Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Pilgrimage, Death, and the Compassion of Jizo - Jomon Martin, Zen Teacher

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Pilgrimage, Death, and the Compassion of Jizo - Jomon Martin, Zen Teacher · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  Jomon: Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
• 0:23
  Jomon: Okay. So if you've been here, at all in the last month, in the month of February, you will have experienced how we are, along with Great Vows and Monastery, doing something of a focus on parinirvana or the Buddha's transition into physical death, and also exploring death and our own death and what that means, how death informs and clarifies our life, how it has life embedded in it. And so at the monastery last week, Pari Nirvana Sachin was happening, which many people here attended that, and we do many practices to turn towards death. So here we've been focusing on the book The Five Invitations by Frank Ostasewski, who is a hospice chaplain and longtime Zen practitioner and wrote a book about many of the aspects he learned in his great fortune to be able to be with people who were dying. So last week I was in Corvallis, sort of right after this, and I went to Corvallis on a Wednesday and we did a brief session focused on Jizo Bodhisattva, which is a very different topic, although Jiso Bodhisattva is not unrelated to death, so I thought I would talk about this today.
• 2:07
  Here's a picture of Jiso Bodhisattva and this is the book that my teacher, Chosen Bayes, wrote about who this is and what this is about. So in this talk I'd like to do a bunch of things, of course, continue and complete our theme on parinirvana and death, continue our exploration of the five invitations and those five again are: don't wait. I won't do all five today but just to remind you: don't wait, welcome everything, push away nothing, bring your whole self to the experience, find a place of rest in the middle of things, and cultivate don't know mind. Those are the invitations that death can offer us. So the other things I'd like to do in this talk tonight is to weave in the history and context of Jiso Bodhisattva who has been through the millennia an intercessor for humans in the afterlife and who has also been a spiritual pilgrim and also has been and is a protector of travelers and children.
• 3:13
  So I'd like to introduce you, if you don't know anything about this, to this important aspect of practice in this particular lineage because of my teacher and some of our teachers chosen Bayes, her deep connection to and practice with Jizo that did result in this wonderful text. Are we up to that? Sounds like a lot! All right, so what is a bodhisattva? What is a bodhisattva?
• 3:47
  A person is the volume up enough? A little quiet tonight? I don't know, maybe I'll move this up. A person who has attained or is striving towards bodhi or awakening or enlightenment or buddhahood often the term specifically refers to a person who forgoes or delays their own personal nirvana or enlightenment in order to compassionately help other individuals reach Buddhahood. So someone who could just merge forever with the great mystery chooses instead to stay and help other beings achieve or realize realize awakening.
• 4:33
  So who are bodhisattvas? Well the most well known one, the most popular one tends to be Avalokitesvara, also known as Kuan Yin, also known as Kanzeyon. This name refers basically to the same being, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Those are just her Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese translations. Again, this is the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion, often depicted as female, though historically not always so, became more female as time went on, is often depicted, as many bodhisattvas are, in quite opulent clothing.
• 5:19
  She's usually depicted with a pitcher or a vessel of water that may be poured out or that she may be holding. Sometimes that's seen as the tears of compassion or the waters of compassion. It is said that she hears the cries of the world and thus pours out the waters of compassion. Another bodhisattva is named Manjushri. Manjushri is the bodhisattva of great wisdom.
• 5:46
  He's often depicted with a sword and his element is air. There's also a bodhisattva named Samantabhadra who rides on an elephant. This is the bodhisattva of great activity. His element is fire. Sometimes these guys will be on either side of the Buddha on the altar.
• 6:05
  We have a kanzai on behind this Buddha. When I visited China, that was one of the ways that you would see a Buddha on the altar, but then if you got to go behind the altar there would often be a Kuan Yin behind the altar, the wisdom and compassion working together. So Jizo, which is the Japanese name for Dizong, that's the Chinese name for Kishitigarbha, that's the Sanskrit name and the Sanskrit name Kishithigarbha means earth womb or earth store. Kishithigarbha is the guardian of all that is born from the earth and its origins begin with the Vedic earth goddess Prithvi or Bhumi, b h u m I, who is often pictured on a lotus or with lotuses and maybe some clay vessels. In the story of the Buddha's enlightenment, the tempter Mara wants to interrupt the Buddha's practice before he achieves awakening And Mara devises various elaborate temptations, desire or aversion and none of those succeed.
• 7:31
  Armies and things, threats do not succeed, so finally he tries skeptical doubt to see if he can get an edge. Maybe the Buddha's got some impostor syndrome or something. So Mara's like, well who do you think you are that you're the enlightened one? Who's your witness? I have all my armies to bear witness to me.
• 7:53
  I'm the enlightened one. Who will witness for you? And so the Buddha took his right hand and touched the earth. And you have seen this gesture probably in statuary and images and it's called the Bhumi Sparsha Mudra, the sacred gesture of touching the earth. And you may recall one of the names of the earth goddess was Bhumi.
• 8:17
  So at that moment of touching the earth, the ground rumbled and shook and the earth goddess emerged and it is said that she emerged and wrung out her long hair creating a massive river that washed away all of Mara's armies and she did bear witness to the Buddha and all his previous bodhisattva lifetimes of generosity, of selflessness, of kindness, of continually helping other beings. So the earth goddess is a long ally of the Buddha, so Kishythi garbha, the earth womb or the earth store bodhisattva in historical India in early Buddhism, was not a super major feature figure in Buddhist iconography and when he was pictured he was pictured with a multitude of other protectors. So it wasn't until Kishitagarbha and Buddhism traveled to China along the Silk Road when some of the ways he was to become a helper to people became clearer. So at first he was really pictured as a traveler. Here are these travelers along the Silk Road and you start to see images of this simple monk or a humble traveler with their traveler's robe and maybe a hat and a spiritual traveler's staff.
• 9:43
  For Jizo it's called a shakujo and on it are six rings that he jingles to warn animals of his approach so there's no accidental misunderstandings. And it's said that he carries a centimani jewel, also known as a wish fulfilling jewel, to light the way in darkness. I should add that the gender is not really distinctly male or female. Kishitagarbha can be female, can be male, can be neither or both. So we can really just use any pronoun to refer to Jizo.
• 10:30
  So in China he was called Dizong and you may recall from one of our talks this month we talked about the fifth invitation from Ostasevskiy's book Cultivate a Don't Know Mind. And in that talk we talked about the koan not knowing is most intimate. Not knowing is most intimate. So that's about letting go of your assumptions, don't know mind, letting go of your assumptions, being willing to see each moment new. So I'll just remind you of this koan because it also evokes this pilgrimage mind and I want to talk at some length about the pilgrim aspect, spiritual pilgrim aspect of Jizo because that may be also something of your story too in some way.
• 11:22
  So the koan is just a story, a conversation between a student and teacher. So the two people in the story are Fayan and Dizong, it turns out is the teacher's name. Pha Yon, a young wanderer, and Dizong, the teacher, notice the name of the teacher. Dizong saw Pha Yon dressed in his traveling clothes and embarking on a journey. Dizong asked, Where are you going?
• 11:53
  Fayon responded, On a pilgrimage. Dizong asked, What is the purpose of your pilgrimage? Fayon answered, I don't know. And Dhisong said, Not knowing is most intimate. This is a testing question, where are you going?
• 12:16
  He wasn't really asking what's your itinerary? Where are you going to get your passport stamped? He's asking what is your mind state? What is your heart taking you? And when Fayon says, I'm going on a pilgrimage, well what's the purpose?
• 12:36
  Do you have some goals? What's, again, what's your, how are you carrying this pilgrimage? And when he answers, I don't know, Dizong really indicates an appreciation of that answer. It's kind of like, Ah yes, not knowing is most intimate. That's the way to do it.
• 12:58
  Because when we travel, as I mentioned, everything is new. Our expectations of how things should be are completely blown away, especially if we're in a country where we don't speak or read the language. It's like being an illiterate child. So there's an arc to a spiritual pilgrimage and one that you may find some resonance with in some way if you happen to find yourself in a Zen activity on a given weeknight. Maybe you're a spiritual pilgrim of some sort.
• 13:35
  These aspects of a spiritual pilgrimage, these points on a path can be identified and labeled in a number of ways. In the Zen tradition we have what's called the ox herding pictures and that's its own study, that's its own talk or series, that's huge. So I went and just gathered a nice list of six things from a PBS series on spiritual pilgrimages. So see if these apply to your own spiritual journey or if you've been on a retreat even, these can apply. This is another going on a retreat is another spiritual pilgrimage.
• 14:10
  So here's another list: the call, the separation, the journey, the contemplation, the encounter, and the completion or the return. So I said those a little quickly but here I'll elucidate them a little bit. So when we hear the call of spiritual pilgrimage we know maybe that something's just not quite right or something's really really not working. It may be that we know, we realize something is missing or something that used to work no longer does or your needs have really outstripped the resources of your usual tools and skills and you're just caught flat footed and you have to do something else, something you haven't done before. That's sometimes the call to really look for some other way and the separation then is actually making the break, doing the thing, setting out and stepping forward in a way that is unfamiliar or that others may not understand.
• 15:22
  Then the journey entails the natural and inevitable obstacles, challenges, hard parts and adventures that's that's part of it. It has to be. Sometimes literally the commonalities of blisters, diarrhea, sunburn, hunger, discomfort that is what people encounter on a literal spiritual journey on the on the famous ones in Europe or in Japan or from Texas to DC. The contemplation, is it a direct or a circuitous route and how do we get there? Different traditions have different ways of getting to a particular point.
• 16:07
  And then the encounter, this is the arrival, the sighting, and this is embedded in Zen as well. We're always being encouraged towards our own direct experience to encounter the mystery in any and every in this moment. Can we see the truth of the teachings in a new way? Can we see what the ancestors saw? When a line and a chant jumps out we realize what they're pointing to.
• 16:37
  We have that same capacity and secondhand experience is not enough. We really need to experience this for ourselves. And finally the contemplation and the return, how do we integrate it? How do we apply it? How does it serve?
• 17:05
  Hopefully not just as a set of badges or another way to strengthen our identity as a very spiritual person, a VSP I guess. The VSPs will be sitting over here and of course there is that diamond or that pearl of wisdom that we can see as a cliche but that so much of what might shape us into something different or something new or something useful or something that serves has come from the journey itself, right? So in that sense we might learn to trust our experience, Even the more difficult ones, especially the more difficult ones. This is another part of the teachings from Frank Ostasevskiy. This is invitation number two: Welcome everything and push away nothing.
• 18:20
  Welcome everything and push away nothing. So I just want to read a little bit from his book, this story from the book The Five Invitations and I love this story also because it's about the Northwest. He says, During a workshop in the rural Northwest, I was speaking on the possibilities that arise when we stop running away from what is difficult. One of the attendees, a burly middle aged man with broad shoulders and an even wider smile, spoke up. That reminds me of telephone poles.
• 18:59
  I did not have a clue what he was talking about. Telephone poles? What do you mean? I asked. He explained that he once had a job installing telephone poles.
• 19:11
  They're hard and heavy, he said, standing up to 40 feet high. There was a critical moment after you placed a pole in the ground, he said, when a pole was unstable and might topple over. He says, If it hits you, it could break your back. His first day on the job, the man turned to his partner and said, If this pole starts to fall, I'm running like hell. But the old timer replied, Nope, nope, you don't want to do that.
• 19:39
  If that pole starts to fall you want to get right up to it. You want to get real close and put your hands on the pole. That's the only safe place to be. When Ostasevskiy goes on to say, When confronted by harsh realities of life or even some small discomfort or inconvenience, our instinctive reaction is to run-in the opposite direction. But we can't escape suffering.
• 20:12
  It'll just take us by surprise and whack us in the back of the head. The wiser response is to move toward what hurts, to put our hands and attention gently and mercifully on what we might otherwise want to avoid. I would point to the maybe obvious, maybe not obvious relationship to what he says there and what our practice is right here on the cushion every moment, that indeed that is what we're practicing. That things arise, even if it's just, oh my gosh, my nose itches, that I'm gonna just encounter that or if not I'm gonna watch all the ways I try to get away from that or try to change my experience and not have the experience I'm having, that it all shows up right here on the cushion and we do get to practice this and learn how to add to our repertoire to include our capacity to turn toward what's difficult. So on a spiritual pilgrimage, like if you really did do, what's the one in Europe called?
• 21:46
  El Camino, yes. And then there's one in Japan. My friend Myobun did one from Eugene, Oregon to DC. And then there's the monks that went from Texas to DC. So on a spiritual pilgrimage like that we can assume that there will be discomfort.
• 22:10
  We might not expect that so much though if we begin a spiritual practice, shouldn't this lead to ease and joy? Isn't there something about that in the chant? Shouldn't this make me feel better? I mean it's great when it does. It often can.
• 22:29
  But this in many ways more of a side effect, the feeling better. And there is perhaps something more important going on than feeling better or feeling comfortable. And that's really what these what a spiritual pilgrimage is endeavoring to encounter. Because of course in a world that is inherently unstable, when the law of impermanence is right up there with the law of gravity, when we keep discovering that we can't be exactly the self we want to be, or we can't get everyone else to see us the way we want to be seen, and that the world seems to always have plenty of stuff I don't want, and plenty of stuff I want but don't have, and there's gonna be lots of times that I'm uncomfortable, And I might have some tricks and tools for that like shopping or drinking or distracting with video games or the internet, but they don't always work or they work great until they don't. And then what are you going to do?
• 23:52
  So we just drop all of it and take what little figure out what little do we need to just embark on this living question, this embodied question? What's more important than all this? So Jizo is a pilgrim too. He is a guardian also of pilgrims, of travelers. So that's how we're going to introduce Jizo in some ways, but he's also an intercessor in the afterlife and so I just want to weave those things together here.
• 24:35
  When Di Zong took on more of a role in China as something of like a defense attorney basically for people who found themselves in the hell and hellish realms of the afterlife. Now this goes into some Buddhist cosmology that you do not have to adopt or believe or anything, literally. Sometimes these stories about Buddhist cosmology really serve us when we look at them as metaphors, we can talk about them that way too. But Jizo is the guardian of all the realms of human existence, or all the realms of existence none of which are permanent. So this is a little different from the heaven and hell maybe that certainly that I was that I grew up with, that those things are permanent, but these realms of existence that we may find ourselves in in an afterlife are not permanent but they may last a really long time.
• 25:37
  So here's another list, I'm sorry to say, Buddhism is full of lists and so here's another one of six realms. There's the Deva heaven and this is like super great. It's everything comfortable. It's all the good things. It smells good there all the time and the food is great.
• 25:57
  I read in one of the accounts of it that there's no children like under seven. Maybe like there's like cruise ships that try to design that particular reality but most of the devas in that heaven do not have any gray hair either. It's sort of this like permanent, almost permanent youthfulness and gorgeousness and they do once they start getting a little gray hair or a wrinkle then they start really freaking out because they know they're going to fall out of it. They're going to like and they have to kind of take their chances to the next realm. It's not permanent.
• 26:36
  The realm under them is the Asura heaven which is the jealous God realm. So we can think about this realm as like, you know, they're sort of the jealous suburbanites or something or, you know, whatever that just are always trying to make war on the Deva heaven and get what they have. We can think about them metaphorically as kind of what we see in the celebrity world. I mean both of these heavens, the celebrity world or the world of the super wealthy that you know there's no nothing they can't purchase really to make themselves comfortable or feel better. And the jealous god realm is kind of like political or those kinds of gossipy negativity.
• 27:31
  But we too can experience those things as well. We can have those moments like that. I'll skip over the human realm and move to the animal realm, which is kind of self explanatory. Animals that may not have quite the same relationship to cause and effect as we do but more act on instinct, although personally I believe I have had dogs that understand cause and effect really well, that they can be exploited and they can, you know, their bodies or their labor or their whatever gets exploited and that is something that humans can experience. You know, when we're in an animal realm it's like, is our life nothing more than waking up, going to work, you know, getting exhausted and coming home and going to bed and waking up and doing it all again?
• 28:25
  That's the animal realm. We're in a kind of an exploitation kind of a situation where the body is being broken down in a situation like that. Below that is a hungry ghost realm and the hungry ghosts are kind of these creatures that are depicted in some of the artwork in Chinese and Buddhist cosmology. They have great big swollen bellies because they're starving, they have tiny little necks and every time they try to eat or drink something it burns and so they can't they're just starving all the time and just wanting, wanting, wanting, wanting. Nothing can satisfy them and you know, we might understand that deeply from perhaps our own experiences with addiction in ourselves or others and then there's the hell realms of just violence or war that we know that that for many people, these realms are all too real, all too real.
• 29:28
  And so it's said that the human realm is this incredibly fortunate place to be because in the Deva heaven, who needs meditation? It's all good. And they're not thinking about that in Asura heaven, that's for sure. The animals and the hungry ghosts and the hell people, they just don't have the bandwidth to think about spiritual practice. They're just trying to get through each day, each moment.
• 29:56
  And so in the human realm, we have just enough pleasant and just enough unpleasant to be able to see the need for our spiritual practice. And it's seen as this rare gift, this rare opportunity that we have to practice as human beings. So we can take these up as various mind states. They can also be seen as the teachings of karma, that the cause and effect of our behavior and the behavior of others can land us in a hell realm, that's for sure. So this is Jizo as an intercessor, someone we can call upon and you know if we have a dear one who's deceased, we can ask Jizo to help them find their way in that afterworld or if they weren't so great, maybe our wishes for them can help tip the balance for them a little bit, help them move out of a difficult realm more quickly.
• 31:00
  There's a lot to say about this, there's a whole slideshow that Chosen does and it's very interesting some of the artwork here we could do a whole you know, we did a whole retreat on this and there is a Jizo Sashin at the monastery in September interested in this material. And there are practices too. Anyway, in Japan, around the time of the arrival of Buddhism and beyond, there were times of very high infant mortality and children who died before reaching adulthood could not take up the responsibility of taking care of their parents. This was also a responsibility of children in Chinese culture as well. So these children would be condemned to an afterlife along in Japanese Buddhist cosmology along the River Sai and their job was to stack rocks to honor their parents to try to help their parents do a little better even though they couldn't be there for them, and then at night a demon would come and scare them and wreck all their stacks and they'd have to do it all again the next day.
• 32:04
  So Jizo would come and wrap his robe around them and protect them. So with this child protector role and being absorbed by Japanese culture, Jizo became cute. It's the darndest thing. Jizo became cute. The Japanese word is kawaii and you could hear it being used kawaii neh?
• 32:33
  Ah kawaii neh, it's cute isn't it? Kawaii. These childlike features, a big head and kind of smaller body and big eyes often. So I mean, you know, here he is holding a baby and here's another one with little So Jizo images are ubiquitous in Japan. They're everywhere.
• 32:56
  They're all over the place. And people will tend to a little neighborhood Jizo altar and dress them, put a hat on them, put a little outfit on them or a bib, and Jizo became also a protector of children who have died which what a comfort to a grieving parent. And that's the kind of pain that really requires some kind of divine intervention. These statues of a childlike monk parents could put a hat or a bib on them or leave a pinwheel to help them honor their lives, to acknowledge their lives, and to ask Jizo for help. And in more recent years, so before, during, and after World War II, when many forms of birth control in Japan were illegal and there were these pregnancies that could not be supported in a country devastated by war, abortion was legal and many women experienced abortion in Japan.
• 34:02
  And in response to this the Mizuko Jizo or water baby Jizo ceremony became available for women and families to honor children who for whatever reason may not have been carried to term or babies or toddlers who have died or young children or even now adult children who may have died for some reason or another. So when Chozan Roshi learned about this ceremony as it came from Japan to The United States, The person who started doing it was from the San Francisco Zen Center, an American teacher named Yvonne Rand. She first offered this ceremony in The United States and so Chozen learned about it during a time that she was actively doing her work as a pediatrician and as a pediatrician who specialized in the field of child abuse. And in that year there were quite a few deaths of children from child abuse and she was involved in their investigations and she knew their stories and she knew their situations and so when she did the ceremony she was able to honor each one of those children and it helped her so much that she vowed to offer that ceremony. And that's been a huge part of her practice and her life ever since for quite a few decades now.
• 35:34
  So we have what we call a Jizo Garden at Great Vow and it has lots and lots of these little statues of Jizo, many of which participants in retreats have made or know, statues we have received from Japan. And during the Jizo ceremony you can make a little hat or a little bib, a garment, and put it on jizo as a way to grieve or honor a child or any beloved who may have died. And so we also try to so that's a jizo ceremony. We also do a kishitigarbha ceremony which is to cultivate the qualities of jizo and here's the last list of this talk. Five things, there are more but these are the five that we typically work with.
• 36:32
  Benevolence or friendliness, great determination, which you of course need on a pilgrimage or to be of service in these ways, fearlessness, optimism, which I think we need a little bit more of these days, and vow. So any one of these we can work with at some depth, but there are ways to work with Jisobodhisattva including making these images and really cultivating the qualities within ourselves that these are all seeds within us that we can take care of and grow our capacity for benevolence, for determination, fearlessness, optimism and vow making. The practice of making a vow is powerful and is the reason why Great Vows and Monastery is named what it is and it's common to Jizo practice across around the world. When we visited, did a pilgrimage to China, we were on Jizo Mountain, Jihua Mountain and you go up a lot a lot a lot of steps and all alongside the steps are these chain railings basically and all along the way there are padlocks just weighing down all these chains and it's people who have made a vow and they brought a padlock and locked it to the Jizo Mountain as a symbol of their vow.
• 38:13
  It's beautiful. So I'd like to end just by inviting you if any of this resonates or touches something or this pilgrim sort of metaphor or the sort of reaching out for help, it's not to externalize anything really, but if we ask for help we can acknowledge that there's more to life than we know, right? It's a way of practicing don't know mind and we don't know what the effect will be if we ask for help. It may open our awareness to some response we would not have otherwise thought of or considered. You know what I mean?
• 39:06
  Or we might be willing to see someone in a slightly different way if we've asked for help, we've said, you know, this is bigger than me. Maybe I don't know what the best thing is to do.
• 39:25
  Jomon: Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendest.org. Your support supports us.