On the Trail of the Mysterious Shingon

The Shingon (the Japanese secret school) is nothing if not mysterious, and everything I do recently keeps leading back around to them. For example, I decide that I’m going to tag my photo site, and I come to my Mandala album, and find that there aren’t a whole lot of bona fide Buddhist mandala in there, so I decided to fix that, and dropped the Chinese roots for “mandala” into a Google image search, and voila!, a whole lot of Buddhist mandala. But in looking at these, it arrived that most of them just weren’t making a whole lot of Chinese sense. Way too much green, just for starters. (I don’t know what the Chinese have against that color. Perhaps mother nature was unfilial towards her parents, and they haven’t forgiven her for it. Who can know where some of their schticks come from?) They were also iconographically opaque, until I arrived at this:

Finally, front and center, a Buddha who is big enough to read, and clearly from the mudra, it could not be somebody other than Dainichi Nyorai, the root Buddha of the Shingon. I think this is just about the most cheerful mandala I have ever seen (It turns out to be the 金剛界曼荼羅 kongōkai mandara). It manages to have both a high level of organization and tremendous vitality, and I love the color. Somewhere in the midst of the search, I also encountered this WordPress blog page, which is remarkable because it got around to all of these mandala in a matter of paragraphs. For some other examples of the taizōkai mandara and the kongōkai mandara, see my Shingon Album The above article about the Shingon is the best thing I have seen on the subject.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing PIng

Heliocentric Buddhism

(click image to enlarge)

This was taken from the ocean side of Diamond Head Crater, across Black Point, not visible here. This is what you would see from Waikiki if the crater didn’t block the sight line. There was a Japanese tourist present also at the time. What I tend to be doing at large on this island before dawn is another story that I intend to write soon. Frankly, I can’t believe what a great photographer I am. This was taken with something practically non-existent compared to the camera that I now own, a truly spiffy Olympus Stylus. Currently, I have a 2-gig storage card full of tyewtally awesome new shots that I will be posting in the coming weeks.

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The Japanese are sun-worshippers. They are. This business of a Shinto heirarchy headed by the Sun Goddess Amaterasu isn’t just mythology. You can find Japanese tourists all over this island who rise before dawn and go to the highest crag they can find simply to watch the sunrise. No fanfare. No kudos from those around them, because they’re in a foreign place which basically does not understand this behavoir, or care that anybody does it. But I care, because their sincerity is the only reason that they would do this. There’s just no other payoff for it here in Hawaii.

You don’t see this in Waikiki because sunrise isn’t visible in Waikiki. But sunset is, and at sunset, the whole beach is full of Japanese tourists standing at attention to watch the sunset, which are usually outrageously beautiful. No fanfare, no noise, no calls to cohorts to watch the sun go down. It’s not necessary. They’re like a school of fish, turning on a dime together at some invisible signal.

Then there are the “local Japanese.” Forget them at sunrise and sunset. They’re a different race all together. Ask them. They’ll tell you. They’re American. They’re all out being paid to drive trucks or set up and clean up one scenario or another, at both sunrise and sunset. That’s what’s important to them. But real Japanese are about beauty. They appreciate it, they demonstrate it, and they recognize and honor it automatically when they see it. That’s why they come Hawai’i.

And that’s true of Japanese Buddhism as well. There’s nothing on earth like Japanese temple architecture, when they stay true to it, which unfortunately, the local Japanese lineages mostly haven’t. They got the archetypes for it from China, but the Chinese have never, and will never, rise to Japanese woodcraft. There’s no dance more beautiful than Japanese Obon. There’s nothing as beautiful as Japanese liturgy, because they know when to shut the hell up. They know when one more bell, or one more damnable praise, to anyone at all, will destroy the entire mood of the Sangha. It’s called listening, I think. The Dharma guardians will clue you to this stuff if you care to listen to them.

A unique part of the beauty of the Japanese Buddhist temple liturgy is O-Higan, an observance which is unique to Japanese Buddhism, and which is a solar observance. (The Kanji for Higan, 彼岸, mean “other shore.”) Higan happens at the time of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and it is a time of remembering the six paramitas, a basic aspect of the Buddha’s fundamental teaching.

A couple of days ago, sitting on the beach at Waikiki at sunset, I was reminded of why the equinoxes are so important to traditional Japanese culture. It’s because they’re islanders, and always have been sailors. When you can see the ocean, you’ve got a flat horizon and that changes the entire usefulness of the heavens, and your whole way of relating to them. At the horizon, the equinox occurs when the sun rises dead east, and sets dead west. Always. All latitudes. There’s your compass, as long as you can see the stars. When it’s not the equinox yet, you still know where east and west are, because you know where the zodiac is, and you know from the time of year where that is in relation to east and west.

So we relate the six paramitas to the equinoxes, because they are equally important to us.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

Amateratsu Rules!

Land of the Sun Goddess
By MICHAEL HOFFMAN
Special to The Japan Times

…A devout Buddhist and an earnest Confucianist, Shotoku enrolled his own relatively backward country in China’s school of civilization. The pupil-teacher relationship, rare if not unprecedented in the history of nations, would last centuries, during which Japan in effect Sinicized itself. Buddhism, Confucianism, Chinese writing, Chinese art — all were swallowed whole and, for a time, uncritically.

A century after Shotoku’s death in 622, the resplendent Nara Period (710-784) was bathed in its first luster. It was overwhelmingly Chinese, overwhelmingly Buddhist. The native Shinto kami, with Amaterasu at their head, slipped into oblivion.

When smallpox struck Nara, the capital, in 735, the Emperor Shomu’s thoughts turned not to them but to the Buddha. The course of action his piety suggested to him was to order the casting of a giant bronze image of Roshana Buddha.

But he hesitated. As Sansom explains, “To erect a great Buddha in the middle of the capital . . . was, on the face of it, a serious blow to the native divinities, unless some means could be found of reconciling (Shinto and Buddhism).”

The reconciliation was entrusted to a monk named Gyogi, who journeyed to Ise and for seven days and seven nights prayed at the threshold of the Sun Goddess’ shrine — to good effect, evidently, for in a dream “the Sun Goddess appeared to the emperor as a radiant disc,” writes Sansom, “and proclaimed that the Sun and the Buddha were the same.”

The bronze statue required years of work but was finally completed in 752. This is the enormous Great Buddha — 48.7 meters high — whose serene presence graces Nara’s Todaiji Temple to this day.

Only as Japan approached modern times did the Sun Goddess peek through and finally burst the clouds of indifference that had enveloped her. How thick those clouds were may be gauged from a passage in the 11th-century “Sarashina Diary,” written by an anonymous noblewoman. Troubled by a strange dream, she is advised “to pray to the heavenly goddess Amaterasu. I wondered where this deity might be and whether she was in fact a goddess (kami) or a Buddha,” she wrote. “It was some time before I was interested enough to ask who she actually was.” …

Amateratsu is so beautiful, and as a spirit presence, She is actually stronger in Japanese culture than Buddhism. What has happened to Buddhism in Japan is very wierd and seriously unhealthy – it has been turned into a death cult in which the heads of the largest lineages are literally the keepers of mausoleums, and “temple” is actually a secret Japanese codeword for boneyard – the bones of all of their ancestors are literally clustered around the main altar in their temples.

The reason that Obon odori is so powerful is that it is structurally impossible to do it in a temple. And look at a yagura, and tell me that those powerful red and white stripes are about Buddhism. Where else do you see them but emanating from the sun on Japan’s flag? The central focus of Obon is actually Amateratsu. That’s why Obon works as a multi-cultural festival in Hawaii – basically nobody owns the Sun Goddess. Amateratsu is also still why Japanese culture works, to the extent that it works at all. And look at that word. What is the ‘ra’ in the middle of it but the ‘ra’ in (Jetsun Arya) Tara, the Ra (changed in the modern language to La) which literally means sun in Hawaiian, and the Sun God Ra of ancient Egypt? Amen, I say unto thee beloveds, Amateratsu is absolutely nobody but the Great Mother, the Sun Goddess of Central Asia and this entire planet, Whom we all worshipped in the far past time when God was a Woman.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

The No-No Boys

One of the original barracks at Tule Lake, still extant in 1975.

Excerpt from Danielle Steele’s Silent Honor

Those who didn’t sign were rounded up from the other camps as well, and the No-No Boys wound up in the segregation section at Tule Lake. It was, in fact, at that point being built into a separate camp, for people thought to be disloyal to the United States, and security was immediately increased to deal with the problem. Tak was deeply grateful that, in the end, Ken had agreed to sign the loyalty oath, even if it meant seeing him go off to war and risk his life for his country. At least his loyalty as an American would never be questioned. …
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Perhaps. But Ken joined the American army and died in combat in the European theatre, and his father Tak subsequently died of a broken heart at Tule Lake internment camp.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

Practice Update

I have continued to keep five precepts, with very minor infractions, since I took them on Mar 1. I have also been wearing my precept robe for an hour of walking meditation, beginning before dawn, except for the last ten days in March, when I was too sick with the flu to do that. Tomorrow, 5 April, I will not be present at Fo Guang Shan. I have decided to visit Haleiwa Jodo Mission for their Buddha’s Birthday celebration.

In previous years, whenever I visited a Japanese Sangha in the spring, I wound up spending the months of April, May, June, July and August dancing Obon with the Japanese Sangha, to the exclusion of Fo Guang Shan. That will not happen this year. I will wear my Fo Guang Shan precept robes in the Japanese Sangha, and enjoy their company for exactly one day, and then return to my proper place.

In general, East Asians find ways to grow on you, and they are all well worth knowing, and that includes the Japanese. The Japanese are more emotionally relaxed than the Chinese. In general, they don’t even try for “gratitude” because they know that, as a whole Sangha, it’s just beyond them. But what they demonstrate and insist on is loyalty. They understand that if you can’t even stick to your own lineage, you’re just not even human yet. Even traditional Japanese Christians are expected by Japanese Buddhists to remain Christian. They lose all social status if they convert. (But this is NOT true for recent Christian converts locally!) So also me anymore. Wherever I go, I belong to the lineage that has given me Refuge and Precepts, i.e., Fo Guang Shan.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

O-Higan

The Higan celebration, which is associated with both equinoxes, will happen at Jodo Mission Haleiwa on 28 Sept 08, at 10:00 AM. This beautiful and friendly local Japanese temple can be found on the beach just Kona (Leeward) of Haleiwa Alii Beach Park on the island of O’ahu.

Higan is unique to Japanese Buddhism, and goes back to the legendary Prince Shotoku, an early Bodhisattva-Ruler who recieved the original transmission of the Buddhadharma to Japan from Korea. The solar-oriented date (the equinox) relates to Japan’s entire orientation to the Sun. The word Japan means “Rising Sun,” and the Sun Goddess Ameratsu is central to Japanese mythology and the self-conception of the Japanese people.* All of this is a complete departure from the Chinese norm, and harkens to the Tara cult of Central Asia, which is continuous, BTW, with the pre-Alii Hawaiian Goddess cult.

For more info. on O-Higan, check these links:

My Mother’s Haiga.

O-Higan’s relationship to the Paramitas.

A Soto Shu interpretation of O-Higan (The Soto Shu is the only Buddhist lineage presently transmitted to American lineage holders.)

*Japanese Sun-worship – the local Japanese are another story, but bona fide Japanese tourists can often be found posted on every high point on this island to observe both sunrise and sunset. They love this. They’ll rise before dawn simply to go out and observe sunrise. And full moon sunset at Lanikai is a mob scene.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping