By Gordon Bermant

We’ve all driven our cars to places where we want to park, and there’s a sign that says, “No Parking.” Now we have to make a decision – to park or not to park.

On one hand, if we choose not to park, we can do that for a number of reasons. We might think that “No Parking” really means no parking, and it would just be wrong to park there. Or we might think, “I really don’t want to get a ticket, because if I get a ticket it is going to be expensive, and I don’t want to have to pay for that ticket”. Or we might think, “There are a lot of other parking places around here, so I can go somewhere else to park”.

On the other hand, if we choose to park, we can also do that for a number of reasons. We might think, “I’m not going to be very long, no harm will be done if I park to do my business.” Or we might think, “Police are not very strict about parking enforcement around here, so if I do park, I won’t get a ticket.”

So there are a number of reasons why we would choose to park and a number of reasons why we would choose not to park. But in none of these cases do we doubt the reality of that sign. That sign is an authentic sign, regardless of whether we obey it or not.

But now imagine, as we are deciding what to do, that somebody comes up and says, “You know, that sign is a prank. Some kids have put that sign up there, and it doesn’t mean anything. No one should pay attention to that sign.” Now I have to decide who is telling the truth. Is this a true No Parking sign? Or is it a falsehood that I can safely ignore? The choice I make when I am told that the sign is a phony is different from the choice I make if I accept the reality of the sign and obey it or not.

I think about this when I think about our relationships to our religion, Jodo Shinshu. Some of us in the sangha were born and raised in Jodo Shinshu. It is the family’s religious tradition, often gong back generations. Others of us, such as me, are converts who have come to Jodo Shinshu as adults. After almost twenty-three years in the sangha, I have come to a few conclusions about those of us who have come to Jodo Shinshu rather than having been born and raised in it.

If you are raised in Jodo Shinshu at your mother’s knee, you can develop faith that is unreserved and unshakable. This faith is beyond doctrine, in fact beyond intellect or conceptualization. In response to arguments between others about some point of Jodo Shinshu teaching, you can say “Be that as it may, in my heart, I feel Amida’s gift.”

That is a gift that comes from your mother’s knee. It is the gift that comes from being born and raised in a religious tradition with loving parents. Taitetsu Unno has explained that when parental love and concern are expanded and deepened within us, “we speak of the compassion of Amida Buddha, who never punishes but always protects and supports us in life.” The experienced security of parental love and guidance is generalized through implicit and explicit teaching into a deep acceptance of Amida’s embrace**. In Japanese, the term is Oya-sama: Amida Buddha experienced as a universal parental love within us.

Of course adult converts to Jodo Shinshu have no such certainty growing from childhood. Many of us feel that we were fooled once or more in our religious lives, and now we have empty feelings in the middle of our spiritual lives. We seek assurance that what we see and hear is authentic, not deceptive.

As converts, or would-be converts, we are cautious and self-protective. So it doesn’t help to learn from ministers that we should simply trust in Amida Buddha’s compassion or that there is nothing we can do, no practice we can employ, that will bring us closer to that compassion. Such a message can add to despair. It does nothing to help us fill the empty place.

Those of us who arrive at the door of the hondo with holes in the middle have not experienced familial love and guidance generalizing throughout childhood to become integrated as Amida’s compassion and wisdom. We need religious guidance to help us transform the experiences of our lives, working honestly with our emotional memories. We seek practice to open places deep within for the realization of Oya-sama long after our childhoods have passed.

In January of this year I witnessed the strength and success of this practice. The annual celebration in memory of Shinran Shonin, Ho-Onko, was held on January 15 at the Jodo Shinshu Center in Berkeley. Reverend Kodo Umezu invited 10 speakers to present dharma messages at the evening service (a “dharmathon”). Spontaneously, many of these messages referred to relationships between the speaker and the speaker’s parents. Some told of a fulfilled loving relationship, while others expressed longing for love even at the time speaker was attending to a parent at the time of the parent’s death. Several speakers described how ministers had guided the speaker to an act that opened the speaker’s heart to the intimate connections among familial love, personal forgiveness, and universal compassion.

I think that these connections are the core of faith. They are beyond language and independent of doctrine. They are beyond what we “believe” as Jodo Shinshu Buddhists. We can be conscientious or indifferent about learning and sharing the teachings. We can give much or a little of our time and money to the temple and other good causes. These efforts demonstrate our beliefs and our obedience to belief, but they are not by themselves confessions or expressions of faith. Faith is the awareness, beyond language and beyond doubt, of Oya-sama within us. Once apprehended, we are able to share it with others; it is universal compassion. It is what we discover when we accept an undeserved gift gratefully. And that is the great promise of this religion – that everyone is embraced unconditionally in Namo Amida Butsu. Everyone who comes through the door of Jodo Shinshu Temple seeks this embrace. Our task in the sangha is to create an environment where everyone can find and celebrate it.

* With gratitude to Wilfred Cantwell Smith and his book Faith and Belief: The Difference between Them.
** www.geocities.com/shin_sangha/jodo_act2006.html

By Jerry Bolick, November 30, 2008

I cannot give up the flower of this world

which sooner or later scatters—

though I go to Enlightenment,

I cast backward glances.

Haya Akegarasu

As Buddhists we often speak of detachment, generally understanding that to mean breaking free of our attachments, “transcending” our attachments and the accompanying suffering. People we love die; we suffer loss and grief. The liberated personality, we suppose, somehow glides past this more easily than we. Fair enough, if life were a movie. But it is not. And life recently clarified this for me, pulling me close, deepening my appreciation.

Today, November 30^th, is the fourteenth anniversary of my brother in law’s death. We learned of this just last week. Yes, last week, fourteen years after his passing, we learned he was gone.

While still a young man, Eddie was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. On medication, he was fine; off meds, he was delusional and unable to function normally. When things were good, he loved to work and to be with people. When things were really bad, it was not unusual for him to wander off. He once wandered as far as Phoenix, where he was picked up and committed; we last heard from him upon his release in the summer of 1994—he was happy to be headed home. We know now he made it as far as Los Angeles, where, apparently homeless, he was killed.

At that time, the police had only his fingerprints to go on and were unable to make a match. Eddie became John Doe #216 and so family efforts to locate him over the years, including hiring a private investigator, were all for naught. Early in November, expanded Homeland Security database information allowed LAPD to make positive identification and the family was contacted.

The grief we are experiencing over Eddie’s loss is, as you might expect, different from anything we’ve experienced as a family before. My wife and her sister are deeply troubled because Eddie was “alone” when he died. But I believe something different and more is weighing on us. Eddie was without family at his side at the time of his death. He has also been without family grief and remembrance for the fourteen years since then. And we in the family share with him in this latter aloneness, because through that whole time, we didn’t know.

Not knowing, we have not been able to remember him as we would have wanted; not knowing the loss, it has gone un-grieved. But now, in our awareness of our not knowing, the doubled depths of our mutual aloneness with Eddie have become tangible, a deeply marked wound of emptiness in our hearts.

It is as if we’ve been naked all these years and, just now finding out, we’re not so sure how to digest this news, not at all sure what is happening, why we feel so disoriented, even cheated. And, but, here is the light: not knowing truncated, effectively denied us our need to engage loss, to grieve and, over time, to find meaning. This need, not fully appreciated, yet shared by all peoples, was enabled to surface only through awareness.

Being un-aware of loss, being detached from this painful situation, did not relieve us of suffering; it stripped us of a fundamental and meaningful human experience, without which, we are…less.

Buddha teaches us that there is no liberation without the awareness and recognition of the suffering and pain inherent in human life. It is not that we transcend suffering or leave it behind, but that we transcend and leave behind the false idea that suffering, grief and loss are to be avoided. This is not only the starting point of Buddha’s teaching, but also where it stays.

With as full awareness as we can muster, we are encouraged to turn toward our suffering and the suffering of others. And by virtue of that turning awareness, we are freed. Freed to go more deeply into the heart of our own humanity, freed to come to know who we really are and to find true and sustaining meaning and joy.

For me and my family, this turning awareness allows us to once again hear Eddie’s voice, to respond in kind, to recognize our broken and fractured hearts and to begin on our way to becoming healed and whole.

Namuamidabutsu

For Eddie

Tides of silenced tears

Of lost grief

Of years of unknowing

—you’d died—

Alone amidst our unknowing

Stripped of the gift of ache and grief

We are lost

My wife Geri does most of the yard work at our house. I respond to her good nature about this with relief and guilt. Occasionally, to assuage guilt, I engage in short bursts of manic labor, for example by raking up leaves that have blown into locations in our back yard where they are difficult to retrieve.

Some seasons ago I went out to rake a lot of leaves from underneath our low-lying juniper bushes. I filled a lot of leaf bags in short order, threw them in the bed of my truck, and drove them to the county dump. Driving to the dump with trash in a truck is a man’s job: inflating if not elevating. Then I returned home and raked up more leaves: crawling under the scratchy bushes, reducing guilt with every scratch. The bags piled up again, more than two dozen of them. I decided to take a break. Then I felt something odd about my left hand; something was missing. My wedding ring had slipped off my finger! I had lost it during these hours of mindless work.

All the guilt flooded back, plus more, like interest on my earlier deposits. I thought about all the places I could have lost the ring, which included anywhere I had raked, anywhere I had been during the day. I got back down beneath the junipers and searched the ground, but the ring was not to be found there. This seemed like a pretty hopeless situation.

Confession was the beginning of a resolution, so I told Geri that I had lost the ring. Together, we looked around the wider area where I had been raking, without success. If I had lost the ring at the dump, it was gone forever. Then there was the big pile of trash bags stuffed with leaves. Perhaps, as I was scooping up leaves between the lawn rake and my left hand, my ring had gone into a bag with the leaves—unlikely, but maybe. Those bags sat there like a lump of reproach: if I didn’t check them out, I’d never know for sure.

Geri volunteered to go through the bags with me. This would be a big job. It was a lot of work with small chances of reward. Neither of us wanted to start it right away. So the bags sat through a winter season, in a corner of the yard, waiting for us, doing what wet leaves do when crammed together for months.

On a clear warm day, all our excuses exhausted, we put a tarp down on the deck, dumped the first bag of leaves onto it, and pawed through the mound. When we finished searching, we replaced the leaves into the bag and dumped the next bag. We knew without saying it that we had a simple plan: we would search every bag. This turned out to be important.

One of the early bags in line had a surprise for us: an ant colony had developed within the leaves over the winter. As we sifted through the leaves, thousands of ants panicked. They grabbed eggs the queen had laid and ran around frantically clutching the orange eggs between their front legs, trying to save the future from disaster. As I watched this, one of the few Japanese words I know popped into my head: fukashige: Inconceivable Shinran used this word in the second line of the Shoshinge, describing Amida’s inconceivable light. But here is the other side of inconceivability, when complete disaster strikes, beyond expectation or cure—from the ant’s viewpoint. My stirring of leaves to solve a problem of my own had ended the world as they knew it: inconceivably! Humbling it is to consider that the world could act on me as I had acted on the ants, without intent to harm, but to destroy my world nonetheless. This is “collateral damage” indeed. But then the bright side of inconceivability arises, as the sun rises, its benefits accruing with no intent from a distant actor, just the way things are, beyond my comprehension.

I had these fancy thoughts, but still no wedding ring and a lot of bags left to empty. So we swept the ants back into their bag and dumped the next bag of leaves onto the tarp. No ring. Next bag: dump, sift, and re-bag. And so on, bag after bag after bag. No ring.

I recognized that my feelings were all over the map as I dumped and sifted. Was I hopeful about finding the ring? The fact was that sometimes I was (particularly as we opened each new bag and spread it out), and sometimes I wasn’t (particularly when we re-bagged the leaves and tossed the bag on the growing pile of bags that had disappointed us). After a while I recognized that how I felt about this task didn’t matter. What mattered was that we had a plan and were sticking to it.

In the midst of unpleasantness, my feelings vary widely and quickly. That’s my nervous system at work: electrochemical fluctuations in a bag of flesh located in a speck of the universe. I fall into a trap if I monitor those feelings too closely and worry when I find no optimism, no hope there. What matters is to have a sensible plan and stick with it. Feelings of hope go where they will. Endurance follows the plan. Calm arises from recognizing the capacity to endure irrespective of feeling’s fluctuations. Beyond hope is a good place to be.

As the number of remaining bags dwindled, I made a promise to myself: if I find that ring I won’t wear it on my finger but on a chain around my neck, beside the small wisteria crest I have worn for years. Same promise for a new ring, if that was necessary.

Extending the plan was comforting.

At last, the last bag. Open it up, turn the leaves onto the tarp…plunk!! The ring…in the last bag!! Spontaneously, out of my mouth: Namo Amida Butsu!! Namo Amida Butsu!!

But not so fast—what was that nembutsu that emerged just then? What was spontaneous about it? Was I thanking someone for the ring being in the last bag? In particular, was I thanking Amida Buddha who had kindly arranged for the ring to be there, like Santa Claus or parents who hide Easter eggs for their children to find? Or did I have a shred of an idea that I had deserved to find the ring? Any of this is magical thinking, not things as they are, not Jodo Shinshu Buddhism.

Whether the ring was in the bag or not, the world is as it is, was as it was at that moment. “Inconceivable” means just that: my efforts to conceptualize the working of the world, in respect to my intentions and hopes, are puny. This time, I caught a break and found my ring: Namo Amida Butsu. Next time, I may not catch a break: Namo Amida Butsu. It is the same nembutsu. The world is not about me. My task is to turn toward the world and everything in it, remaining open to whatever is there. I can plan, I can endure, and I should. Outcomes are what they are. In the meantime, my ring rests next to the wisteria crest on the chain around my neck. Namo Amida Butsu.