Good morning!
At the end of our Rohatsu (Dec. 8) sesshin (embracing/touching the heart: 摂心・接心) commemorating the Buddha’s awakening, we have our ordination. Ordination is ordering into holiness (the holy order). Soto Zen does jukai (giving/receiving precepts: 授戒/受戒) of the Triple Treasure (Buddha, Dharma, Sangha: Community), the Triple Collective Pure Precepts, and the Ten Grave Prohibitory Precepts. As Dogen said (If not with all, it is not the Great Vehicle/Way. Receiving the Buddha’s Precepts is in the same rank as the Buddha), the Pure Precepts embraces all beings and all good dharmas & actions (actual no killing, stealing, lying, etc., as the awakened ones’ actions).
As the Triple Learning of morality, concentration, and prognosis (sīla, samādhi, prajńā) is the basis of all Buddhists’ Ways/Paths (truth/ethic). Concentration (next to nirvana) is the core of them, stilling karma, seeing dharmas, and saving moral actions. The Buddha reached nirvana and awakening of the Dharma of Dependent Co-origination (of all dharmas) and karma-dependence (of all living beings). He provided us with the core practice of it (sitting/stilling/seeing/serving/saving) to save all from sin (separation), sickness, suffering, samsara (up/down life like hungry ghosts, fighting devils, etc.), slaying, and succumbing. It is the unparalleled gift to transcend all karmas and calamities.
Due to nescience (no witnessing) of nirvana (no-wind, of karma), humans, most advanced in brain/hands (sciences/technologies), became the culprit of inordinate disasters (wars, nukes, pollutions, climate abnormalities, mass extinctions, etc.). In the karma world, people delude themselves with fictions (selves, societies, states, civilizations, etc.), taking fallacies and shames as fortunes and fames, self-inflicting damages, as if spitting against heaven, the Dharma of Dependent Co-origination (interdependence). Hence the paradigm shift from karma to dharma, sin to holiness, artificial unidirectional civilization (matter/power) to natural cyclical culture (heart/life), ego to eco, etc. essential and inevitable.
Religion (from religare) is reunion with holiness (wholly wholesome way/world) from sin (separated sick suffering/samsara), but degenerates into selfishness, superstition, sacrifice of people/plants/planets of/by/for the powerful. Civilization (urbanization, from civitas, city, cf. citadel) ushered wars, slavery, class system, etc. (discrimination, exploitation, destruction). States (from city states to nation states) multiplied them with selfishness (me-ism, materialism, militarism, money-ism) to the brink of total wiping out of life even by a mad man with MAD (mutual assured destruction), deluding and mobilizing masses. Humans must ordain, organize, and order in calm-clearness like Indra-net knot crystals.
12/11/16
