Good morning!
We have another beautiful autumn Sunday morning with crisp clear air and a
beautiful blue sky. We could still see the clear calm full moon last night. Our worlds
inside are also in holy harmony, health, and happiness. We witness primordial
purity, peace, and prognosis after sittings and service.
Yesterday we had the Buddhist Council Mindfulness Day with movie and discussion.
The movie was “How to Cook Your Life” based on Dogen’s Tenzo Kyōkun, Lesson to
Chief Cook, to cook and cultivate not only in eating and drinking, but also living
through life with the Triple Heart/Minds of Great, Mature, and Joyful Heart/Minds.
During the discussion we talked about life’s meaning and management, life cooking
and course, the kinds and kinetics of karma, disaster demise and decrease,
heart/mind harmony and management, care and cure cooking and changing, etc.
in the Dharma of Dependent Origination and the Karma of Creation and Control.
Life is not limited to individual skin sacks, but limitlessly interconnected and
integrated with all throughout space and time –not to limited bursting bubbles,
but limitless seamless sea with world-body-mind, intellect-emotion-volition-truth-
beauty-goodness, past-present-future, time-space, etc.
All forms and formations are karma-creations. The Four Applications of karma are
decreasing and stopping bad karmas, and starting and increasing good karmas,
which is cultivation and culture – the true significance of religions,
saving all in supra-mundane, beyond mundane matter and militarism.
Devastating disasters like typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. are intertwined with
global warming, mass extinction, etc. caused by our own living ways. To stop them
we must change our vision, action, and mission with the Triple Heart/Minds to stop
the Triple Poisons of delusion, desire (craving), and divisiveness (anger).
The Triple Heart/Minds are essentially the same as the Fourfold Limitlessness or
Brahma-vihāra, Holy-living/residence of friendship, compassion, joy, and
equanimity, which were paraphrased into the Four Principles of the Tea Way of
harmony, respect, purity, and equanimity (primordial purity, peace, prognosis).
Equanimity or renunciation (upekhā/upekṣā) is samādhi (tranquility) next to
nib-bāna/nir-vāṇa, wind-lessness (of karma), the source of awakening and the
Triple Heart/Minds, Fourfold Limitlessness, etc., the vantage point to recreate
our vision, action, and mission in our new life and living.
In pleasure and pain, we have friendship and compassion, sharing them to infinity
and to nil. Because of the truth of oneness of life system or solidarity, we have
friendship and compassion, beauty and goodness, for our voluntary moves and
movements, Omotenashi (Buddha/Bodhisattva heart/minds) customs and cultures.
Omotenashi spirit and society comes from Buddha/Bodhisattva, Awakened/
Awakening-being, Heart/Minds and Vows based on nirvana and bodhi
(awakening) to “save all prior to the self” in purity, peace, and prognosis
(in amrita, ambrosia, immortality, Dharma of Dependent Origination, etc.)
Our life is the birth/death of 60 trillion cells, with chromosomes in them (each of
which unraveled and stretched out extends 1.8 meters, making combined length of
thousands of times around this planet of water), metabolism taking place through
blood veins (extend two and half times around the earth), etc., by our hearts, etc.
This understanding of the microcosmic world generates a picture of Gaia as a
mesocosm with its 30 million species and their million populations working as a life
system, both wrought through four billion years of evolution with the whole planet
and the macrocosm of the universe through fifteen billion years of development.
Why can’t we be obliged and grateful for all the efforts of our ancestors and their
gene-shared sisters and brothers, and the water and wind, seas and stars, the sun,
space, time, and so forth? Only with great, mature heart/minds, can we enjoy holy
harmony, and happiness with joyful heart/mind in full free function.
10/20/13
Japanese Maple, Portland, Fred An, National Geographic
Aurora-Borealis-Sun, SDO, NASA
Wally Pacholka, National Geographic, Dec., 2010