Good morning!
Today, July 7, is Tanabata (七夕), celebrated in the East as the day of the Weaver
Princess (Vega) and the Cow-herder Prince (Altair) meet across Ama-no-gawa (天の
川: Heaven River: Milky Way) and people hope their wishes, written on paper strips
hung on bamboo trees, are realized. The day is one of the five Sekkus (節句), distinct
marks on the calendar like joints on stalks of bamboo; the others are January 1 (New
Year’s Day), March 3 (Peach, now Girls’ Day), May 5 (Iris, now Boys’ Day),
September 9 (Mum Day). The last one is called Chōyō (重陽): Double Positive or Sun,
which falls on the Sun shining forth that formed the solar system according to the
Cosmic Calender (with the Big Bang at the start of the New Year’s Day and the
present moment at the end of December 31st). The formation of the Milky Way falls
on May Day. So far our planet Earth is the only one with water and life going around
the sun in a position appropriate for cycling seasons and system flows.
I read Noam Chomsky’s recent essay, “Who Owns the Earth?” He claims that the
arbitrary man-made boundaries have been creating calamities. One of the worst
cases was in Europe, currently borderless and in peace, but another border struggle
would be the last one. He switches his question to “who defends the earth,” and
advises us, common defenders in a comparatively borderless world, to protect
“commons” on different levels. Human civilization (urbanization, from Latin civitus,
city) started about five millennia ago (only ten seconds ago in the Cosmic Calendar),
accompanied by pyramidal systems with city walls, wars, colonialism, slavery, class
system, etc. Artificial borders, privatization in “commons,” on different levels, have
been producing the five calamities of delusion, bondage, discrimination,
exploitation, and destruction.
The one-directional pyramidal system of one percent of people (now a corporate
country), a minuscule minority of thirty million species, is blindly, from the top of
the pyramid, precipitating the end of all (ABC weapons’ pollution, mass extinction,
etc.) Actually ninety some percent of people blindly buy this pyramidal system and
privatization theory as good, enslaving themselves on their behalf within boundaries
of the triple maladies of me-ism, materialism, and militarism (epitomized in money-
ism, the so-called “kin-ji-tou: money letter tower” in Sino-Japanese expression, as
the letter “money” is like a pyramid: 金). They buy the endless “growth” in the triple
maladies with mass production, consumption, and pollution in our limited planetary
space, source and sink resources, propagandized and propagated by the pyramidal
power people.
The Awakened Way tells that there is no owner of the earth, planets, and the whole
world, and that we must stop our sinful, separated, selfish karmas and the limited
mundane, conventional reality (like the triple poisons and maladies), in order to see
the wholly wholesome Dharma Dhātu (Realm) and the unlimited supramundane,
ultimate reality (like the triple learnings and treasures). The cosmic life system has
been going on for fifteen billion years with all beings participating throughout their
interdependent evolutions and ecologies. We must get rid of our head-stuck logs and
blindness to see like King Mirror, to stop fighting like the blind men groping for an
elephant. We must learn how to free ourselves from our karmas, to fully function
with our eco (not ego)-body-mind systems. Everyone in the Indra-net can and must
attain unconditioned peace and unsurpassed awakening, enjoying holy harmony,
health, and happiness in cultivation and culture of life and heart.
7/7/13
The Summer Triangle and the Milky Way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Triangle
七夕の笹飾り （Bamboo with Wish-paper-strips)
京阪土居駅前・旭通り商店街にて（2005年7月撮影）from Wikipedia