Wake Up and Laugh!

Another re-posting from the now deleted ‘Marcus’ Journal’ I’m afraid – but one that I absolutely must place here for being so very close to my heart. On the 10th of May, 2008, my spiritual journey reached something of a culmination and new starting point as I undertook, along with three Dharma brothers, a formal and very beautiful ceremony to take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and formally vowed to uphold the Five Precepts.

The ceremony was undertaken at the Hanmaum Seon Center in Anyang with my preceptor, who chose my Dharma name, being Seon Master Daehaeng Kun Sunim. The ceremony was led by Chong Go Sunim, and the other preceptees were Carl, Joe, and Joseph. Suki, Park and Amy from the Saturday group, and both ordained and laypeople from the temple, were also in attendance. Part of the ceremony involved me reading out a speech that I’d written for the occasion. This is the text of that speech:

The Dharma is simple. I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha, and today, gladly and in public, in this wonderful temple, with my good Dharma friends, and under the guidance of good Dharma teachers, I undertake to follow the five lay precepts – the basic moral and training requirements – and thus formally, for the first time, become a Buddhist.

It’s simple. I vow to abstain from killing, from stealing, from sexual misconduct, from telling lies, and from taking intoxicants. I do this for myself and for my friends, for my family and for my community; I do this because this practice IS the Dharma. It is not just the foundation, it is also the goal, not just the starting point, the five precepts are the Dharma itself. I follow the five precepts for the sake of all beings.

Someone might ask me why I want these restrictions, why I feel the need for these rules. But the precepts aren’t a prison, they are the key. Through the precepts we find freedom. Through my aspiration and vow to follow these trainings I allow my own true nature to act upon the world. These precepts are my deepest intentions, which here, today, I give voice to.

Of course I’m going to fail. Killing is inevitable in every mouthful of food I eat, no matter how strict a vegetarian I am. Stealing happens every time I posses something while others do not. Sexual misconduct lies in wait in almost every advertisement I see, every TV channel I watch. I tell lies when I say “I’m fine” or “good morning”. And what of intoxicants, do I count sugar? Do I stop drinking coffee?

Zen Master Daehaeng has reformulated the precepts, where traditionally they start with ‘do not’, she has given them new voice: ‘Love all beings equally and compassionately’, ‘Give alms and create virtue’, ‘Cultivate a pure and upright body and mind’, ‘Speak only the truth and uphold trust’, ‘Always maintain bright and upright wisdom’.

This is simple. This is the Dharma. And although I will stumble, and greed and anger and delusion will set me off course, in vowing to follow these precepts I am re-orientated. My efforts alone are not enough, sheer determination alone is not enough to follow these precepts. Yet by vowing to do so I allow the precepts to guide me and I allow the deepest and most fundamental part of me to respond.

This is my Buddha-nature, my foundation, my inherent nature, the part of me that is already the precepts, that doesn’t need the rules or the ceremony, that doesn’t need the chanting or the incense, but which responds to my vow and which wishes, through me, to fulfill it.

Thus the Five Precepts are, just as they were first set down by Sakyamuni Buddha and recorded in the Pali texts, “a vehicle of happiness, a vehicle of good fortune, a vehicle for liberation. Let our virtue therefore be purified and shine forth.”

“The name of Nirvana is One-mind. One-mind is the Womb of Tathagata”
– The Lankavatara Sutra

Back on my old, now deleted, blog, ‘Marcus’ Journal’, I made a number of posts wrestling with the term Hanmaum, or One-Mind. Recently, I put together some of those thoughts for the Tricycle Community Hanmaum page, and here I’ve re-written and added to that again. I don’t pretend to have come to the end of my journey with this term, but this post reflects my learning and practice so far.

One of the highlights of that practice is found most Sunday mornings when I’m lucky enough to be able to visit the Seon Centre. And though it’s a bit too fast for me most of the time, there’s one line in the chants that is repeated and with which I have become familiar. I’m still not sure I can pronounce it right, but it goes “han-ma-u-mae-kwui-ha-li-da”, which means “I take refuge in One Mind”.

When I first came across this term, I found it slightly odd. Does it mean I take refuge in a mind? That there’s only one mind? What does that mean? To be honest, it made me somewhat uncomfortable and I prefered the untranslated term, Hanmaum. Attending the ‘Hanmaum’ Seon Centre, felt different somehow to attending the ‘One Mind’ Seon Centre.

 I looked it up and found that it was Master Won Hyo who first popularised the concept of ‘One Mind’ in Korean Buddhism after an enlightenment experience on his way to China. Waking up in a cave one night he drank from a bowl beside him; in the morning he discovered it was a skull, filled with maggot-ridden sludge.

That was the seventh century, and the term is still used today. Paul Lynch, Guiding Teacher for the Five Mountain Sangha, recently released an unpublished poem by Seon Master Seung Sahn – called ‘One Mind’. The opening of the poem, “One mind perceives/ infinite time./ One is all./ Everything is one” suggests something that is active and that connects everything.

But does this mean that there is only mind? Master Seung Sahn, commenting on the Won Hyo story in ‘Compass of Zen’ writes “Everything is created by mind alone. You made this whole universe. You made dog, and cat, and tree, and God, and mountain. You made the sun, the moon, and the stars.”

The refrain from the Sunday morning chant that prompted these thoughts is from Kun Daehaeng’s modern version of the Thousand Hands Sutra, The Thousand Hands of Compassion, and so I look at her definition. She calls One Mind “the fundamental mind that is intangible, invisible, beyond time and space, and has no beginning or end”.

A synonym, she makes clear, for Buddha-nature. “Every single life and thing in the universe has Buddha-nature… Buddha-nature is only one, so it is Hanmaum; it is inconceivably large, so it is Hanmaum; it is not an individual thing, but the interconnected whole, in which all things are working together, so it is Hanmaum.”

Strange how the idea of ‘mind’ seemed somehow impenetrable to me whereas belief in Buddha-nature comes perfectly naturally.  I discussed this with some Dharma friends at the Seonwon and noticed again, not for the first time, how body language reveals what translation doesn’t.

When I say ‘mind’ I think of the brain. If I were to point to it, I’d point to my head, and when I talk about Buddha-nature, I point to my heart. In contrast, my Dharma friends point to the heart for both Buddha-nature and for mind. They are synonymous, and for me that’s the best way to approach what could be an otherwise difficult concept.

But “Of course,” my on-line Dharma friend Barry Briggs from the Ox-Herding site wrote, “if we make “mind” (one mind, many minds, no mind), then we fall into the ditch!” and I could see his point! Seung Sahn Sunim said the important thing is to attain mind. Daehaeng Sunim, in a teaching I find very accessible, and one that meshes with my more devotional nature, talks about entrusting.

Entrusting. I love that. But it’s funny how words had snagged me. I see now how Juingong, True Self, and Hanmaum, One Mind, are all exactly the same as Buddha-nature, the term I find easiest. But again, the term is not the point. Daehaeng Sunim and all the Masters tell us words are not the point. The goal is to attain it, the practice, and what a lovely practice it is, is to let go.

Link:
Chan Poetry: One Mind

Trying to wrap my head around Buddhism (what it is, exactly) is a very slow and ongoing process. What I find helpful is finding the similarities between all the different types of Buddhisms and not worrying too much about the differences.

I also find the simplest explanations the most helpful. In the Dhammapada, the Buddha sums up the teachings in three simple lines,

To avoid all evil, to cultivate good, and to purify one’s mind – this is the teaching of the Buddhas.

(Dhammapada 183.)

They are definitely challenges for many of us to follow, myself included, but seeing it put so simply gives me hope that I can do it!

The first time I visited the Hanmaum website, I was struck with a similar lesson, bare and simple,

The goal of Buddhism is to see things as they truly are.

I’m not sure that it has the same effect on others that it had on me, but it literally made me stop for a moment. It struck me in several different ways at once…  It made me realize that I don’t see things as they truly are, it also made me realize, “Here is someone who does see things as they are. It’s possible for all of us to see the same.”

The journey of opening my eyes has been mixed with pleasure, pain, and learning not to get hung up on either. It took a lot to look at the “joys” in my life and to realize the underlying suffering attached to them. The more I look, the more I see, the more I let go, the more I’m able to gradually see a third layer, one of pure, independent happiness, seeing things the way they truly are.

Eternal, unchanging, pure gold.
The bright essence of our true nature.
– Seon Master Daehaeng Sunim

I don’t want all my posts here to be no more than re-writes of material I published on the now deleted ‘Marcus’ Journal’, but I used that website to do a lot of thinking about the practice and as a record of my journey, and there were one or two posts that I think bear being repeated. This is one of them. A little research and some persoanl reflection on what exactly is meant by ‘Juingong’.

In terms of its Chinese characters, juin is the person who carries out an action, whilst gong means sky, or empty. And an on-line dictionary I consulted suggests that the Korean term juin-gong originated in the theatre or in literature and means the hero or heroine, the lead role. Which, by extension, also means the central figure in any situation.

Korean Buddhists have traditionally translated this term as True Self, as in this poem said to have been expressed spontaneously by the great Seon Master Gyeongbong Jeongseok as he danced alone under a full moon upon the falling away of his doubts and the revelation of his true nature:

Having searched for myself in all myriad things
True Self (Juingong) appeared right before my eyes
Ha! Ha! Meeting it now, there is no doubt
Brilliant hues of udumbara flowers spill over the whole world.

Master Gyeongbong Jeongseok compared his finding of True Self to waking from a dream and, in terms both personal and touching, described it as being “as familiar as my own name”. Seon Master Daehaeng, when she first awoke to Juingong, called it appa, the Korean for ‘daddy’. Years later, according to Chong Go Sunim’s excellent biography, she’d laugh about this, saying:

“If I hadn’t been so young and uneducated, I might have called it Buddha-nature or true self, but at that time all I knew was that it was completely full of love and warmth, so I just called it ‘Daddy’.” Still today, Master Daehaeng teaches that you can call Juingong Dad or Mum, Amida Buddha or God, my love or pure water. It is, she teaches, ‘the true essence of me’ and the practice is to entrust everything to it.

My great friend and Dharma brother Carl once wrote an intimate and helpful essay on his practice of entrusting to Juingong. He says he first saw it in action in a friend before he tried it himself, and the effects were remarkable. It was “transforming her life,” he says “making her really happy, focused, and frankly, fascinated – I became more intrigued.”

Putting everything into Juingong is like slipping a post-it note into the mind, Carl said. He can just leave it there, knowing it’s being taken care of, and that he doesn’t need to do things alone. It works, he concludes, because “we are all connected – all people and all things – in this continuum of life and existence”.

This aspect of True Self, that it doesn’t exist separately, is why it is described as empty. Emptiness not as a void, but as continuous manifestation. Daehaeng Sunim describes it as “the fundamental place of ceaseless changing shapes” and says “JuinGong is never born, never dies, it is the eternal self, it cannot be seen with the eyes, nor can it be grasped with any thought”.

Which is a wonderful reminder to me to stop thinking and just rest, something I don’t do enough of. And yet, when I do, when I entrust everything to Buddha-nature and find myself held within its embrace, then, like Master Gyeongbong Jeongseok dancing under the moon, I discover that normal language can hardly express it at all.

A few months ago, a friend visited me from Daegu. In our discussions, the topic of letting go came up. She told me she’d been thinking a lot about “letting go” lately and making an effort to practice it.

I grabbed No River to Cross from my row of books and said, “Here… you can take this”

It was the easiest time I’ve ever had letting go of a book!

Daehaeng Kun Sunim’s teaching was summed up to me in two words, “Letting go.”

When Joe first encouraged me to join the group discussions, it took a bit to convince me. The thought of sitting inside a library on a Saturday afternoon, when I could be out in the mountains or traveling around Korea somewhere, didn’t appeal to me.

In the end, Joe played the “there’s a cute girl there I think you’ll like” card and I agreed to check it out. Incidentally, “the cute girl” didn’t show up that week, or the next, but I didn’t really care. The content of the group was enough. Besides, even better than meeting a cute girl, I got to meet Marcus, Chong Go Sunim, and Carl!

At first, I was a little naïve about the teaching. “Let go… Okay, I can do that! There are many things in my life I’ve let of.” But wait, why am I still thinking about them? Why do I still want to replace that hat I lost on the bus? Why do I still miss those photos I accidentally deleted three years ago? Why am I still upset by what people said about me in high school? I realized letting go wasn’t just giving something away, or distracting myself with something new. And it wasn’t that easy either!

Sometimes, letting go can be like pealing the price tag off of something and as you go to toss it, you notice it’s stuck to your thumb. You flick at it with your index but instead of flying toward the trash like you anticipated, now it’s stuck to your finger nail. You keep at it, as it travels from finger to finger, right hand to left, until finally, success! It’s gone.

When I was young, I remember playing in the woods behind the house with my neighbors. We used to enjoy searching for little bubbles of sap on the trunks of trees and popping them. It would only take a few before my hands were a sticky mess, picking up every tiny bit of dirt I touched in the forest. Our attachments are like this. We cover our ourselves in the sap of our desires and get covered in dirt. It sometimes took a couple of days worth of scrubbing to get my hands clean. Learning to let go is taking much longer. Eventually, I learned to keep my hands clean. Maybe I can learn to do the same with my mind!

I am so happy to be here on this brand new blog. For years I kept another (‘Marcus’ Journal’), and old readers of that will know me very well. But this new group blog, headed by the wonderful Chong Go Sunim, will have a much wider audience – and for all those new readers I’ll start with a brief outline of how I come to be here at all.

My journey into Buddhism goes back to my arrival in Thailand over ten years ago, but the greatest impact was when, a few years ago, I was lucky enough to be back in Korea. One day I stumbled across a beautiful little book called “My Heart is a Golden Buddha”. I thought the title alone was amazing, and I carried that book around with me for weeks.

Inside were many stories from Korea, stories of farmers and kings, animals and sages, wives and wisdom, and fabulous illustrations. A little later I saw that there was an American monk running a Dharma group on Saturday afternoons studying another book by the same writer.

That monk turned out to be, of course, Venerable Chong Go Sunim, and the writer of the book was Seon Master Daehaeng KunSunim. And my time in that little group, which we all came to know as Saturday Sangha, became one of the most significant periods of my life.

Over the weeks and months we met together Chong Go Sunim pointed to a teaching at once simple and profound. “Just trust in your foundation” he said, “Juingong, your Buddha-nature, is the only thing that can truly solve everything, so entrust everything that confronts you to your foundation and let go to that.”

The name is not the most important thing, the faith and the entrusting is, and it’s something that has deeply influenced my own spiritual practice. For me it points a way through all the various approaches, and places practice where it really belongs – in one’s own heart.

And that heart is also, we learn, the source of connection; something that has been very important to me personally. “Just keep letting go to your foundation” Kun Daehaeng Sunim says. “Then you can communicate with each other. If you dial a telephone on your side, the phone will ring on the other side. When you do this, your sincerity can be transmitted. This is truly loving [your family] and is the expression of the Buddha-Dharma.”

Well, eventually, our little Saturday group decided to formalise our commitment to the teachings and in May 2008, just days away from Buddha’s Birthday that year, four of us – myself, Joe, Joseph, and Carl – took formal refuge at the Hanmaum Seonwon in Anyang. Chong Go Sunim led the ceremony and Seon Master Daehaeng Sunim gave us our Dharma names.  It was a deeply beautiful and meaningful day.

I’ve returned to Thailand since then but have been delighted to find that there is a Hanmaum Seon Centre here too, and I’ve been astounded by the kindness and generosity of the Sunims and lay followers here who have done so much in facilitating, leading, and building the English-language Seon club.

And with ever more English-speaking people like myself being drawn to the teachings of Kun Daehaeng Sunim and to her message of entrusting to one’s own True Self, I’m sure this blog will go some considerable way in terms of connecting people, discussing the teachings, and helping everyone discover together that our hearts really are all a Golden Buddha.