Of Earth Store Bodhisattva

I’ve spent a week having a lot of fun with Yin Xun Fashi’s very valuable commentary on the Earth Store Bodhisattva Fundamental Vow Sutra, and there’s a couple of points from him that I’d like to pass along, and then contiunue my discussion of Earth Store Bodhisattva (hereinafter: ESB) in terms of Chogyam Trungpa’s POV. t of Yin Xun’s commentary is culture-specif for the Chinese because that’s whaqt a comentary is; it’s a culture-specific explanation of a scripture. I learned a lot ab pout Chinese culture and the Chinese mind from reading it, but it be without benefit, I feel, for an English-speaking audience.

According to Yin Xun, Bodhisattvas (hereinafter: Bdst, plural Bdsts) vow to save all beings, but ESB has a special desire to save those who suffer most, that is to say, the hell-beings. This jibes with my previous conception of ESB as “the activity of the Bdst in the hell realm.” Yin Xun also points out, very skillfully I feel, the fact that ESB is the only Bdst for whom the standard iconography includes the monks robe, and this is because “left-home marks” are what is necessary to save hell-beings, because they simply will not be motivated to practice without the appearance of pure marks. Both the environment of the hell-beings are utterly polluted, and without a perceptual sign to the contrary, they simply are not going to get out of this until their dreadful karma which got them there has been extinguished simply by their endurance of their great suffering, which is the greatest suffering which sentient beings can experience and still remain conscious.

Such a dead-handed process, i.e., merely suffering until the suffering itself purifies you is, in general, unacceptable to the Bdsts, who are just unutterbly bored by a POV which simply ignores the presence and validity of their practice and vows. The Bdst has arrived here from blissful Buddha-fields, and works with the Buddha-light (Fo Guang) behind his/her back and within his/her heart. From a fundamentally Bdstvic POV, the suffering of the hell-beings, in the presence of the Bdst, has nothing to do with their past karma. It is, rather, the direct present result of their direct present failure to recieve the Buddha-light which is now before them. But the initiative in this is absolutely in the hand of the Bdst. Failing that, the hell-beings are utterly and structurally incapable of anything but more suffering for the duration of their evil karma.

Chogyam Trungpa’s view of the six gatis (deva, asura, human, animal, hungry ghost, and hell-being) which I have tested, and with which I profoundly agree, is that all these life paths or vibratory realms are interpenetrating, and all these different kinds of beings are present in human form (because the human realm is the place of integration, analogous to the heart center wint he human body. Meher Baba says that the human realm is the only one from which you can go on the spiritual Path.) For example, the military is full of asuras. Ditto the higher echelons of the corporate world. The hell beings are present in our midst as the mentally ill, those who tend to harm themselves and others.

Hell beings, aka the mentally ill, have suffered to the point that their minds are broken, and what typically breaks is the integrative functions of the mind (I am not a clinician, and so I am not even trying to be clinically accurate in this description. I am expressing an intuitive POV based on buddhist teachings and my own observations.) That is to say, the ego, that bete noir of spiritual teachings, is broken, and a broken ego makes a dysfunctional human being.

Furthermore, the evil karma which produced the tremendous suffering which broke the ego is still active, and in general what you get from such people is evil behavior. Left to its own devices, this continuously self-reinforcing evil can literalaly go on for kalpas (thousands of years) but working from the outside of these evil dynamics, you can interfere with this dead loop and end it rather quickly and effectively, if you have the key, and know how to use it. The key is exactly this: The ego is broken in this individual. That means that ordinary human defense mechanisms are not available to them. It also means that thay are TOTALLY creatures of their immediate perceptions (because the perceptual mechanisms are much more robust than the integrative functions, being hard wired to the eye,ear, nose etc., and they will typically continue to be comparatively unimpared, and they will be the virtually complete content of the conscious mind, in the absence of the ability to integrate experience).

The reason that the behavior is evil in this population is that their perceptions are evil. Their hands are tied in this. They have no choice. It’s like the eye-motor_nerve link in a bird. Do not pass go. Do not collect disability. Do not think. Do not consider what this will do to your entire life. Simply ape the most outstanding idiocy that is going on around you. Their minds have been so deadened by excessive suffering that this is, quite literally, all that they are capable of. Their behavior is utterly controlled by their immediate perceptions. Hence, the absolute importance of “left-home marks.” A monastic, arriving with robe, bowl, mantras, bells, wooden fish, drums, and awesome left-home behavior altogether, can break the link between evil perceptions and evil activity. Once this link is broken, it quickly becomes the conversion of the mind, from percieved purity, to lawful behavior, because you see, therre’s no ego there to get in the way of that conversion. the personality is dragged through it, willyt-nilly, by the power of their own (previously evil) perceptual process.

If you tell a normal human being the Buddha’s Rirst Noble Truth, i.e., “Life is Suffering,” that normal human being is ordinarily offended by it, because normal human life is, in fact, the denial of this truth. He or she has all or part of the prized American Pile (of sh!t), the job, the spouse, the house, the dog/cat, the 2.5 kids, the 3.x lawsuits about alimony payments to previously attempted piles, and the real estate scams thereof. Hou could “life be suffering” when You. Own. All. That. Stuff?

But when you tell “Life is Suffering” to a hell-being, you are likely to have made a friend for life, because the perception of that individual is quite likely to be, “Somebody who finally understands me! Where have you been all my life?” From that point of entry, you can gradually put the ego back together in a health form, by demonstrationg the Buddha’s Law of Cause and Effect: from this good cause, therefore that good effect, from that good effect, therefore the diminshment of your suffering. So you link their behavior back to something other than suffering. It’s gradual, and it takes a lot of time and effort, but it is absolutely effective, and the result of it is normal human beings, not psychiatric pharmaceutical junkies, or remedial program junkies. It is for this purpose that transformation bodies of ESB come into this world of five pollutions and sting red dust, and the presence of such Bdsts in East Asia is why those societies have comparatively little mental illness.

Xtians trying to deal with mental illness are a real conceptual hairball althogether, because they have no real ideological basis for understanding what they’re looking at. ONe can sympathize with them, and I do, but I’ve never seen “Xtian love,” as well-intentioned as it can be, resolve or relieve any manetal impairment. Because they have no idea of what caused these disorders in the first place, they can’t see thech theoretical phantasies as the “chemical imbalance.” Yes, the entire physiologies of impaired individuals is in fact imbalanced, but fixing the imbalance doesn’t resolve the disorder. The disorder is not chemical, it is mental. To correct it, you have to change the MIND. The Buddha has told us that that mind is the result of behavior, absolutely. But the behavior that has caused a particular mental condition in the present may be hidden in past, and forgotten, incarnations.

The mentally impaired of today are the Hitlers, Mussolinis, Saddam Husseins, and Osama bin Ladens of the past. Absolutely. That is absolutely where this dreadful karma comes from. After causing that kind of harm, the person’s individuality descends to hell, where the person’s individuality is literally torn apart by the direct experience of the suffering that he/she caused others. The ego shell which protected the individual from these experiences is torn off and destroyed, and what is left of the mind then incarnates as a mentally impaired individual.

Even while being utterly in pain all day long, and utterly dependent on others, such impaired individuals are still capable of imagining and hatching destructive plots against others. They do that because that is all they know how to do. Usually their plots are foiled by their incompetence, but occasionally they pull one of them off. If they are in prison or in one of the rehabilitation programs modelled on the prison pecking order, they achieve greater status among their peers by doing this. Human helping prpofessionals in America have proven, in my experience, utterly out of their depth in this deviant behavior because they simply have no theoretical basis for understanding it. None of the theories they accept actually explain what they are looking at.

What can change these people is what they least deserve: love. But not naive and helpless Xtian love, please. Their disease will just batten on that. The Bodhisattva’s compassionate love is both great and informed and capable of fixing these disorders. The Bodhisattva has the conscious equiptment to help these miserable hell-beings build back lawful egos and gradually to free themselves of their entire legacy of suffering, and to re-enter normal human society.

Because the Bodhisattva has this Knowledge and this Power, he/she vows, as Kshitigharba:

UNTIL HELL IS EMPTY, I WILL NOT CERTIFY TO BUDDHAHOOD.

By my vow.

GATE, GATE, PARAGATE, PARASAMGATE, BODHI, SVAHA!

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping