Life seems simpler if we blot out awareness of its mystery, but such a life is an impoverished one. There is a dimension to ourselves, the most essential dimension, which it is folly to ignore. Patricia Wright’s Gate is a delicate image of this. She shows us the complexities of a normal existence – lines in confusion, with hints of gridded order behind, to which we are not privy. As we move to the center, the lines grow ever more clotted and chaotic: who can understand the meaning of events that make up our conscious experience – in relationships, in business, or whatever? But the swirls of events are the context wherein is held the gate. It is a real but shadowy presence, a way through, a possibility. If we allow silence to open up within, we shall see the gate and be free to open it. Sister Wendy Beckett, Meditations on Silence.
The decision to end the Sunday meditation at A Single Thread is both clear and fitting for this new dimension of practice. It is, however, not a decision to stop practice but to embrace it in the middle of the swirls of change where the gate to liberation is in a frame of silence, solitude, sitting, and study; it is a Way Through in the middle of the complexity of our lives.
No one is able to do the work for another. The Way Through is …a real but shadowy presence which requires that we do thework to see the gate and go through.
Holy objects point to wholeness, not to the literal or concrete. Icons are one example of a holy object. It is not a mere symbol. A symbol suggests a contract or signa as a means of identification as in a badge. An icon is something greater. It shows a slice of something bigger.
When we enter a space we search for holy objects to determine whether we fit in as an ally. In a real sense, we are searching for the holy object. We look for the power of it to teach us something bigger than what is given within the confines of the frame of the object. We tend do this whether we know it or not.
Speakiing of…
The more universal the icon, the more widespread power it has.
A good question to start off is, “What is the icon image of my life as it is?” To begin to see your life as holy (wholeness) begins to broaden and deepen your place in the world. It, in some way, reveals the power of holiness.
In order to understand this, consider your big toe. It is not just a big toe, it is part of a team of toes, and the team is part of a foot which is part of a leg, which is part of a body, which is part of being. The big toe suggests something larger. Your life suggests something larger.
How does your life complete the wholeness (holiness) of being?
What is the bigger context of the frame of my life?”
In other words, we discover who we are in the eternal mosaic of being alive.
Attention to what shows up is a venerable and reliable method of this discovery. It will, if you give it some effort help you find out the bigger context, the holiness, of the icon called ‘your life.’
What’s showing up in your backyard…
It requires effort to discover what is hidden in the frame of your life. It may sometimes feel like a coded message, but it might be better understood as a veiled bride or bridegroom waiting to be revealed. And…there is the possibility that somethings are meant to remain hidden. And hidden brightness requires a quiet, restful stance of faith.
THE MASTER Ikkyu showed his wisdom even as a child. Once he broke
the precious heirloom teacup of his teacher, and was greatly
upset. While he was wondering what to do, he heard his teacher
coming. Quickly he hid the pieces of the cup under his robe.
“Master,” he said, “why do things die?”
“It is perfectly natural for things to die and for the matter
gathered in them to separate and disintegrate,” said the teacher.
“When its time has come every person and every thing must go.
“Master,” said little Ikkyu, showing the pieces, “it was time for
your cup to go. Collection of Stone and Sand #85
Vanishing Bluebird by Zhong Fen li Bao yu Di
Comments on Practice: Vanishing Bluebird
When I look at images, paintings, photos, I immediately want to reach a conclusion, to know something. I am practicing to let go of that reaction and that desire and instead rest in not knowing. However, my desire to know repeatedly reasserts itself, especially when I write about what I am seeing. As I said, these days I am constantly practicing to both let go of wanting to know and believing that I can know.
That said, let me offer comment on the bluebird photos. The bluebird died this spring trying to nest in my chimney. This is a common occurrence on the prairie. I took the photo, I think, because I wished to hold onto its great beauty. Reflecting on it, I see my delusion. When the bluebird was alive, flying about, perching on tall grass, or nesting in a nearby box, I admired it greatly, wishing to see him again and again…..wanting more. When he was made lifeless, I still thought I could have more of him and his beauty, even possess him by preserving him. Much gratitude to whatever carried him off. The second photo captures a cold slap that I needed.
Vanished by Zhong Fen li Bao yu Di
The bluebird vanished, but he did not become nothing. I am sure that I could make a list of what he may have become. But neither can I know nor do I need to know any specifics. It is quite enough to know that he continues to move and change.
Another point that I shall contemplate….who is the “I” that desires and seeks to know? Is it the “I” that wants to hold onto his own beauty, his vitality to, try to possess himself?
I recall something Sister Wendy Beckett said, ” I don’t think we are all that important. We are only important to God, not to ourselves.”
A senior teacher at Shasta Abbey, whose website I often visit for Zen teaching, provided a key to the Wheel of Suffering when he noted that if you find yourself caught in a place of suffering, you are ignorant of something. The key is to discover how ignorance is keeping you in a place of misery and craving. As I make my way through the many images and facets of The Wheel of Suffering, I come upon my ignorance over and over again. Being surrounded, as I now am, with my own take on some of the Wheel images, I often find myself using the cards as clues to discover where the truth is hidden under the flotsam and jetsam of ignorance.
As my sangha slowly, deliberately contemplated the original Wheel, my creative attention moved from the outer rim of the Wheel to its innermost circle. In the Wheel mandala, greed hate and delusion live at the hub. These “Three Poisons” are at the center of Buddhist thought as well, the reasons for suffering boiled down to their purest essence.
Just as the hubs of our bike and car wheels hold the spin of those wheels together, so the three primary human emotional drives of delusion (a pig), greed (a cock) and hate (a snake) bind our suffering with such force that everything on the Wheel, moving out from the middle, is held together by their power.
Getsu San Ku Shin 2016 Delusion….Greed……and Hate in the card game of life
In my re-working of the Wheel mandala, these three poisons are the orange card suit, hence, each of the playing cards have the color orange featured in its design. They are the “bullseye,” the core of the teachings, and not unlike the card of Ignorance at the top outermost edge of the Wheel, seeing that one is caught up in the 3 Poisons is to see everything. It is an arrow to the heart of the beast called suffering.
Greed and hate are strong words. They don’t mess around in describing the lengths to which we humans will go to manipulate the world so that we may realize our self-centered dreams.
These are toxic, poisonous impulses in human beings. These twin drives reach far back into evolutionary time, and allowed our oldest ancestors to know instantly whether to move towards, or away from, sensate experiences. They were, and are, survival drives, and our success as a species reflects in part the success of greed and hate at showing us how to navigate challenges in our environment. And yet, unedited survival responses have gotten the world, and each of us, into a mess of trouble. They are the craving of the second Noble Truth: the cause of all suffering.
Greed
Contemplating my own manifestation of the basic human drive to want more, better, different, I began to notice a tendency in my eyes, in my posture and also in my mind to reach. My eyes reach into my visual environment, looking for problems to be solved. My mind too is relentlessly seeking, driving, re-working the past hour or day, cleaning things up, dreaming of the next minute or hour or day’s work to be done. And my torso urges me forward, always forward. As I settle into a period of sitting meditation, often the settling comes as a relaxation of my torso from urging myself forward to resting back into the center of my pelvis. It always feels like coming home, a great relief. I began to recognize that the reaching habit has greed at its core.
Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
The Greed card illustrates this reaching as the deep imbalance it is. The sitting figure reaches for a piece of unripe fruit (the future is never ripe enough for picking, yet we can’t seem to stop reaching for it anyway), and/or for a pile of dry bones, those aspects of our lives that have already been lived, are gone forever, but which we, with our re-hashing, try in vain to keep alive and malleable.
Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
When the sitting figure on the greed playing card can organize not around the reach but around the gathering of all experience into the here and now, then her true center, binding her to heaven and to earth, becomes manifest.
I make use of this image frequently to help me let go of the reaching mind, and settle into my own centered stillness, especially while I meditate. The “clunk” of body and mind and spirit into that pure quality of presence is dear to me. It is worth practicing to find. Grounded down, lifted upwards, fully here, wanting nothing, feeling my own connection to everything above and below through my own mind, heart and gut.
Meditation is a strong antidote to greed, for the simple though profound act of sitting still sends instant signals to the wanting mind that there will be no going after anything for the duration of the meditation period. This can make the mind frantic with desire, as we all know. But to be physically still in the face of a greedy mind lays a foundation for deep practice.
Next time, while in meditation, when you find yourself overwhelmed with the unrelenting desires of the mind, try bringing your attention to the stillness of your body. Make your eyes still. Let the frantic mind run its course as you hold your ground with your sitting posture. Accept that this stillness you have achieved, so foreign in our culture, so contrary to the workings of the grasping ego and our survival instinct, is understandably difficult for your mind to surrender to. Honor your body’s capacity to lead the way for the mind.
HATE: THE FLIP SIDE OF GREED
We like to soft-pedal hate. We call it anger, frustration, dislike, irritation. Do you know that all these words have hate at their core? Do you know your own hate? I was not very familiar with my hatred as I began working with this playing card. I was much more in touch with anxiety, fear, dread. My teacher said to me over and over again, “Underneath fear is hate.” It took me a long time to realize the truth of her words, but eventually I saw that my anxiety is built on self-hatred and self-condemnation. Somebody inside me hates who I am and what I do.
The hate playing card shows a fearful woman with missiles trained at her. Two hate-filled male figures, squeezed into the bottom of the frame, fuel the spark that can ignite the missiles. The hatred, buried and held back, also burns like a slow fire, licking up the left side of the image, and eventually releasing fiery venom from a very pretty, though lethal, snake. Image by Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
Which is more dominant in your internal world, hate or fear? Do you know of the connection between fear and hate from your own experience?
My deeply hidden anger first manifested as left side body pain. Eventually, with study, contemplation and meditation, the physical pain transformed into long-held emotional memory.
When anger or fear show up, whether sparked by the present or the past, the key is to recognize their fundamental emptiness. Do not believe that what you feel is true. Do not identify with it. Let this strong energy come, up through your still body and mind, then let it go. This capacity, to be present to strong emotions with acceptance yet without letting them define you, comes with practice and the good guidance of a teacher.
As my angry memories emerged, I could see how attached I was, and am, to having things go my way. My teacher’s words echo in me, “What are you going after?” Ask this of yourself. Whatever it is we are driven to have, aversion and its many guises can be kindled when our cherished aspirations fall apart.
Fear and hate drive us towards fighting against, or running from, that which we perceive as a threat, while greed propels us to reach for, in order to grasp, that which we perceive as insuring our wellbeing. Whether we are caught in like or dislike, we create what feels like a solid state made up of running from, pushing against, and reaching toward. This sense of solidity is a delusion. A house of cards!
DELUSION
Delusion is the third and final drive at the hub of the Wheel. Delusions are the stories we tell ourselves that help us to know the world and how to operate in it. These stories are delusions because they arise out of the likes and dislikes that condition our understanding. They are created by, and they also feed the creation of, greed and hate, the pushing away of experiences and people and the reaching for more, different, better.
Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
The false sense of being a solid somebody is illustrated in the Delusion playing card with a New Yorker cartoon that assigns names and personalities to two waves rising up in the ocean. We can see the hilarity in this……yet we are deeply attached to our own identities, easily forgetting just how fleeting and fluid our self-ness really is, and how completely interpenetrated with everything else this thing called “me” actually is.
The second cartoon depicts my personal favorite, the delusion that lives at the core of my belief system. Here, at the heart of my conditioning, stunning is an imperative. I MUST be stunning, be perceived as stunning, strive relentlessly to be stunning. It is a deep drive. My very survival seems at stake. Stunning, and the striving required of it, are imbedded in my personality. Despite many attempts to slow down, relax, let go of my ambition and perfectionism, I remained caught and in pain because of this drive until I committed to a Buddhist practice. I still find myself striving towards an ideal all the time. It remains a pervasive influence on me. But I have tools now that have helped me to stay present to this impulse long enough to know how exactly it is false.
One such practice tool is represented by a “trap door,” on the Delusion playing card, an opening through which to escape the falseness of the world that delusion creates. Opening this door, we find a mirror, showing us a reflection of…….what? The way to freedom from the ignorance of our delusions lies in opening to what may be outside this self-contained reality, staying in the question, “what is really here?”
Image by Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
But even before we can bring mindfulness to our suffering, we need to see where we are. We have to wake up to the truth that we are caught in a false sense of self. The original Wheel mandala illustrates the Three Poisons as three beasts eating each other’s tails, showing us that these drives co-exist, are co-created. If you can identify one, the other two are INEVITABLY running also. I have found this such a valuable tool. Now I know that whenever I am angry, greed and delusion are somewhere close at hand. I know that whenever my perfectionism is driving me, that it is greed and hate I am giving birth to. Here is an example from own experience:
When, through my Buddhist practice, I encountered a tight knot of anger within a chronically painful left hip and neck, I was brought face to face with the whole trio of drives. The rage inflaming my hip and neck arose from a time in my life when I helped to create and manage a business that, in my mind, represented the pinnacle of stunning-ness. It was everything I had ever dreamed of. In order to get it and keep it, I worked harder than I had ever worked, denying myself sleep, time with family, self-care…..in other words, the greed-filled reaching was manifest. Eventually, the pressures of managing a successful business took their toll, and the business relationships began to fall apart. It was not pretty. When I finally walked away from the whole enterprise, it was with a deep sense of failure, my dream of stunning shattered. Depression ensued, remedied only by my eventually plunging into new projects.
It was not until I had enough skill as a meditator, as well as a mentor to guide me, that I discovered the rage I had suppressed, and that my body still carried. I saw that my hatred was sustained by my belief that the business was the only thing that would ever truly complete me. A decade or more later, I continued to crave being the stunning owner of a stunning enterprise. Because it fell apart, I was furious with both myself and my business partner for how things had actually unfolded.
Staying still within the experience of the hatred, I began to remember that I did not really enjoy the process of running a business. I did not like being in charge. I did not really want to show up in that way. It didn’t actually suit me. It was, if I was honest with myself, a relief to walk away, to get a rest from the effort it took to be stunning. The impulses for less busy-ness, for less notoriety, for a more solitary life, had been completely ignored and denied by my drive toward fame and power. The solid sense of myself I thought I had was indeed a delusion built of desire and culminating in aversion. Seeing this clearly, I could step out of ignorance.
The anger fell away. It was painful to realize how little I had actually known of my true nature, but I also felt joy at having discovered a world within, beyond the delusion of stunning. I was grateful that the partnership had fallen apart and freed me to have a different kind of life.
The example above illustrates the poison that can manifest when we don’t get what we want. But it also speaks to what can happen when we DO get what we want. It took me years to realize it, but having this business, for which I had fought and reached mightily, was not a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. Now that I had it, I had to keep it…..which made me more anxious, more stressed. I found I was fighting all the time to keep what I wanted, to control its outcomes, to make it a continuing success. I truly felt mostly aversion for the project, though this was paved over with my habitual determination to succeed. Looking back, I can see that typically when I get the thing I strive for, it is nothing like the pleasure and nourishment I expected. Fool’s gold.
Greed hate and delusion do not represent our true nature. Who we really are remains hidden until we can see through our habits, and stop believing them. My Buddhist practice, and the wisdom tradition so beautifully illuminated on the Wheel of Suffering, are the tools I am using to lead me inward and homeward.
Three years ago, my teacher offered members of the sangha support and guidance to create a personal artistic expression of the Wheel of Suffering, an ancient Buddhist mandala comprised of images that map how we humans create and re-create our own suffering. The Wheel of Suffering also brilliantly offers an imagistic map of liberation. It is a one-stop guide into the entire panorama of Buddhist wisdom.
Wheel of Suffering
It is said that the Buddha originally drew this series of images in the dirt to explain the origins of suffering to his monks. Subsequently, the Wheel could be found on the walls of every monastery, as a teaching in symbols, not requiring literacy, just a willingness to contemplate the fullness of what is presented.
But the symbols are ancient, and sometimes difficult to translate into modern culture. Could we, could I, re-work the images to speak to this time and place? Could I do so in a way that would speak to others, that would be a universal as well as a personal, guide to liberation from suffering? My sangha embarked on an in-depth contemplation of the Wheel images and their spiritual significance.
The Wheel Figure 2
The Wheel of Suffering is comprised of three main ideas/images: At its center is the wheel itself, actually four separate and nested wheels. These four wheels together contain close to 30 separate images, each describing yet another way we manifest self-centered pain and disappointment.
The nested wheels are held by a fierce creature who fixes the viewer with a steady, piercing stare. This creature, Yama, represents impermanence. Impermanence, embodied by Yama, is spinning the Wheel—AND devouring it. Can you see how the constant change in your own life is spinning your wheels, how change itself and the friction thus manifested can leave us wanting something other than what is?
Yama is in turn suspended within a frame of sky, from which a Buddha stands nobly in a cloud. So, all of our suffering, AND impermanence itself are held by something bigger, something that isn’t suffering, and isn’t impermanent. Something represented by sky, and by the Buddha, who points at the wheel as if to say, “This is important, study this!”
Study it I did. At first, to have enough understanding that I could choose an artistic medium of my own to express the many ways we humans are on the wheel, running in circles looking for something we never find. I settled on an overall concept of a deck of cards, a card for each image contained in the Wheel, to be rendered using collages of mixed media.
The Card Game of Life
My deck of playing cards has four “suits,” one for each of the four nested wheels, signified by a color. Rather than clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades, my Wheel deck has orange, black/white, blue and green suits.
The cards we’re dealt on the Wheel of Suffering…
The Card Game of Life Figure 3
Stepping Onto the Wheel Along with other sangha members, I was engaged in a careful contemplation of each of the drawings contained in the ancient wheel mandala, using these images as a map with which to discover the precise and varied ways I myself created suffering.
We began our study of the Wheel not at the center, but at the top of the outermost circle, represented by the color green in my cards. Beginning here, one is given, first and foremost, a tool for getting off the wheel. If one is going to study suffering…it is quite beneficial to enter onto the Wheel with an “out.” The twelve images of this outer wheel begin, at the top, with a blind man, feeling his way in the world with a cane. He is IGNORANCE, and in spiritual terms, this ignorance blinds him to the causes of suffering. He is blind to his innate ability to apply the brakes and turn towards the cessation of suffering.
As I contemplated the root of my own ignorance, I was also searching for how to depict on a playing card this fundamental blindness and the truth it obscures. This exercise of beginning with inner contemplation, followed greater self-awareness, followed by the creation of an image for the playing card, has become a powerful tool in my spiritual practice.
Zen master Eihei Dogen taught, “To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the Self is to be actualized by myriad things.” To let go of the hold our ego has over us requires going deeply into our personality, understanding it thoroughly…..so that it slowly loses its grip, and the one who studies, who sees the ways she is conditioned to keep the spinning wheel spinning, and who chooses not to perpetuate those habits…….that one begins to take up more space. That one is NOT on the wheel. That one is sky, and like sky, is not separate from everything.
Each card can take weeks of constant attention to what I am doing, thinking and feeling, moment to moment. Such mindfulness, I have come to know from my practice, leads to clear comprehension. Clear comprehension leads to wisdom. Once some clear comprehension of my habit or tendency in each realm of the wheel is reached, the way is opened to let an image for the playing card arise. Each of my cards reflects my own quest for such wisdom.
At first, I was deeply uncomfortable with spending so much time in “don’t know,” in an absence of images and understanding. I had to accept that I could not think these understandings into being. To bring forth an image requires a willingness to sit still in the empty space. I came to trust the something that would inevitably emerge from nothing, often when I would least expect it. Each card reflects my practice with this kind of patience, this equanimity with the moment-to moment unfolding of everything.
IGNORANCE
Figure 4
As I pondered the blind man on the road, I came to see that my own ignorance comes from getting caught up in the identities and activities of my everyday life as if they will provide me with ultimate nourishment. What I go after inevitably creates pain, stress and disappointment—-even when it is initially pleasurable. When I can see the suffering I create, and recognize that I am looking in the wrong place, I step out of ignorance. Seeing that I am suffering gives me another choice.
The stuff we fabricate, and take as real, blinds us to the truth of suffering
Figure 5
When we can see that we want the material world to make us happy…the blind snaps open, something crumbles, the wise grandmother comes out of the basement, and Truth sets us free
Figure 6
Practicing with Ignorance
Two winters ago, deeply immersed in my study of the Wheel, I experienced a flare-up of a chronic pain pattern in my neck and head. The least wrong posture or poor eating/drinking choices aggravated the pattern, and I would be on the couch, in severe pain for a day or two. I could no longer practice yoga, I could not tolerate even one glass of wine in the evenings. I began to judge every activity in terms of its potential contribution to pain. I feared for my future, I was irritated with myself for the least little slip-up that seemed to make things worse. And I agonized about whether and where to look for help.
By this time, my “Ignorance” playing card was complete. I had included “joint pain” on the window shade as I knew that physical pain caused me to suffer. But I had not yet lived the experience of “pulling up the shade.” Often, waking up to ignorance comes only after much suffering. We are conditioned to carry on within the narrow confines of our own misery. We are conditioned to believe that the solution to our suffering lies in finding answers outside of ourselves. This is indeed a kind of blindness, and it is a profound turn when we begin to see that we ourselves are causing our own unhappiness. This “turn” is the waking up from ignorance as depicted by the blind man on the Wheel’s outer rim.
The moment when I saw that my neck pain could be part of my spiritual practice was a moment of having my own blindness illuminated! The teaching of the Four Noble Truths is encapsulated in the image of the blind man and in my personal experience with chronic pain:
First Noble Truth: There is suffering. Do you know when you are suffering? Do you know that the pressure, anxiety, and irritation you cope with daily is caused by YOU? When I was able to see how much pressure and anxiety I had created around my neck pain, my suffering became evident to me. Every life has physical pain. It was my emotional reaction to the physical pain that was creating my suffering.
Second Noble Truth: The cause of suffering is craving. What do youcrave? I just wanted my neck pain to go away. I wanted my life back. I wanted to go to yoga, enjoy a glass of wine, and experience myself physically in ways that assured me I was strong, fit and able-bodied.
Third Noble Truth: There is an end to suffering. This is a truly amazing message! Your suffering can end, IF you can see the fallacy in placing your hopes and dreams in the material world. When my neck pain became a part of my spiritual practice, everything changed. This was not easy or quick. It required walking the Eightfold Path, as we are instructed in the Fourth Noble Truth. With the help of good teachers, and the discipline of a regular meditation practice, I began to accept my pain and the resulting physical limitations as a given. Moment by moment I learned to precisely and kindly be with the pain. Moment by moment I began to see clearly the ever-changing nature of the human bodily form.
Once I could stop bringing so much negativity to my experience of the neck pain, the pain itself began to change. Pain is a message from the body. If we expend all our energy to resist that message….it will get louder. Stillness and acceptance can allow for the energy and information contained within pain to move through.
There is liberation, wisdom and a surrender of the delusion of control in this way of practicing with chronic pain or other forms of suffering…such as in the realm of relationships. Relationships get me into trouble quite often. How about you?
It was after having dinner with a friend one night that I found myself caught in the agony of anger and judgement toward this person. They had spent our time together recounting numerous tales of woe. For them, life was hell. For me, it was so clear that this hell was self-induced. I could see clearly how they could feel better. Why couldn’t they see it? How could I kindly tell them the truth? How could I help them to see the error of their ways? I am not proud of it, but this is a stance in which I often find myself: knowing the solution to someone else’s pain, then feeling responsible for “helping.”
On the drive home, I was able to see that my reaction to this person’s hell was to enter hell with them. I was miserable. Closer to home, I saw that I deeply wanted this person to be free from their suffering so that I didn’t have to suffer with them. To fix them was to fix me too….or so I thought. By the time I reached home, I knew that neither their pain nor my pain for them was fix-able. I was ready to send an email saying, “Thanks for our time together. I am so sorry it’s so very hard right now. You are a good person. You are doing your best.”
Such a crisp, quick snapping open of the window shade is a great blessing. Often, the quest to “see the light” is a much longer and more arduous process. Often, I spend days, weeks, hanging out with the stuff on the shade, unable to see through it. But it is always amazing grace, and a sign of diligent practice no matter how long it takes, to be lost, then to be found.
Written by Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
Photo Credits
Figure 1 http://www.quietmountain.org/dharmacenters/buddhadendo/wheel_of_life.htm
Figure 2 http://www.quietmountain.org/dharmacenters/buddhadendo/wheel_of_life.htm
Figure 3 Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
Figure 4 http://image.slidesharecdn.com/thewheeloflife-110613131946-phpapp02/95/the-wheel-of-life-11-728.jpg?cb=1308046106
Figure 5 Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
Figure 6 Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
This is a clear and simple practice to do every morning and evening. Begin with gratitude that you have found this practice path. Call out your own name, i.e., Your Name, What luck! Remind yourself of how lucky you are to find this Way.
Chant or recite out loud the following poem by Hsu Yun.
I am lucky to receive…
The chance to practice the Supreme Dharma of Emptiness Without fear of being invaded by the foolish affairs of outside life!
Set the time of sitting! Make it just as long as it takes one fragrant incense stick to burn down. In that time you can thread the basic principles of Buddhism into a lovely string of pearls.
One by one those marvelous concepts came from the East to encircle our hearts here in the West.
Here in this place we touch these sacred pearls and sing their praises like the sound of ocean waves.
Do 3 prostrations of Letting Go of any preoccupation.
Light a candle and incense.
Offer 3 bells.
Offer Purification- Use a leaf and some water and sprinkle the water on the crown of your head. Offer communion.
Every moment is fresh and new. Everything arises and ceases; everything is dissolving.
Notice the changes in your own body without the storyline.
Aging, sickness and death arise and cease everywhere. Nothing escapes the laws of nature, the laws of God.
Some of us do not understand that we are perishing here.
Those who understand this bring to rest their quarrels. [Dhammapada]
Renounce doing harm, ask for forgiveness from those you have harmed, forgive yourself.
Avowal of karma –Confess your actions; Chant this 3X
All my ancient twisted karma, (strike the bell after each line)
From beginningless greed, hate and delusion,
Born through body, speech and mind,
I now fully avow.
Recite the three universal precepts
I do no harm. I cease from harmful actions.
Do No Harm – Cease from Evil It is the great teaching of all Buddhas everywhere.
I cultivate goodness in all conditions.
Cultivate goodness-The moon is in the dewdrop no matter what the circumstance. In all situations I return to the Dharma within. I train not to be swayed by external circumstances.
I purify the mind.
Purify the mind, let go of the non-essential. Realize that likes, dislikes and indifferences of the mind are hindrances to the pure mind. I let go of the non-essential. Pause and contemplate the non-essential.
What do you need versus what do you want?
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