International Day for Nonviolence

I have been very lax in writing this blog but how about this for a new start

This Teisho is provoked by the fact that this coming Sunday October 2 is the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday which is celebrated now as the International day of nonviolence.
So this is an important opportunity to reflect as Zen students on what this means to us personally and what this means in terms of Buddhist teaching in the Precepts.
My own position is influenced partly by Fr. Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk from Prinknash, who went to India and established a Christian Ashram along the lines of Gandhi in order to dialogue with the great Hindu tradition. This was reinforced by listening to and meeting Gandhi’s grandson about 15 years ago.
We are into a real area of interfaith dialogue here. It may surprise you to know that Gandhi first learned about nonviolence from Christian sources. It was reading the New Testament account of Jesus’ nonviolence during his life that sent Gandhi back to his Indian Hindu scriptures to discover it there as well. You might want to ask the question here about finding nonviolence in the Christian scriptures when the evidence of much of history seems to indicate that the Christian church, for the most part, has, since the emperor Constantine been quite ready to go to war. There have been some churches however like the Quakers, Mennonites, and the Brethren who have constantly proclaimed a gospel of nonviolence.
Out of this exploration he developed the Sanskrit word Satyagraha which can be best translated as ‘soul truth’ or ‘True Nature’ or ‘Inner Truth’
“Satyagraha has an end namely Ultimate truth. It is a moral force, firmly rooted in truth and love that puts itself at the service of justice and peace. Satyagraha, which opposes evil with serious and positive, though nonviolent, resistance in order to overcome it with good, must be distinguished from what Gandhi called ‘the nonviolence of the weak’ which simply submits to evil without resistance. It was a fundamental principle of Gandhi that evil must always be resisted, but in ways and by methods of action that are nonviolent.”
Within Satyagraha is discovered Ahisma – a Sanskrit word that means ‘non injury.’ To spell it out more fully it is the efficacious concern to do no harm, physically or psychologically to another person or indeed to any creature or even to any part of the natural world. At first hearing Ahisma may seem to express an attitude that is negative, yet in actual fact it designates something very positive; namely that I have a concern, a love, a spirit of good will toward another person that makes it impossible for me to inflict injury on that person or creature or part of the world. Gandhi originally taught that God is Truth, just as Christians say that God is Love, but later he decided that Truth is God, too. Reality is spiritual. (remember Merton once remarked that either all of our life is spiritual or none of it is.) All people are interconnected and everyone has a share of divine goodness within. (You may recall Thich Nhat Hahn’s teaching that we need to water the seeds of goodness, peace and love that are within us.) So Gandhi teaches that to harm anyone is to harm God and to serve others is to serve God. God was not a person to Gandhi but an “indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything.”
The Zen or Buddhist understanding of all reality takes us back to the Four Great Wisdoms which are said to derive from the experience of Shakyamuni Buddha. First he points out that all Life means suffering and that this follows from the delusion that we are an entirely separate being each with our own attachments. The Buddha‘s experience was that there is no such thing as a totally separated self, unconnected with the rest of reality. Contemporary science, of course, will wholeheartedly agree with this. But all is not lost as it is possible to break the cause of suffering; to overcome our delusion of a subject /object divide. The fourth truth therefore is that through the skilful means of silent wordless and imageless meditation this delusion is overcome. (It is worth noting that this awareness of nonduality is also to be experienced through the Christian tradition of apophatic (meaning without word or images) contemplative prayer.
With this as a background we can turn now to the Buddhist Precepts. These precepts need to be understood clearly as they are not a set of rules or commandments to be obeyed. They are an orientation towards a life that is lived with compassion and reverence for all creation to which we are intimately connected. We indicate in the Gatha of repentance the failure that derives from our greed, hatred or ignorance to do no harm. We certainly miss the greatness of the Precepts if we see them as a set of external do’s and don’ts. They are meant to liberate not to bind. The Precepts have a vitality that functions deeply in one’s life, taking account of the intricacies and subtleties of conditions encountered in the existential circumstances of our personal life.
It is worth noting that in Zen Master Dogen’s time there emerged tow different schools of thought concerning the Precepts in the Kamakura period. One advocated the observance of the Precepts as primary in Buddhism, whereas the other repudiated this, or at best regarded observance of the precepts as secondary to the supremacy of faith. Roughly speaking, the former school of thought was associated with Zen Buddhism. Needless to say Dogen belonged to this tradition and he was eager to restore unremitting observance of the Precepts. As a matter of fact, the hallmark of Kamakura Zen was the advocacy of the primacy of the precepts and for Dogen it was the fundamental point of Zen Buddhism. A prime characteristic of Dogen’s thought lay in his passionate search for the translation of the Bodhisattva vows into concrete and routine daily behaviours and activities. In the Zendo scrupulous instructions with respect to rules and behaviour were not codes that bound just the outward movements but were ritualised expressions and activities of Buddha-nature and emptiness. To put it simply in the words of Daido Loori Roshi the liturgy in the Zendo is a way of making the invisible visible much like a Christian sacrament.
The Precepts then are there to guide us in how to live in harmony with all creation right from the start; we should not think we have to wait until we have got enlightenment or something before we practice them. In this, from an interfaith perspective, it is noteworthy that the Buddhist precepts have a remarkable coincidence with the moral teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in St. Matthew’s gospel. So we practice the precepts. We practice them in the way that we practice sitting Zazen. To practice of course is to “do “something so we “do” the precepts. We are to be aware of the precepts not necessarily in all their detail but in their whole orientation of “doing no harm.” Once we aware of them we become sensitive to the occasions when we break them. Then, when you are aware of the break, you acknowledge it and take responsibility for it then you simply return to the precepts once again. It is just like when you work with your breath in Zazen. When you begin to sit Zazen after just a few breaths you often find that your mind has gone elsewhere. When that happens you notice it, then simply, gently yet firmly return to the breath. That is how you practice the precepts. That is how you practice your life. To practice in such a way is itself enlightenment.
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