Orange County Buddhist Church
Orange County Buddhist Church
A WAY OF SEEING (New Year 2006)
Akemashite omedetō [Thank you to Kei Shimizu for showing me where to find Word’s diacritical marks] gozaimasu. Sakunen-chū wa iro-iro to osewa ni narimashita. Kotoshi mo mata yoroshiku onegai-itashimasu.
Happy New Year, everyone. Thank you very much for all that you did for me and my family during the year past. Please continue to favor us this year as well.
It amazes me
Each new year, how old I’ve grown,
Yet how young I feel.
That haiku-attempt is by me; here’s another haiku to describe me, by Bashō:
Year after year
On the monkey’s face
A monkey’s face.
Each year is getting shorter and shorter, and I know that that cannot be the case. Before, when I read the obituaries and saw that someone had died in their mid-80s or so, I used to think, “Hmm, that’s a pretty good age. I hope I can live in good health that long.” But, now, as I come up to 70, I’m thinking, “Dang, if I go at, say, 85, that means only 15 more years! No wonder the years seem to be getting shorter.” Of course, we do not have to be a Buddhist to know that we might die before the day is through or we might last to a hundred, or even more. After all, my mother lived to 106. On the other hand, my father died around 50. What a subject to start the year with!
I am reading a new (to me) book, Living With the Devil – A Meditation on Good and Evil, by Stephen Batchelor, a Buddhist scholar of Madhyamika, a school of Buddha Dharma founded by Nagarjuna, first patriarch of Jodo Shinshu. He uses a word of which I am becoming fonder the more I think about it, to describe our human condition. That word is contingent. Its meaning is almost identical with “dependent,” but its nuance is more existential, I believe. Maybe it’s just that it’s an unfamiliar word to see to describe my existence. The American Heritage Dictionary defines contingency, the noun form, as “an event that may occur but that is not likely or intended; a possibility.” From before we are conceived [because that is contingent upon generations of ancestors and all their contingencies], till the moment we die, we are contingent upon so many things, seen and unseen, that consciously and unconsciously we do whatever is necessary to make it seem unique and independent and, perhaps, thereby live forever. This attempt to avoid the reality of our contingency is to live with the devil.
Perhaps we can read the book together in a BEC class sometime. In any case, I hope you will read it. It’s available in paperback as well as in hardback.
Think about whether you are a contingent being.
Gasshō,
Donkon Jaan
Rev. John Doami
