Emperor Liang’s Repaying Filial Piety Repentance

I. Doctrinal Implications

Gautama Lord Buddha, the Noble One, the Enlightened One, the World Honored One, the Thus Come, was born Shakya Siddhadartha, and he was the crown prince of what is now called Nepal. His family was one of those Kshatriya (Hindu warrior class) families in which parricide, quite unfortunately, was kind of par for the course at the time. The Shakya clan was most definitely in the king business; that’s what they did, and it’s really the only thing they knew how to do, and little Siddhartha was Usual Suspect Numbero Uno; he was crown prince, he was going to become king. End of story when the son does what his father wants because he has filial piety.

However, little Siddhartha had other ideas. Pretty much as soon as he had attained maturity, he snuck out of the golden cage that was the royal palace in the dead of night, together with his faithful co-perpetrator, and then slinked off into the forest to practice Hindu austerities, leaving behind (read: ABANDONING) his beautiful pregnant wife. I don’t even want to know what happened to the co-perpetrator when the father found out. But after too many changes to write here, Siddharta re-emerged from the forest as the Buddha, with a whole new Middle Way Dharma that was only vaguely related to his parents’ religion. His beautiful wife was violated in the Buddha’s continued absence from the king business, by his enemy Devadatta, and subsequently comitted suicide from shame. But his son with her later became a Buddhist. In other words, from a Confucianist point of view: Shakya Siddhartha was THE most difficult and unsatisfactory of all possible children, and he compounded the outrage by succeeding everywhere without his parents’ help. He never mentioned his parents or anyone’s parents in his Dharma, let alone such basic Confucianist survival equiptment as gratitude and filial piety.

Fast forward 1,000 years. Change scene to north China. It has become apparent to a devout Confucianist literati that Buddhism really has a lot to offer China, but it’s got a SERIOUS image problem because of the founder’s TOTAL failure to get it in terms of his parents. Because of this, it is being suppressed, and could easily be wiped out of China completely. So this pious fellow pens the treatise which we know as Emperor Liang’s etc. This is not a sutra, which is the perpetually reiterated assertion about it within the text. It does not even pretend to be spoken by the Buddha. It is also not a commentary, because it explains no scripture. It is a ritual magic practice manual, in which the Buddha’s Law of Causality is made to hop to Confucianist values. For example, there is a long list of Buddhist hells to which the unfilial child can be sent. This ritual takes well over twelve hours to chant, at breakneck speed. The associated begginning and ending sequences take another hour, for each session. We just did this at Honolulu Fo Guang Shan in seven sessions over a week.

After that was concluded, there was another added “concusion” in the form of the “88 Buddhas Rependance,” another item in the SAME perfectly tedious genre, in which three separate copies of the Amida Sutra are embedded in a matrix of what are essentially magical assertions designed to make us imagine that filial piety, as an ethical principle, can be derived from the Amida Sutra. I previously criticized that in these terms. That took another four hours. I think it was the Abbess’ hope that we would have no critical faculties left over from the experience. In my case, she hoped wrong.

II. How I Got Snaggled into This

It has become abundantly clear to me that our abbess is not a Buddhist, but I am beginning to think that with a little more guidance and a lot more practice, she could turn out to be a noteworthy magician.

The Abbess really likes ritual, and in general, I find this a pain in my butt. It’s probably why I took birth somewhere else than China in this life. Previously, on Buddha’s Birthday Celebration this year, she had placed me, for ritual offering purposes, in a group of men representing the male lay Sangha, who were dubbed the “Vajra.” This word, “Dorje” in Tibetan, means male sexual organ, thunderbolt, or crystal, depending on what your mood is at the time, if you know what I mean. You can also confuse all three meanings together if you really need to get into a whole lot of trouble instantaneously, but we’re not going to go there on my watch, OK? But in this kind of context, it also implies someone who supports the temple financially, and I was not one of those at the time, and really could not forsee myself becoming one of those. And this whole day was a niusance for me because of the constraints on my freedom of motion that resulted from that role. But then, four months later, I started recieving a fixed income, and naturally, if that happens to me, the temple gets a cut, no matter what. This temple has earned that from me, just from always being there when I needed it, even if I don’t agree with some of its doctrine. So she made me do something ritually that turned out to be predictive.

So then, when I coughed up the first tithe, the nice dharma sister at the duty desk advised me to put the names of my deceased relatives on this piece of paper to basically transfer merit to them, because that would “help me.” OK, whatever. I wrote the names of my deceased parents, paternal grandmother, brother, and girlfriend, and those same names appeared in English among the hundreds of Chinese ones, posted on burial stele papers on the wall, during what turned out to be the Emperor Liang’s etc. In the past I have avoided this like the plague because I had intuited in advance what it was, and I was afraid of becoming reactive and throwing things through windows. In this case, I had no real intention of going to the ritual itself, and was late to temple on that day, and almost walked out on it.
But somehow I stayed, and there was a second session, and in the meantime thre was a whole succession of my beautiful Dhama sisters who came with great sincerity, and big Chinese eyes, and told me that a place had been saved for me. It was standing room only in the Buddha Hall that day. The place they had saved was almost smack in the middle of the first row, and before it was all over, boy did I take some flack from that. “What are you doing in the front row.” “Don’t ask, OK? You don’t want to know. It’s stupid enough already. Please don’t make it worse than it already is, by having a whole bunch of dumb questions!”

And so it was that I came to sit at the head of the Sangha, in front of dozens of people who had more right than I to do it.

III. What Actually Happened during the Ritual

The loud clanging of bells went on and on and on, and it reminded me of a Tibetan demon-exorcizing ritual, called Dur, that I had gone to in Berkeley, long before I was anything like a Buddhist. The Dur-master, Lama Dorje, had been the Dalai Lama’s weather-maker and he was quite good. He apparently thought I was a difficult case, and had his attendant beat me, rather viciously, with the spirit-bag that was supposed to trap demons.

Later, I noticed that the wild bell noise was due to our Abbess using quite a fine black metal vajra bell upside down and in her wrong (right) hand. After her recent trip to China, she mentioned going to a vajra temple there. I don’t think she’s a tantric initiate, because I don’t believe that an initiate could abuse her bell that badly. I don’t even want to know if what she was doing is par for the entire cohort of Fo Guang Shan nuns. If they’re going to use tantric tools, they should get initiated and learn how to use them right.

On Wednesday morning, not much more than half-way through the ritual, I fell off my bike and scraped a good three square inches of skin off my right knee, right where the pressure would go on the numerous bows for the rest of the ritual. Besides the pain that would inevitably ensue, such wounds are always a crap shot in Hawaii. If you dress them, they run and don’t close, and if you leave them undressed, they often become infected with staph, which can literally become life-threatening within days. I thought that there was a better than even chance that this wound didn’t really have anything to do with my knee at all, since it was clear that what I had gotten involved in was magic and not Buddhism, and that if I left the circle from this this kind of negative dynamic, it was highly likely then to get worse. So I dressed it and knelt on it, with quite a bit of pain on Wednesday. It was a running mess that night, but fortunately, after I washed it on Thursday morning, it closed and stayed closed thereafter, and the pain from kneeling on it diminished with every succeeding day. It is continuing to heal normally a week later.

This ritual was exhausting for me, mentally, emotionally, and physically. I usually went home from it with all robes drenched in sweat, and just barely able to put one foot in front of the other. The good news is that I think it was good for my Chinese comprehension. I suspect that my mother, who died in March and who is undoubtedly in Xtian purgatory from her emotional crimes, heard it and was terrified. And hey, frankly, I think it probably did her good to be terrified by the fact that I can reach her in the spirit world.

But once is more than enough. Next year, and every year thereafter, I will most definitely dance Obon, and I will most definitely insist on dancing it all the way through the month of August, when Fo Guang Shan does its Emperor Liang gig, because Obon is more beautiful and more fun. Hold the Neo-Confucianist liturgical firedrills for somebody who needs them.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping