A Spirit of Respect Shared by Lama Surya Das with full credit to John Blofeld
A zen student articulates the distinctions between your visual and ritual elements of practice. This content has been brought to our notice by
who's an American lama in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions. He is a poet, chantmaster, spiritual activist and author of countless popular works on Buddhism; a meditation instructor and spokesman for Buddhism in the west. Lama Surya Das keeps us up to date about the different facets of buddhism along with meditation often with his own discourse and often via articles along with content that sheds light on buddhism. This piece on Buddhism originates from John Blofeld a scholar, writer, along with translator of Asian philosophy in addition to religion, specially Buddhism and Taoism. Continue reading to read more information about Buddhism as well as the variations between the conceptual and also ritual components of practice.
Due to the fact Buddhism came to the West, inevitably quite a few people have felt, “Zazen is nice, consideration is nice, self-discipline is great, but why all this bowing as well as incense? To whom would you provide incense as well as flowers?” To this all the Buddhists of the past and all Asian ?Buddhists currently could answer with 1 voice: “Dear friends, a spirit of reverence is really important to successful practice. Without it, enlightenment can not be gained!”
Prostrations and also offerings are generally admittedly simply forms-just a human strategy for expressing precisely what cats express by rubbing themselves alongside a much loved person’s legs. If this were natural for individuals to stand on their heads as well as stick out their rumps to show reverence, then Buddhists could stand on their particular heads or stick out their rumps as a matter of course. Kinds do not matter by themselves, however the attitude of mind represented by prostrations and so forth is of stupendous significance to followers of the Way.
My Tibetan lama said to me at a very initial phase of my training: “Ignorant people follow the perspective of subject to king before a Buddha statue. Higher-level practice is accomplished entirely in the intellect. Yet even if you reach the maximum level-hard without a doubt to arrive at in one lifetime-you have to daily alternate formless, wordless, above-conceptual practice with bowing down along with making offerings. Never ever fail in that.” My Chinese Chan (Zen) educator informed me: “In between your rounds of meditation, exercise bowing, offering incense, along with making circumambulations. When you have no spirit of respect, simply no feeling of amazement for all that lies beyond the constraints of that miserably circumscribed illusion you suppose to be your ‘me,’ you will make hardly any development. Why? Simply because whenever your practice improves, you will reflect: ‘I did much better inside my meditation just now’ and by so contemplating fall back to the minimum level of ignorance as a result of the actual consequent inflation of your devilish ‘I’!”
Those Zen monks who said, “Meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha” as well as advocated employing Buddha figures as firewood and so on had been talking not to Americans or to new Buddhists but to Chinese or maybe Japanese Zen followers that could possibly be counted upon to know the meaning of such instructions, which truly amounted to this: “Never for 1 moment suppose that veneration of sutras or even images is of much utilization in itself, so don’t let it replace the rest of your practice, as uninformed people typically do.” I doubt if it ever entered those monks’ minds that one day there'd be individuals in the world who would take these kinds of powerful (and also comical) injunctions actually!
If it's wrong to have and to symbolize perceptions of reverence, awe, as well as gratitude by prostrations in addition to offerings, then all Buddhists happen to be wrong since the dharma had been preached in this latest kalpa 2,500 plus much more years ago. Could it be possible that those hundreds of millions of people at all levels of dedication to the practice we so significantly value included no single man or woman of genuine understanding until finally Buddhism reached America?
Article Source -
