Myōhō Harris, Rev. Master

This was taken from a talk in the December issue of the Dharma Reflections series.

Over the Christmas period, a few people sent me cards with pictures of their children on them. As I was sitting here, reflecting one afternoon, it came into my mind that over the years, there’s something I’ve noticed across the board with lay trainees, and it’s the great love they have for their children and grandchildren. They are grateful to have them, and would do anything, and everything they could, to help them. There’s joy and delight when they speak about them. The thought arose, that if people could have that same attitude of mind towards their spiritual training, then they would go far, and their practice would deepen in leaps and bounds.

When we receive instruction in how to meditate and train, we’re all given the same basic set of instructions on what to do, how to start and how to go forward. Then it is up to us as to how much we wish to give of ourselves to that practice – that’s the key factor. These are not instructions such as, ‘This is how you programme your kitchen boiler’, where there’s just one outcome. These instructions are like a door that you can open to another world, to a different kind of life.

At first it may seem that meditation is just one of a number of things that you ‘do’ throughout your day, and perhaps you don’t feel that great a connection with it. And it is true that if you don’t have a hunger for the truth, if you don’t really want it, then probably you won’t put that much effort into it. But if you want to find the truth (what is real), as much as you want your children to be happy and healthy and to succeed in life, if it feels intensely personal to you – which training is, it’s personal to each one of us – and if you can open your heart to it, then you will find that those instructions are like roots from which something quite magnificent will come forth. This is because a deep caring about the Buddhist way and a quiet love of training will grow. When we wish to give all that we can, we open up and offer ourselves to be taught, to be awakened, and through this trust in the practice, much becomes possible.

Years ago I had a cat called Charlie. One day I had just put a clean sheet on my bed when Charlie came in, jumped up, and walked across it. Looking at his muddy paw prints I smiled, thinking they looked like beautiful plum blossoms. Sitting down and reflecting later that day, it came to me that, when you love, you don’t see dirt. This is how we can look at ourselves, and others, and all the painful or challenging things that may arise in meditation. The eyes of the Heart Mind, of inner reflection, see no dirt, they see the Truth, which reveals and clarifies what we need to understand so that we can resolve, or lay to rest, inner confusion. If we can receive these insights, in the simple (yet profound) purity of gratitude and trust, then the path forward opens up.

Gradually it dawns upon us that what is being revealed is not external to us, it is within us. It is our true life, our essence, the life of Buddha that is unfolding, opening up and blossoming within and as our human life. From being an activity which we may have thought of as something ‘I do’, our view of meditation changes, and it becomes something that I am. What is unfolding is the fullness of what I am, and with that comes the realisation of what a wonderful gift it is to be a human being.

At the Buddha’s Enlightenment festival we celebrate our human potential, and as that unfolds, enriching our lives, we see how the instructions we received, in simple uncomplicated words, have opened the way to us having a completely different understanding of what it means to appear in this world in human form.

Those instructions, those basics, they never cease to be relevant and our understanding of them is ever broadening and being refined. They’re always there, like ‘the roots in the mud of the world’ from where we started, with our hopes, our dreams, our fears – our not knowing what would come of this practice of Buddhism. Through them is drawn in the spiritual nourishment of ‘I take Refuge’, which fans out into every aspect of our life.

The Precepts also take on a different meaning. What starts off as a static list, soon becomes something else. It becomes the unfolding of the life of Buddha. Just as you don’t have to ‘remember’ to love your family, so we don’t have to ‘remember’ to keep the Precepts. They are there within the natural essence of your life, my life, ever-flowing, ever-teaching, ever-increasing our ability to understand and see clearly, so we are always becoming Buddha. This is not because we are never good enough to get there, but because everything is constantly changing, as our individual life fades and appears, as form manifests from the formless, and we and all that exists are the endlessly changing manifestations, or appearances of the great mystery that we call Buddha.

In The Scripture of Avalokiteshwara Bodhisattva it says to ‘cherish a longing deep’ within us.  If you can cherish and nourish the wish in your heart to train, just as much as you may wish to cherish and nourish your own children, then training becomes a labour of love, it becomes as natural to us as is breathing. Just as you may look at your children as they grow up and consider carefully how you can help them ‒ what their needs may be, and how you can support them ‒ so we need to look at ourselves in the same way, recognising our spiritual needs. We all have them. This is not a fault. Responding to them is the means by which the confusion of the past is laid to rest and future distress is prevented. By recognising these needs, mistaken views are clarified, and whatever it was that entrapped our mind, keeping it small and tight and limited, can fall away.

With this falling away, comes an awakening, an opening of our eyes, and we see that this purity, which is our true essence, is also the essence of your children, and of all that exists. It is at the root of the love that you have for your family and it unites you with all life, all things, including the so-called inanimate. If you can abide within that living essence, and not use your mind in a way that is tainted by judgement or desire, or various forms of selfishness, then you will be able to love, and live, with an innocent purity, that will benefit both yourself and all around you.

When we don’t have that connection with the refuge, our fear of our opinion of ourselves, or our doubt, can make it very difficult to look within. We begin to live more and more externally,  instead of allowing the inward-looking gaze to go where it naturally wants to go, we pull it outwards, away from its source, creating a mental world of endless thinking and pretence, because we don’t want what the awareness of looking within reveals. This is a lonely and unsatisfactory way to live.

If your child had started to go down some wrong paths and get into trouble, and make life very difficult for themselves, you would do everything you could to try to help them, and doing so would come from love. It would not come from anger, nor hate, nor impatience, nor feelings of ‘they’re no good’. It would be, ‘How can I help this being I love so much?’ We can have that same attitude towards ourselves. Relaxing into inherent faith, abiding there, taking time to contemplate the way forward, not filling that space with our own tangled thoughts, but patiently waiting for true direction, is an activity Buddhism calls, ‘turning the stream of compassion within’.

When we relax into meditation and abide within its spacious tenderness we find a total acceptance, from which comes a deep reassurance that puts a fragile, vulnerable being like myself at ease. It stills and settles us. It is enough. From this comes contentment which enables an even deeper relaxation of body and mind, as they are drawn together within that purity. It is this which helps us to resolve our karma, by enabling us to relax in trust, and be completely honest with ourselves, because that’s what resolving karma requires. Taking Refuge, entrusting oneself to the inward-looking gaze, not fearing the truth, and never turning away from anything the meditation brings to us, we can see what is needed and there is no doubt in our minds that we can take that next step.

The love of the great mystery never gives up on anyone. Meditation never asks anyone to do anything that they are not capable of doing. It offers step-by-step guidance. It gives every single being the same opportunity to find and enter their true home. For myself, home is a place where I belong. The ancient Buddhist writings say that ‘the land that is nowhere is our true home’. We don’t need to fight for our place in the meditation hall, it is freely given, it is there, waiting for each one of us, and is the formless universal mediation hall within our being. It is the abode of our own completeness. Ironically, it is a ‘place’ where we no longer exist, where there is no need for personal identity, and it is this that brings the greatest peace.

Dōgen said, “Every step I take in this limitless world is my home.” As he walked the many twists and turns, the ups and downs of a human life, the roots of his being disappeared into the place where there is nothing from the first. From that fathomless source, which we call the refuge, a temporary appearance comes forth for a purpose. Finding and fulfilling that purpose is a labour of love. Just as when your family need help, and you will always offer it, so when we need spiritual guidance we can turn to the meditation ‘as a child turns to its mother’. In some of my darkest moments the all-accepting tenderness of the great mystery has permeated my being, bringing reassurance and confirmation of that unconditional love.¹ We are already known to the core, and what is needed, will come. The unmistakable reality, the truth of it, will be as a liberating gift of grace, bringing clarifying insights that resolve age-old confusion. We are constantly being taken beyond all that we think we know. We do not have to know anything. The practice finely tunes and unfetters our awareness, so that it becomes as a net that is ready to catch, to receive, what the meditation brings. Training is doing one’s best to become the embodiment of what enlightened awareness reveals. It is how we show gratitude for that unconditional love.

Homage to the Buddha,
Homage to the Dharma,
Homage to the Sangha.

1. When talking about Buddhism we use words, doing our best to describe something that transcends words, and which does not have a neat dictionary definition. This is certainly the case with the term Unconditional Love, or with any mystical aspect of Zen.

Speaking from my personal experience, which is all I have, it is not an emotion, it is not the opposite of hate. What I am trying to convey is a mixture of purity, a sense of cleanness and innocence that leaves me feeling very grateful and unfettered. There is also tenderness, and an unfailing trust in me, which could also be described as reassurance, or as full and complete acceptance.

Here are two occasions describing how that love has manifested, and helped me. Once, as a young monk, feeling weighed down with despair, in meditation I felt my robe became a golden hand of pure love that carried me. A tender warmth filled my being. It reconnected me with my purpose, and from that love came a reassurance that I could, and would, keep going. On another occasion, when I thought I would give up, and leave the monastery, what came to me in meditation, with such gentleness, were the words, “I will love you if you go and I will love you if you stay”. This broke the tension that had built up in my young and overloaded mind, and of course I stayed. If we do our best, something else within that great mystery will step in, and give help when needed.  Experience has shown me that there is compassion and understanding for us. We should never think of Zen as being hard and cold.