Namu
The nembutsu, as recited in Japanese-derived Pure Land Buddhism, is namu amida butsu (南無阿弥陀仏), a Japanese rendering of the Sanskrit Namo Amitābhāya Buddhāya.
(Before we go on: in continual chanting it’s usually just “namu amida bu”, which rolls off the tongue easier!)
The first word, namu/namo, is of ancient heritage. Wiktionary very helpfully gives us the example of the ṛgveda passage 1.27.13, composed anywhere from 1500 BCE to 1000 BCE:
námo mahádbhyo námo arbhakébhyo námo yúvabhyo náma āśinébhyaḥ
yájāma devā́nyádi śaknávāma mā́ jyā́yasaḥ śáṃsamā́ vṛkṣi devāḥ
Homage to the mighty and homage to the lesser [gods]; homage to the younger and homage to the elder [gods]!
“Ancientness” is not a sign of good, but it adds flavour to the practice that is worth reflecting on. Nembutsu-focused Pure Land Buddhism began to differentiate itself in the 7th century CE, with the efforts of Shàndǎo in China taken as a key player,1 and a burst of activity in 12th/13th century Japan led to popular Pure Land Japanese Buddhism, which provided the impulse for my own practice.
The centring of the nembutsu in practice is a particular chain of interdependence: Sanskrit words are joined together, some from centuries before and some from centuries after the historical Buddha’s life, parsed into a Japanese phonology, then delivered around the world through preaching, books, and the internet.
Namu has literal translations stemming from namo’s connotations of bowing and reverence, but one of its main powers in contemporary Buddhism (regardless of who comes after the namu/namo) is in reaching towards a way of engaging with the universe that goes back thousands of years: through a verbal bow, using language to indicate and describe your ongoing act of giving reverence to something which is both other-than, and part-of, yourself.
Peace,
⭕️
But history is messy.↩︎
Blogging for the/a Spiritual Archive
In my “non-Circle” life, I have seen the importance of archives and records of peoples’ daily lives. Especially for religious movements that are small in whatever country or language they are being practised in, practitioners can fly under the knowledge radar.
Pure Land Buddhist practitioners in my country, charitably, number in the high dozens, split across a few different temples and traditions. In this regard, part of the impulse for me to blog about my way of being is simply for there be a representation of what an example of “Pure Land convert Buddhism” looks like in the early-to-mid 2020s.
This has become a stronger recently, as the Japan-based temple I attend remotely has stopped doing remote initiation ceremonies. These ceremonies are not ordinations, but essentially confirm the individual as being “on the books” and part of the organisation, as well as providing a spiritual benefit of dedication. The traditions of Pure Land Buddhism in my country that have active temples do not appeal to me for regular attendance (this is not for personal reasons, but simply because I have a very particular attachment to a specific tradition of Pure Land practice that has only a small reach outside of Japan). This has left me slightly adrift organisationally, but that has turned quickly to a sense of calm about the trajectory of my practice. I simply cannot, without getting on a plane (not impossible in the near future, though!), become a formal member of the lineage I currently most closely align with.
This is frankly, a relief. I can now freestyle. I can take the fragments of English-language (and as my Japanese skill improves, online Japanese-language) Pure Land materia that I have, and develop an independent way of being in the world. This is not completely anarchic—the sūtras and Hōnen provide axiomatic grounding for how I make decisions about how to practice and how to view. Yet my “home” is the practice itself, not an organisation. I do not have to be orthodox or orthopraxic, just true to where my existence is leading me.
This is why I consider a wider spiritual archive important—even if my own contributions to it are not particularly important or interesting. The way in which the dharma has navigated the West, producing syncretic and hybrid practices, is not due to a failure of Western practitioners to grasp a “true” Buddhism, but the way in which Buddhist practice inherently works—upāya includes the fact that full access to the nuances of traditions is fragmentary for many outside of particular countries where large organisations are based.
It is a truism that within each religious movement, no matter how big, each individual practitioner will have their own unique understandings and practices. Online blogs and other avenues for DIY publication provide a space for an ecology of archives to grow, away from the tenets of specific organisations, and back to sharing the lives created when the dharma begins to grow in someone’s way of being.
Peace,
⭕
On Peacemaking
In the contemporary druidry tradition, prayers, invocations, and rituals for peace are sometimes called “peacemaking”.
For perhaps obvious reasons (look at the date of this blog post, for those reading in the far future), peace is on many peoples’ minds, and I want to share some ways in which I attempt to grasp at this in my practices.
“Making”?
Like all concepts, the term “peacemaking” has connotations both beneficial for practice, and connotations that point away from particular possible ways of thinking about peace.
Peace making emphasises the real, practical, lived effort: peace does not come ex nihilo, it has to be planted, grown, and cultivated by sentient beings. This is particularly the case for peace within networks and ecologies (human or otherwise).
However, it belies one point that I see from my own perspective: peace as a state of being is always and already there, even if not visible and felt by yourself. This is “internal” peace, but I use that word with the awkward awareness of the oddities of interbeing and interconnectedness, where such an internal-external distinction eventually falls down. This peace cannot be made, but it can be discovered.
Peace-practice
The two methods of peace-practice here involve essentially “emanating” peace, in a verbal and visualisation pratice (either partially visualised, fully visualised, or just “felt” — all are valid).
Druidic — Ritual
The druidry tradition peacemaking ritual, as available to the public in the link above, has a few separate steps, but I highlight the first one.
Turn to the four directions and saying:
May there be peace in the North,
May there be peace in the South,
May there be peace in the West,
May there be peace in the East,
May there be peace throughout the whole world.
The similarities of this to loving-kindess or metta meditation will be apparent to some readers already.
This is currently my primary animistic-druidic practice. I tend to open my day with this, even if I don’t then go into a full druidic practice that early in the day.
While saying these phrases, imagining the direction (and then the whole world) being bathed in peace is crucial. Whether that visualisation is done for non-dual “magical” reasons, or for the psycho-spiritual effects on the practitioner is a separate question, but feeling the peace in more than words is crucial for this.
This can either be, as it is in my morning practice, under a minute long — a shower of peacemaking and peace-discovery. However, the ritual can be slowed down and performed over a period as long as needed, to deepen the experience of peace.
Loving-kindness — Meditation
Loving-kindness meditation is a popular Buddhist (and secularised) practice in the West, if not as well-known as mindfulness meditation. See the link just there for details, but the general approach is to generate feelings of love, compassion, and kindness, and then direct that at yourself, other people, and then the whole world (variations on this exist).
Part of this practice is visualising the world experiencing and being bathed in peace, as with the druidic practice above. However the peace-invocation phrase tends to be repeated, and they can vary from practitioner to practitioner.
I have integrated an explicit invocation of peace as part of my loving-kindness practice. I like keeping my loving-kindness practice simple, having only a few phrases which I can truly enter into and send out, so I tend to only have two or three that I repeat. Currently, they are:
May all beings live in peace,
May all beings be safe,
May all beings be happy.
I chose “live in peace” to emphasise both the internal and external aspects of peace. To energise all beings to “feel” or “experience” peace is a highly meritous act, which should not be devalued; however the current “““state of the world”“” brings forward engaged concerns about outward peace in terms of military actions, society, politics, and the climate.
“Live” emphasises continual existence within, and “in” talks about the situation around the being. Peace becomes a container, not just a state of being. May all beings live in peaceful containers, where they can be safe and happy with ease.
南無阿弥陀仏
namu amida butsu.
Peace,
⭕
Two Quick Yijing Dice Methods: With Yarrow and Dice Probabilities!
I’ve always been a fan of having multiple ways to perform divination, and particularly a fan of methods that are compact, minimalist, and portable.
The Yi’s traditional coin method is portable (three coins in a pocket or wallet!), but I wanted to see if there were any other pocket methods, and particularly ones that involve dice. There’s already quite a few dice-based Yi methods out there, but mostly ones that result in only one moving line, or they have their own probabilities.
With a quick bit of ingenuity, however, you can get Yi casts with the same probabilities as coins with one die, or the same as yarrow with two. This requires an eight-sided (and extra four-sided, for yarrow probabilities) die, found in standard polyhedral dice sets sold online and at geeky stores the world over.
The probabilities of the two different methods and an explanation of the numbers can be found here.
Coin Probability
As the probabilities for the coin method all reduce down to fractions of 8, this is quite straight forward.
One option would be to simply chunk the dice results up by probability, but I want to stick with the yin-yang structure of even and odd numbers. I also want to keep the traditional association of moving lines as “old” lines, and so assign them to higher numbers on the die. Doing so also makes the method easier to remember! Thus:
- Roll a d8.
- If an even number, it’s a yin line. If an odd number, a yang line.
- If the result is 8 (the highest possible yin number), it’s a moving yin line. If the result is 7 (highest possible yang number), it’s a moving yang line.
- Repeat five more times for a complete hexagram!
Simple.
Yarrow Probability
Yarrow probabilities are more complicated, as they cannot be reduced to fractions of 8, and so we have to deal with fractions of 16.
We can solve this by doubling the range of our d8, through adding a second dice to decide whether we have a yin or a yang line — I would recommend here a d4, staying with the Daoist-Confucian cosmology of doubling from the One, but you could also flip a coin.
- Roll a d8 and d4 at once.
- If the d4 is an even number, it is a yin line, if odd, a yang line.
- For yin lines: if the d8 is showing 8, it is a moving yin line.
- For yang lines: if the d8 is showing 6, 7, or 8, it is a moving yang line
- Repeat five more times for a complete hexagram!
As simple as that. Thanks, ancient compilers of the Yijing.
Peace,
⭕️
Parinirvāṇa Day Reflections
Today is Parinirvāṇa Day, the annual remembrance of the death of Siddhārtha Gautama, the “historical Buddha”.
The story of the Buddha’s death is recorded in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra and the Pāli Canon’s Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (both are readable in full, here for the Mahāyāna version and here for the Pāli version) — I won’t go into the story here, but I’ll post the final words of the Buddha in the Pāli sutta, as I previously shared on Mastodon:
Then the Blessed One addressed the monks, “Now, then, monks, I exhort you: All fabrications are subject to ending & decay. Reach consummation through heedfulness.” That was the Tathāgata’s last statement.
Thinking about “ending & decay” reminded me of Chris Lizama’s recent post about a zen kōan, where a fox says that they used to be a monk, but fell into five hundred lifetimes of being reborn as a fox after saying that awakened people do not experience cause and effect. The fox asks the monk Baizhang for a “turning word” to take him out of this cycle, to which Baizhang says: “Don’t ignore cause and effect.”
Parinirvāṇa teaches us that even the Buddha — one who is, for lack of a better phrase, “at one” with cause and effect — is still subject to it. The body of the Buddha was born, lived, got old, and died. The materiality of the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa, culminating in the end of a body’s functioning, is a reminder that the process of passing away is something that will happen to us too, even if we were to be literally the Buddha.
However, passing away is something that we can come to perceive in an entirely new way. It’s the “parinirvāṇa” sūtra, not the “death of the Buddha” sūtra. It is the story of someone not being reborn, rather than the story of someone dying.
I have no way of knowing what it was that Siddhārtha Gautama, the noble one of the Śākya clan, experienced as those body functionings changed so radically that he stopped communicating with the assembled monks. But part of following the Dharma is understanding that the parinirvāṇa event was somehow different from a usual passing away. It was the visible, sensory total representation of something that happened years prior with the Buddha’s awakening, and a moment that capped the time-and-space bound aspects of the Buddha’s teaching. To understand what the parinirvāṇa was would be to deeply understand the Dharma itself.
Entering the stream does not give us immortality, but instead such an intimate and deep understanding of mortality, that death becomes something else entirely.
南無阿弥陀仏
namu amida butsu
Peace,
⭕
A Half-Remembered Zen Poem and a Definitely Apocryphal (Also Half-Remembered) Anecdote of Hōnen
There are two gems I carry around, both of which I have misremembered, and both of which I have lost the original source for — let me know if you know of either of these (or things that sound similar).
First, is a Zen (Chan?) poem I read on a very Web 1.0 website (it had frames!), with two lines something like:
Sit down
and take the last 1,000 years off your shoulders
(I’m not a poet.)
Secondly, is an anecdote of Hōnen that is almost certainly apocryphal, and probably quite modern. I think I heard it on a YouTube dharma talk from a Shin Buddhist priest, but I haven’t been able to find it since.
The anecdote is something like:
A disciple approaches Hōnen and asks,
“Is the Pure Land real or a state of mind?”
Hōnen turns and replies,
“Let’s go there and find out.”
Peace,
⭕