Good morning!
We’re having the spring equinox sesshin. This is very auspicious, because the equinox
is identified as equanimity. In the East we call this time higan (彼岸), the other shore,
beyond the torrents and billows of this world. Further, the spring equinox is important
as the night napping of plants and animals has ended and they’re waking up to start their
new, free, and full lives.
If we just continue our old habits, we must also continue our problems and sufferings.
That is why we need sesshin, touching our minds (接心) and embracing our minds
(摂心). Our minds are compared to the charioteers of chariots. Often our chariots are
pulled by the “will horses,” or karmas. So, we must find our minds and control them,
not be controlled by them.
We need to embrace our minds. Often in the early Buddhist scriptures it is
recommended that we protect our doors or gates (dvāra-gutta). Because we
constantly leak through our sense organs and motor organs, especially leaks
of conceptions, emotions, and volitions through the motor organs, we defile
and destroy our world and ourselves. So, we must embrace our minds.
We have a nice equinox day today in balanced day and night, chill and heat.
Weathermen, however, have warned of a few to several inches of snow accumulation
from tonight to tomorrow night. We have been having extreme weather due to global
warming – droughts, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, even the globe itself warming
to make more fluid magma movement.
Recently we were warned about a Nankai (South Sea) Trough earthquake and tsunami,
which could cause ten times more damage than the Great East Japan Earthquake.
Scientists say the adjacent Tō-nankai (East South Sea) and Tōkai (East Sea) earthquakes
may take place at the same time. Disasters happen not only in Japan, but all over the
world with added human causes.
Not only disasters, but disease, devastation from nuclear plants, and accidents by cars,
etc., may happen any time to anyone. We must therefore be prepared for them and for
deaths. We must solve our birth and death problems before our devastation and deaths.
We must attain unsurpassed awakening in the truth of our life and living, and
unconditioned peace, nirvana, through it.
We must find and settle in the true safety, security, and satisfaction in them. So, sesshin
is the very good and crucial thing to attain them. No one can save another – but each one
only sees, settles, and saves himself from his own beginingless night of nescience and
dreadful dreams through his own cultivation and verification – essential in karma ken
and dharma dhātu.
Dogen said, “To learn the Awakened Way is to learn the self. To learn the self is to forget
the self…” Most haven’t started this process, always pulled by the horses, much less
forgetting the self. Without forgetting the self, we can never find the ultimate truth and
settle in unconditioned peace. Because our life is not as we think in the karma ken, we
must be in the dharma dhātu.
The total cosmos of time and space is our true body and mind. But without our practice,
we never find out such truth. Only through this solid and serene sitting, can we see and
settle in total truth and pure peace. Even if we have a glance of such, we are drawn back
to the karma kinetics constantly, involved in the triple poisons, and then led to the triple
maladies.
So, the only and true solution lies not in changing our outside laws and institutions,
but fundamentally changing our own mind mirrors and karma kinetics. With the triple
learnings, each and every one must change. Then, our societies and ecologies can
change with the triple minds. Thus we can truly enjoy the triple treasures. Otherwise
our joys are limited and defiled.
So, only through our constant practice, can we reach unconditioned peace, nirvana,
and the unsurpassed right complete awakening, anuttara samyak sambodhi, and
taste amrita, ambrosia of immortality, not sticking our heads into the sand, but
squarely seeing the supramundane paramount truth in the dharma dhātu, domain,
beyond mundane contrivances and conventions.
We congratulate each other on our practice here and now at this auspicious time and
place of the spring equinox in the spring sunshine, with singing birds and blooming
flowers! This Buddha mind seal is the crucial and essential function and functional
essence to change our whole life and the whole world with all. Let us touch and
embrace the Buddha mind to seal all in sambodhi and nirvana!
3/22/13
Cherry-blossom-nagoya by Achim Runnebaum, National Geographic, Wall paper