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“It’s important to take time to have some quiet moments in our lives, otherwise we get caught up in the busy-ness of always having something going on.”

Another post from the Way of Oneness...Enjoy.

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A little poem from me. 

-Shinyo

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“Life should go like the giant’s walk, pounding over the earth. No holding back, no indecision, no explanation, no reasoning. It just appears–decisively.

I deeply believe, and hurl myself into it: the decision of birth, decision of sickness, decision of aging, decision of death. The decision that breaks out in laughter or spills in tears.

Life is always being itself. Living in the Eternal Now, I praise the past life that it holds, follow the future life contained in it. So my life moves from decision to decision, from deepest truth to deepest truth, always obeying the changes of time. I concentrate my power on living life.”

Haya Akegarasu

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Hey everyone! Please check out this podcast by a fellow Buddhist teacher (Who just happens to have the same Dhamra name as me!). So much wisdom and love went into this project and so much will continue to go into it! Please give it a listen. May it be so!

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Another Talk by the Venerable Rev. Koyo Kubose! What is the Importance of being earnest?

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by Doug Kuyo Sensei

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by William Toyo Sensei

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by Dave Nichiyo Sensei

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by CJ Daiyo Sensei

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Gratitude and Oneness - a talk by our Sensei, Koyo Kubose. 

Dharma Talk by Rev. Koyo Kubose given at Heartland Sangha. (Please note that these presentations were transferred from VHS archives and do not have the best quality or production.)

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Mind of Embracing All Things

(Excerpt from Kegon Sutra shown above)

Reading an early passage of the Kegon Sutra, I came across a poem by the Ho-E Bodhisattva which made me want to cry out, “How wonderful!” Here it is:

“Be free from subject and object, Get away from dirtiness and cleanness, Sometimes entangled and sometimes not, I forget all relative knowledge: My real wish is to enjoy all things with people.”

This poem expresses so clearly what I am thinking about these days that I use it to explain my feelings to everyone I meet.

Subject or object, myself or someone else, individualism or socialism, egotism or altruism-forget about such relative knowledge be free from it! Right or wrong, good or bad, beauty or ugliness-don’t cling to that either. Forget about ignorance or enlightenment! Simply enjoy your life with people-this is the spirit of Gautama Buddha, isn’t it? I’m glad that Shinran Shonin said “When we enter into the inconceivable Other Power, realize that the Reason without Reason does not exist,” and again, “I cannot judge what right or wrong is, and I don’t know at all what is good and bad.” I hate to hear about the fights of isms or clashes between two different faiths. I don’t care about these things.

Somehow I just long for people. I hate to be separated from people by the quarrels of isms or dogma or faith, and what is more, I hate to be separated from people by profit or loss.

I don’t care whether I win or lose, lose or win. I just long for the life burning inside me. I just adore people, in whom there is life. I don’t care about isms, thoughts, or faiths. I just long for people. I throw everything else away. I simply want people.

It makes me miserable when close brothers are separated by anything. Why can’t they be their own naked selves? Why can’t longing people embrace each other?

I love myself more than my isms, thoughts, or faiths. And because I love myself so, I long for people. I am not asserting that my way is Love-ism or Compassionate-Thinking-ism! Somehow I just can’t keep myself in a little box of ism, thought or faith.

I must admit I am timid. Because I timid, I can’t endure my loneliness. I want to enjoy everything with people.

I go to the ocean of the great mind.

I go to the mind of the great power.

Once I hated people because they lived a lie; once I saw them as devils. Once I lamented because there was no one who cared about me. But now I long for them, even when they are devils and liars, even when they are evil. I don’t care, I can’t help it-I adore them! They breathe the same life that I do, even though they hate me, cheat me, make me suffer.

I am so filled with a thirst to adore people that there is no room in me for judging whether a person is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, right or wrong. This is not the result of something that I reasoned out, such as that I live by being loved or by loving. Regardless of any ism, thought, or faith, I cannot be separated from people because of that.

My spirit shines with the mind-of-embracing-people. Without reason or discussion, I just want to hug everyone! My missionary work is nothing but a confession of this mind.

-  Rev. Haya Akegarasu

Translated by Gyoko Saito and Joan Sweany

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We’re like grass

Dharma Glimpse – Noah Ma yo Rasheda

I’m at the airport waiting to board my flight to San Francisco and then on to Hong Kong. This week was pretty hectic as I tried to get everything done at the office and at home in order to be ready for my trip. I will be gone for 18 days! One of the final things I did last night before leaving was mow the grass. We have a riding mower and this was the first time I’ve used it this season. I had to clear out a lot of things in my shed before I could get to the mower. I didn’t realize we had collected so many new things since last summer. I was pleasantly surprised to get it started on the first try, that’s always a good sign! Once I had the mower out and ready, I sat down and started to drive around the yard to a certain corner where the grass was already starting to get long, I noticed that about half of the yard has not realized that it’s spring time and the grass is still really short and hasn’t started to grow yet, the other half of the lawn is already growing and ready to be cut. It was nice to only have to mow half of the yard, since I was short on time and racing against the sunset to get done before my trip.

While I was mowing, I thought about how interesting it was that half of the yard was on a different schedule for receiving/accepting the fact that winter was over and spring has started. Then it occurred to me that this is also true of us receiving the teachings of the Dharma. I looked at the half of the yard that was still in “winter” mode and I thought of myself only a few years back, still not ready to start a new season, it would only be a short while before I would be entering a whole new phase in my life. I guess society is a lot like the grass in my yard, on it’s own timetable doing it’s own thing. Some of us are in the “spring” stage of life while others are in the “winter” stage still. But everyone exactly where they should be…exactly where they are in the present moment. I realize how easy it is for me to not judge my own lawn, it’s just grass. I don’t judge half of the yard thinking it’s “too early” to be entering spring and I don’t judge the other half thinking it’s wrong because it’s “too late”, and running behind schedule, both sides of the yard are just where they are. I hope to see people in that same way, everyone is right where they are in life, in the present moment. I hope to maintain that sense of non-judgement as I navigate through the phases and stages of life, while observing that we are all at different stages, and yet we are all exactly where we should be…in the present.

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Hunting the Great Awakened Elephant

Dharma Glimpse – April 6, 2014 by  Wendy Shinyo Haylett

Dedication to a spiritual path is a treacherous activity and dedication to a path as a Dharma teacher is ever more treacherous. The innate hazards of attaching to our egos and our self-power as our refuge is ever-present and proportionate to our desire to attain the “end” we have set our sights on … whatever that “end” may be: Dedicated practitioner, teacher, Enlightenment, rebirth in the Pure Land … or whatever.

In the past two months I’ve been involved in two activities for the Bright Dawn Center, one was researching and writing an article about Rev. Gyomay Kubose, Rev. Koyo Kubose, and the Bright Dawn Center of Oneness Buddhism, which recently published in the Amida Order journal, Running Tide. The other was facilitating a sutra study module for the Lay Ministry 6 Class of 2014, focusing on the Tan Butsu Ge and The Heart Sutra translations and commentaries by Rev. Gyomay Kubose.

I have been immersed in the spiritual, philosophical, and teaching history of our Bright Dawn lineage … rereading teachings, exploring lineage teachers, listening to Dharma talks, and, well… something wonderful has happened. I know Rev. Koyo Kubose’s saying is “the Dharma is my rock” but what I have recently experienced is more of the feeling of floating. Immersed in our lineage teachings, I found myself suddenly more buoyant in life, in all aspects of my life. Not like a rock anchoring me, but a natural ability to float. Not a drowning in the details of life, but a floating above.

I felt like I had become one with me, for the first time in many years. Like I was naturally me. I began enjoying every part of my life. I was floating through work, through stress, through chores … even through the endless snow shoveling and cold of the winter of our discontent.  I wasn’t worried about what I should be doing or how I should be acting. I was just living my life, being with my friends, family, co-workers, and clients, but feeling more authentically myself, connected to a natural flow in everything I did, and at ease.

Everything seemed so natural, so free. It reminded me of Dharma song that first captivated me some 25 years ago when I was studying and practicing in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It is called Free and Easy: A Spontaneous Vajra Song by Venerable Lama Gendun Rinpoche.

Free and Easy: A Spontaneous Vajra Song

By Venerable Lama Gendun Rinpoche

Happiness cannot be found through great effort and willpower, but is already present, in open relaxation and letting go.

Don’t strain yourself, there is nothing to do or undo. Whatever momentarily arises in the body-mind has no real importance at all, has little reality whatsoever. Why identify with, and become attached to it, passing judgment upon it and ourselves?

Far better to simply let the entire game happen on its own, springing up and falling back like waves without changing or manipulating anything and notice how everything vanishes and reappears, magically, again and again, time without end.

Only our searching for happiness prevents us from seeing it. It’s like a vivid rainbow which you pursue without ever catching, or a dog chasing its own tail.

Although peace and happiness do not exist as an actual thing or place, it is always available and accompanies you every instant.

Don’t believe in the reality of good and bad experiences; they are like today’s ephemeral weather, like rainbows in the sky.

Wanting to grasp the ungraspable, you exhaust yourself in vain. As soon as you open and relax this tight fist of grasping, infinite space is there—open, inviting and comfortable.

Make use of this spaciousness, this freedom and natural ease. Don’t search any further. Don’t go into the tangled jungle looking for the great awakened elephant, who is already resting quietly at home in front of your own hearth.

Nothing to do or undo, nothing to force, nothing to want, and nothing missing—

Emaho! Marvelous! Everything happens by itself.

So there it was, a profound and beautiful Dharma song that I didn’t really hear. And it was only in my rediscovery of the riches and power of our Bright Dawn lineage teachers and teachings that I felt this freedom and natural ease. One of the books I have been rereading is the essay collection by Dr. Alfred Bloom Sensei, Living in Amida’s Universal Vow.

Reading that I kept coming back to the first essay by the great reformer in our Bright Dawn Center lineage, Kiyazawa Manshi, “The Great Path of Absolute Other Power and My Faith.” In this essay he talks about his quest to find “the meaning of life at all costs.” It is this quest that brought him to his belief in the Tathagata.

He describes something I believe many of us can relate to, because we have struggled with the same thing. I know I certainly can. He talks about the journey he took to his faith and his belief that self-power is absolutely useless. He said it had been a trying process and he could only reach that conclusion of the uselessness of self-power when he exhausted the entire resources of his knowledge and devices.

He would reach conclusion after conclusion of what the meaning was, then each one would be invariably undermined. As he wrote: “One can never escape this calamity so long as one is hopeful of establishing religious faith by way of logic or learning.”

My recent Bright Dawn immersion experience has brought me, too, to that place Manshi Sensei hinted at; the place where all your previous conclusions about the meaning of life are undermined. They are undermined because they were formed based on logic or learning alone.

I can’t tell you how many times during my life as a spiritual seeker, I have reached that place where I look back and laugh—

out of frustration—laugh because I see I have been traveling for miles and miles, months and months, and sometimes years and years, heading in the wrong direction.

Now what? Now what do I have to learn to get myself oriented and walking in the right direction toward Enlightenment or whatever it is I’m seeking?

Each time I reach that place, I come closer and closer to the discovery that it’s not what I have to learn or acquire, but what I must unlearn and give up.

But to be student, one must learn, right? And there is the rub. That is the treacherous territory of being a student of Buddhism or any true spirituality or religion, and the heightened danger of being a teacher on the same path.

It was Shinran who realized in his own life that the path is not so much about Enlightenment or being reborn in the Pure Land, but about the awakening of faith and a naturalness, or “Amida’s Sincerity.” This awakening of faith is described by Kaneko Daiei, a student of Manshi Sensei, in his essay, “The Meaning of Salvation in the Doctrine of Pure Land Buddhism” also in the book Living in Amida’s Universal Vow.

He describes it as “breaking through at the root of delusion.” When that happens, he writes, we are broken, our self-complacency and our faith in self power, logic, and concepts is shaken.  He says “we are emptied through and through” yet “at the same moment we find ourselves taken in by Amida’s Sincerity” and “for the first time attain true restfulness, because our deepest root of our existential anxiety or suffering, namely ignorance, is cut through forever.”

Of course this doesn’t mean that we won’t experience suffering as long as we remain in the world, but he says “they no longer disturb the fundamental restfulness and serenity.”

All this circles back to what Rev. Gyomay Kubose teaches in so many of his essays in Everyday Suchness and Everyday Suchness. Reread for yourself the essays “Naturalness”, “Living Life”, “Life without Regret”, “Buddhism is Everyday Life”, “Simplicity”. “The Natural Way”, “Gateless Gate”, and “Transcending Means and Ends”, to name a few.

Yes, I have been a student of these teachings … constantly whispering in my ear … while I was still trying to be student, trying to be a teacher, hunting that illusive “self” or lack of self I thought I needed to find, and trying to go wherever I thought I needed to go to find it.

I was listening, but I wasn’t hearing. I wasn’t actually living my life. I was doing what I thought I should to reach the goal of … of … what? Hunting the great awakened elephant!

Running away from myself, looking beyond my own life to find it. I hadn’t emptied myself through and through. No, instead, I had been loading myself up with elephant-hunting gear and elephant-hunting instructions and books. I was collecting that gear from every teacher and it was weighing me down until I was lost and spinning, not knowing what direction I was heading.

Had I listened deeply—not mouthing the words to be a model student or give the right teachings—but listened in me, for me, I would have heard. I would have heard that Enlightenment is everyday … that acceptance is transcendence … that ends = means. And that only in emptying myself, releasing me from the tight grasp of me, that I can truly live as me.

Had I truly listened, I would have heard Rev. Gyomay Kubose saying to me “Only when one lives his life does he know its meaning.” I would have heard him say, “Whatever the true inner heart says is the right way. Listen to its voice.” I would heard him say the true way “is simply the natural way.” I would have heard him say that “the true self is selflessness” … the teaching of “forget yourself.”

And I would have heard the voice of Rev. Akegarasu, as Shuichi Maida wrote in Heard By Me. He wrote, “Rev. Akegarasu is always whispering in my ear, ‘There is nothing to worry about. You had better do whatever you want to do.’ This is the Buddha-Dharma I heard from him.”

_/|\_ A deep Gassho to our precious teachers.