feels that having been grasped by Amira's light and yet what a foolish horrible person I am foolish double-headed ignoramus that he just isn't gonna let himself off the hook He's not going to say, yeah, I'm a bodhisattva, and I'm going to go out and do some bodhisattva activity today. I'm going to help as many people as I can. He's not willing to let him to ignore the activity of the three poisons in his life. And yet, I think, if we were to look from outside, we would see that he was preaching to people, trying to help people, just manifesting bodhisattva activity, I would think. But he's not... It's a kind of Buddhism where not to really revel in that, revel in it, right? Not to advertise it either, right?

[32:36]

So, I don't know, what time is it? Oh yeah, wrong time, 25 minutes. Okay. Maybe just open any questions or comments or anything. Tell us about your role. oh yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's interesting because Nishi Hong or not Nishi Honzan Honganji this institution that forms after Shinran's death is under Tendai ordination so all the priests are actually getting ordained at Mount Hiei and getting Tendai ordination so the chanting that we do is from one of the Tendai chanting lineages and Yet, at some point, well, during that whole time, Shinshu priests are getting married, growing their hair out, drinking, eating meat, they're not keeping the precepts.

[33:40]

Actually, I think probably most Japanese Buddhists since Meiji period don't keep the precepts. There's a lot of interesting political history there. There's very few, probably, purely monastic orders in Japan. But Shinshu has been doing it since Shinra. really of you know not keeping the precepts even though they did receive the monastic ordination so we do get ordained and you go to have to go to Kyoto still and you have a 10-day training period and then a ceremony and you start out with it's called zoku bakama it's a skirt thing the hakama kind of like if you know archery Japanese archery and they have that skirt thing so you wear that at the first part of the service And then you go in and the monchu comes and taps you on the head and you take the three refuges and recite the creed. And then you're a monk. Well, you're not a monk. Well, yeah, in Japanese they say sooryo, which is the Japanese for monk. But with this understanding of Japanese Buddhism. And so you run back and you change. You have to run. Because then you have to run back in your ropes.

[34:44]

So basically, I'm going to pull everything apart. So I have a hakama on this part here. But it's a kiribakama. So we don't wear the lei. Zoku is lei. So the zoku bakama is a lei hakama. And then there's a hakama there. This is kokue, which has the pleats. And a lot of times we think that this is part of our robes. But actually, this is the robes. Your tradition may be similar. This is a kesa. We call it gojo gesa. It's like in five sections. And there's a wagesa, and I have one there that we just wear around here. It's just like a ring that attaches here. And then there's also shichi. So this is the five-section kesa, and then there's shichijo gesa, the seven-section. So there's a knot here. If you were watching me, you could tell that I left it tied.

[35:44]

We're supposed to tie it every time, but I have to admit that I leave mine tied because... For a funeral, there's like 50,000 things to do, so I just throw it on, but there's a tie here and a tie here. Shichijo, there's a seven one that's huge, and I've never worn one. It's really only worn for special occasions, and it comes all the way out here, and there's like a handle for you to hold onto it here, and someone has to dress you, I think. I don't think it's something you can put on yourself. This you can put on yourself. So these are kind of formal robes, and we did it kind of backwards because I spoke at city center, three, four weeks ago, and I just wore the, fuho is like a much more simple version of this, and the wagesa, but we did the whole ritual of the bowing and everything, and then this time there's no ritual, but I'm wearing the really more formal robes, so whatever. It's kind of fun, it gives it kind of a theme. In Japan, this would be worn with kimono for the most part, right, hakuwe.

[36:48]

So you have like a white kimono on underneath, and tadi, of course, and then this would be worn over it. But here in the States, you just wear a suit. And I wear that kind of part on purpose too, just because that's my kind of minister's uniform. We dress very Western in this country, most of us. There's some ministers that wear more like Samue kind of thing, more kimono-looking kind of thing. Very often here, we wear western clothes underneath the robes. So in Japan, this would be worn any time you went into the naijin, any time you went into the altar area for a ritual, you would wear these. But in America, we've simplified it more. We usually just wear the fuho wagas, or the more simplified one, and just wear this for special occasions. We wear white for weddings instead of this black, or sort of like maybe hanamatsuri or New Year's, you wear a white one of these instead of... Byakoe is called. And they have different colors, too, in Japan, but we just use the white and the black. And we only wear it for its services, for the most part.

[37:50]

You don't wear it all day. And I wondered if maybe you would do one of your chants. Give us an example of your chanting. Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. most of the time the chanting that we do is more just like reading sutra kind of so monotone just kind of well some like uh two of the ones we do are from the larger sutra on amida and they're so they're just little sections uh so it might be just one two three four five right five characters with a pause at the end of each one uh we chant the smaller amida sutra in its entirety So that takes about 25 minutes or so. You have to go really fast sometimes. And you can do set taku with it. We don't do mokugyo. We don't use the wooden fish. And again, this gets down to sectarian stuff in Japan, right?

[38:54]

Where in Japan, the Buddhist schools develop to where you can kind of tell, okay, they're using those robes and those beads and they... don't have a wooden fish or they do have it, you know, so okay, I've identified them, right? They all have their, we have our sectarian identity depending on our implements, right? So that's dokkyo, just like reading the sutras. But then there's also the shomyo tradition, which is, comes from Tendai, and it's supposed to come from India originally, I think, and it's much more melodic. And so, what's the best example? I don't have the one in here. So the one I did at the city center, maybe, which is called Sambujo, and it's the three respectful invitations. And so it's inviting Shakyamuni, no, inviting Amida, Shakyamuni, the Buddhas of the Ten Directions, into the dojo, and we spread flowers joyously.

[39:54]

So part of the ritual is to have the little flower petal things, and at a certain point, everyone releases them. So I'll just chant the first line of that. So it's bujo, which is respectfully invite. Midan yorai, amida tatagata. New dojo is enter the dojo, the place of practice, or the place of the path, right? Sangei raku. So raku is happily or joyously, and sangei is to scatter flowers. So... Bu... . [...]

[40:57]

Shakyamuni and the Buddhas of the Ten Directions. That would be sung or chanted as kind of an invocation, right? Kind of the beginning of the service maybe. Then you might read a hyobhyaku, one of the kind of declaration to the Tathagata of what service we're doing. And originally those would be in Japanese, but we do them in English a lot now. And then the sutra chanting. I guess we're pretty chanting intensive, actually. I didn't realize it. Until recently, but we have, in order to get ordained, you have to memorize one chant that's like 20 minutes long, all in Japanese or Japanese-Chinese, and be able to chant the one I just did, be able to recite two or three different things from memory. You have to be able to chant some of the Wa-san's, Shinran's poems, not from memory, but you have to be able to do it right, looking at the book and everything. So it's actually pretty intensive, and there's a lot of work to be done. Yeah. from a Jodo Shinshu family, or how it was that you decided to become a priest?

[42:38]

Yeah, I'm not. My father was from Maine, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, nominal Christian, never went to church. My mom was from a Zen family in Japan, but again, nominal Buddhist there, but then she actually became Seventh-day Adventist during college. in Sapporo and then Tokyo and she actually became a nurse because Seventh-day Adventists are strong in medicine and so they have a training hospital in Tokyo. So she was a Seventh-day Adventist and my dad was in Japan for work and he had a heart attack or heart problems and my mom was a nurse and they got married. Fell in love and they got married. So I was actually born in Japan but we grew up from age one to eleven in Boston area and then I went to high school in Japan to an American school never encountered Buddhism then. I was just into like rock music and I took Japanese for six years and didn't learn how to speak it at all and tried. I took Japanese for like eight or nine years. It was such a joke. I could never... I hated it.

[43:39]

I didn't really know why I was supposed to be doing it. I didn't want to do it but I felt guilty because I couldn't speak Japanese to my mom and stuff. But then when I was in college and happened to go to a memorial service for my friend's grandfather and heard the Dharma talk. And it was a general Buddhism Dharma talk, I seem to remember, but I have no idea what the contents were. But I just remember being fascinated, just being like, wow, what is this guy talking about? It, like, made sense. It was probably like Eightfold Path or Four Noble Truths or something, but it made sense. It just, like, the light bulb went off. And that was 1990. And... I tried to get into it. My friend's mom gave me all these books. But it wasn't the right time. There were no teachers around me in the Boston area that I really found. And then I worked at Starbucks, so that helped for Buddhist practice, like trying to be kind and compassionate to these angry people that need their caffeine first thing in the morning. It's actually probably one of the best places to practice, I think.

[44:43]

realized wow like i feel like a buddhist i want to be a buddhist and then i remember i picked grabbed one of the journalists that my friend's mom had given me and it had an ad for institute of buddhist studies which is in berkeley california and it said we are a graduate school for the academic study of buddhism and damn i was a musician at that point playing in bands and stuff and but i read that and i was like oh, that's what grad school is for. When I finished undergrad, I was like, I'm out of here. Not that I hate school, but I didn't like it. I was glad to be done, and I couldn't understand my friends were going on to master's. I didn't even know what a master's program was. But now I had a glimpse. You go to grad school to study what you're interested in, right? To study what you want to study about with teachers. Before, it was just something you had to do, right? And now it's like, I want to do this. And then I kept reading. And then said, we are also a seminary for training priests in the, or, you know, clergy in the Jodo Shinshu tradition and Buddhist churches of America.

[45:47]

And damn, right again, I was like, that's what I want to do. I knew I wanted to go to grad school right away, but then I also knew I didn't want to do it in a purely academic intellectual sense, although a lot of my engagement was intellectual, that I wanted to be more than that. I wanted to be, study Buddhism as a practitioner. And as part of this tradition of scholar-priests, I kind of realized later. And then it was just a matter of getting out to Berkeley, and 20 years later, here I am. I'm kind of wondering, what is Amida Buddha? Good question. Like a deity of some sort, or powers? And what is that relationship with Shakyamuni Buddha? Often I think it can... Amida Buddha can look like a deity, like, you know, this deity granting all this stuff. And I think that that, not that it's a deity, but, you know, traditionally, the Buddhas are powerful, right?

[46:52]

And we can entreat the Buddhas for spiritual help and for, you know. But for Shinran, it's pretty clear that he views Amida Buddha as Dharma body. which he says is beyond form, beyond conception. Actually, Amitabha is Buddha of inconceivable light. Buddha wisdom is inconceivable. If it's inconceivable, how the heck am I supposed to get to it? If it's beyond conception, I can't get there. I think this is the challenge of the Mahayana schools. How the heck do you get there? That's one of the dynamics of Buddhism. If samsara and nirvana are so separate, I mean, of course, you know, wisdom says samsara is nirvana, right? But in one sense, if they're separate, if it's inconceivable, then it's very difficult to attain that. And so dharma body of suchness, of ta-ta-ta, of emptiness, of wisdom, manifests in form as dharmakara bodhisattva, as a king.

[48:02]

He takes vows. He practices. He becomes Amida Buddha. He sets up a pure land so that foolish beings who cannot penetrate directly to enlightenment can attain Buddhahood. And then, oh, I lost it. So that's one aspect. And so it's kind of both. It's like this suchness, dharma body, but then also very much a sambhogakaya, reward body, the vow, that mechanism of the bodhisattva vow is really important. I remember what I was going to say. And so, The pure land, we can stretch it now to the pure land, it sounds like a heaven, right? Pure land sounds like a place. Where is the pure land? And I think there are many different answers. Some people in Chinese Buddhism felt like Amida's pure land was a very low-level pure land because it was impure. There's people there, there's birds, it has form. What kind of pure land is that, right? But the Jodo Shinshu lineage and tradition says no. it's the true recompense land is the true pure land of this Dharma body Buddha and so that yes that form land that seems to have a location and stuff and materiality is just a lower level for people that can that's all they can understand but the true land is actually the realm of the Nirvana the uncreated so

[49:23]

realm of the uncreated it's like right it's still the spatial metaphor of realm and space right but it's kind of been bumped up to where it's not a place it's not um some heaven out there that actually it's buddha reality itself wisdom reality itself but that too is still beyond us and so the important thing for shinran is not so much the buddha image as namo amida but the name is what becomes important and it's not my saying of the name that's important it's that the name is resounding throughout the universe it's interesting I kind of put Nembutsu in terms of my saying it right but then he goes on to look at one of the other vows it says all the Buddhas praise Amida all the Buddhas are saying his name Namo Amida Butsu Namo Amida Butsu it's resounding throughout the universe there's no place where it doesn't reach and then our job becomes the experience becomes to actually hear the name not to say it now it's not hearing it in a in a audit in a you know physical auditory sense it's some deeper I mean it almost sounds like synesthesia right where like hearing becomes a metaphor for something else right something deeper and so it's the experience of hearing the name understanding the vow that it was made for me

[50:46]

that the Buddha... And so the vow is like a manifestation of compassion, the Buddha's compassion. So I think one way we can think of Jodo Shinshu is much more on the compassion side, whereas some other schools focus more on the wisdom side. And that's an oversimplification. I'm not going to say who just says which, except to say that Shinshu really doesn't talk much about the wisdom side. There's little touches of it here and there, mentions like the idea of the Dharma body being beyond form and inconceivable. But for Shinran, it's not so important to understand that stuff. This is for Buddhism for people that can't understand that stuff, but can still benefit from it. So light is usually talked about in terms of light as wisdom, right? But they talk about the compassionate wisdom light of the Buddha, grasping me. So is there a Nirmanakaya aspect to that? That would probably be Shakyamuni. Shakyamuni, yeah, that's the other part. I was thinking, did I answer his whole question? And to try and answer both is that I think Shinran's pretty clear that Shakyamuni appeared in this world to teach about Amida.

[51:53]

Everything else is secondary. And so one of the lines, and that's the exact line from Shoshin Ye, that's why Shakyamuni Buddha appeared to teach about Amida's vow so that people could be liberated. by that. So again, it's coming out of this milieu, Kamakura period Japan, and this very, you know, exclusive and kind of ignoring other schools. And so then I think later on, people begin to, but actually Tokugawa period, debate was banned. Japanese schools, different schools, couldn't debate each other after the Tokugawa piece. Partly because when they started debating, they'd start fighting, right? Because you get all these exclusive practice people, and they'd start, you know, talking to each other, and they would turn into violence sometimes, I think, during Muromachi period, right? It was a very volatile time. So that's one of the things that Tokugawa shogunate did, was ban debate. So 280 years, they all turn in and contemplate their navels of their own doctrines without being in the context of other schools. And it wasn't maybe until 20th century, late 19th, early 20th, that there begins to be more interplay.

[53:00]

And I think even now, there's a lack of dialogue and interplay. Okay. Any other questions? Yeah. Okay. Go ahead. You seem to have one formed. What you said about the precepts, you have to follow the precepts. So, if this, thinking about this as the compassion school and compassion, I would think that there would be, like in the lower suture it says, the precepts of compassion roll like thunder. So I think there would be whether you name it or not, people are living by precepts, bodhisattva precepts, I would think, even though the widest compassion is, it doesn't matter whether you're following them or not, anybody can be saved in this world. I think that Shinshu ethics are very complex because doing good things, being compassionate, being good, can't be held as one of the

[54:13]

requirements because then somebody that can't do that has been excluded. That's the mechanism that I see there as far as the ethics. Meditation can't be a requirement of birth in the pure land or embraced by Amida because then someone who can't meditate is excluded. So that... Embrace is bound. Embrace is bound. If somebody is excluded. Yeah, all people are embraced. So if as soon as you try to start limiting it by saying you have to do this, you have to do that, then you've missed the point. And so I think that there it's a very tricky thing where to hold up anything is you have to do this. You have to be good. You have to do this or that or not do this. You can't eat meat. You can't do this, that. You've excluded a whole bunch of people that can then not be embraced by Amita's compassion. But it doesn't say then that you should do bad things, which some people did say, apparently during Kamakura period. They would say, if you... you should do evil acts just to show how much you trust Amida, kind of thing.

[55:20]

But that's viewed as licensed evil, and Shinran rejects that. The point isn't to do bad things, but the point isn't to do good things either. It's kind of beyond that. So beyond good and evil kind of jumps to mind, right? It's beyond a morality. Shinran's kind of like, what is moral? I mean, what would be the right thing to do? We can try to be compassionate, but in the ambiguity and complexity of actual human lived existence, or just lived existence, not only human, what is good? How do I determine what that is? So I think that's part of it. But then, I would think that the person that is living this life still understands the Buddhist kind of ethics of compassion, but then you kind of view, maybe view yourself against the yardstick and see how far you fail. So your ego may kick in and be like, yeah, I was pretty good today. I think that was a pretty compassionate thing to do. But then that's my ego again. It doesn't mean that I then stopped being compassionate or trying to be compassionate.

[56:23]

But trying to be compassionate isn't the way either. So it's really ambiguous. And I think that's one of our challenges is to explicate that, to manifest that. That's the big challenge, right, is to actually live that life. So they talk about becoming your foolish self. The foolish being is a big part of it. That's a big part of the experience. And so... Part of the transformation, I think, part of the experience of Shinjin isn't that I become perfect. It isn't that I become Buddha. It's that I truly am actually able to see my foolish self. I'm able to see the parts of me that maybe I wouldn't normally like to see, but I'm enabled to.

[57:28]

by the light of Amida, that compassionate light. If it was only see your foolish self, then that would be really depressing. Nobody would want to do that. You'd just get really depressed. But the other side of the coin is the light, that experience of the light, the compassionate grasp. Thank you.

[57:49]

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