dharmatalks

“What then do you believe in, Father?” came the stern voice on the other end of the phone. It seems the elderly Anglican nun found her buttons pushed by my theology, and phoned to request that I stop referring to myself as a Buddhist Successor to the Apostles. “If you don’t have faith in the Church Jesus founded, then you are neither fit nor worthy to count yourself among His bishops,” the gentle voice insisted, “You lack faith in any of the Christian principles and deny the very creeds of our faith.”

I paused thoughtfully, and explained to her that I was making notes, so that I could accurately quote her, and unfortunately, she hung up.

Sister was right about some things. I would never assert that I have faith in any of the “Christian principles” and I certainly reject the credal statements of Nicea. I have neither faith nor much regard for the institutional churched of which she spoke, although I would hardly pretend that any of them were founded by Jesus or his Apostles.

Recently, TIME magazine published an exceptionally well-written article on Mother Teresa, entitled “Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith“, in which some newly published letters written by the saint of Calcutta reveals that she experienced a dark night of the soul, which spanned over five decades. This period during which she struggled with a crisis of faith was marked by some of her greatest contributions to humanity — the founding of the Missionary Sisters and Brothers of Charity, establishment of hospitals and hospices, feeding thousands of sick, dying and poor people throughout the world. It was during this same time that she received the Nobel Peace Prize.

All in the absence of faith.

I am certain that the duplicity, wealth and power that Mother saw in the institutional church, as well as the abuses of authority she witnessed from its hierarchy disgusted her. I know that she was profoundly saddened that the decisions of my beloved spiritual father, Pope John Paul I, to sell off the wealth of the Vatican, and provide for the poor, the sick and the marginalised, was snuffed out, under the reign of his successor. But because she understood the Message of Christ in a way that transcended the superstition and dogma of an institution with which He had no part in creating, she could still accomplish a life of “small things with great love”.

We have to be careful where we place our faith. “Faith in ideas is risky,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh, “Ideas can change, and tomorrow we may not believe the same thing.” In Buddhist dharma, faith is experiential. Our source of energy is faith in daily practice — faith in living from a place of mindful awareness, compassionate service and emptying ourselves in the Great Silence.

My daily practice includes what I am doing at every moment of each day. The goal is to bring a sacred awareness to each breath, and to be mindful of ways in which I can use that moment, that breath in compassionate service to Creation. The Way of Christ and Buddhist Dharma are not two different paths, they are for me a convergence of the Great Truths, and the opportunity for me to live my life more fully.

I believe that most of the Apostles, in whose lineage I was ordained, understood this and dedicated themselves to living this. For them, the journey was experiential, and the process was one of enlightenment — gnosis in the Greek. Sacraments and other traditions would be later innovations, originally intended to serve as visible signs of intangible spiritual principles.

Mother Teresa wrote to her confessors that there were times when she no longer felt that she could actively pray in the tradition of her church. She couldn’t experience Christ anywhere but in the poor, the sick and hungry. There were no external experiences of a “separate god” for her, because I believe the depth of her understanding could no longer allow for that mythos to work.

Not long ago, I received an email from someone who has captured a part of my heart with their vulnerable honesty, in which they said that they wish they could experience a tangible embrace from the God they grew up believing in. This warm, intelligent and sincere person has suffered much in this life, and despite understanding the more cosmic reality of what we call God, longs for arms to hold them, protect them, and make it safe for them to heal.

In that moment, the only thing I wanted was to be able to be there, and take that hurting individual into my arms, where I knew they would know the embrace of God was really available. I knew that, because I know that God is Love, and that one who lives from Love, embodies the fullness of that divinity, and that divinity embodies the fullness of them.

It saddens my heart to know that there are still people who have been led to believe that although there is a God, they are not “Him”. I cannot bear to imagine what it would be like for me to have had to live my life with such a hopeless and limiting belief.

I cannot imagine how I would have survived being raped and beaten by four illegal immigrants in South Florida, in 1983, were it not for the realisation that I am One with the Source of All Life, so that when they pulled that trigger at my head, I lost consciousness in a state of forgiveness for them, and belief that life would go on.

I cannot imagine how I would have dealt with being told, some months later, that those men infected me with what would come to be known as the AIDS virus, and that I would likely not live more than 18 months after that first hospitalisation with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Nor can I imagine how I would have gone on, as each of the 108 friends and loved ones, including five of my partners, would succumb to AIDS over the next twenty-two years, if it were not for the awareness that there is a Power for Good in the Universe, which we call God, and I am One with that Power.

Again, Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “Once we have tasted the reality, no one can remove it from us.”

And so for me, what I “believe in” is Love. I believe that Divine Love became Incarnate to reveal that Divine Love becomes incarnate in each of us. In the words of my paramaguru, Sri Neem Karoli Baba, “All action is prayer. All trees are desire-fulfilling. All water is the Ganga, all land is Kashi.” He taught that sacred traditions, rituals and prayers are good means to an end, but that the thing itself was not the ritual but the spirit. Do the ritual to tune in, but don’t get caught up in it.

Maybe Sister was right. Perhaps I have no business referring to myself as a Successor to the Apostles. I am a disciple of Christ and of Buddha. I am a servant of the Teacher — Guru das in Sanskrit. I embrace no theology other than love… no creed other than love… no path other than love.

I celebrate the Great Eucharist, because I affirm the words of the sacred tradition, which prays, “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the Divinity of Christ, who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.” There is the reason for thanksgiving (Eucharistia)… that God is Love, and that the Eternal Essence we call God became human, so that humanity could become God.

And so I honour the sacred in each person, and in all of Creation. It is not a path I feel compelled to force on anyone, because I trust in the unfolding awareness that is in process in every soul… each person comes to that realisation at exactly the right time.

My job is to be the loving arms that hold, comfort and protect the person longing for God. My job is to be the hands of the God who feeds the hungry. My job is to be the ear of the God who hears the cries of the marginalised and disparaged. My job is to be the heart that welcomes everyone to the Banquet of Love.

The emails and messages continue to come in from folks who find it necessary to let me know that they disagree with my theology and philosophy, especially those who find it necessary to cling to the mythos of the “Blessed Trinity” — refusing to consider that it’s possible that God is not really a dude with a beard, who is our Father, joined by His Son and their Pet Dove, “Holy Spirit”.

As I read the incoming emails, I am reminded of a passage from the gospel attributed to John. As we reflect on the words of John 2:13-25, we recall the account of Jesus coming into Jerusalem at Passover, and finding the money-changers and merchants in the Temple. “This Temple should be a House of Prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves,” Jesus tells them.

Sometime we might find ourselves behaving like the Pharisees, whom Jesus called whitewashed tombs. A whitewashed tomb, in Jesus time, would appear to be beautiful as we see in the artistic depictions of Lazarus coming out of his tomb. The cut stone would be bright and resemble the doorway to a great home. Yet inside, a tomb was still a tomb. Dark, acrid, and earthen.

The whitewash was nothing more than a facade, and Jesus, who knew their hearts, told the Pharisees that they too were wearing a facade. Are there times when our own inner lives fail to reflect the projection of exterior piety that we present to the world?

Jesus knew the moneychangers and merchants could justify what they were doing within the letter of the Law. But He came to free us from the oppression of Mosaic Law, which He knew had always been abused by the “ruling class” of priests, beginning with the wealth land baron Moses himself. Instead, He revealed a New Law — Love, Service and Compassion. And under that law, our hearts had to be consistent with our actions — there would be no “ruling class”, no whitewashing allowed.

The temple built of stone and marble would be replaced by the temple built of Love Incarnate — revealed in the person of Jesus Himself. The institutional religion was replaced with the religion of love. Unfortunately, even some of His followers missed the point, and simply replaced the old institutional religion of Judaism with a new institution. They replaced the strictures of Moses’ manipulative Ten Commandments with thousands of pages of canon laws of their own. And somewhere along the line, we keep seeming to miss the Great Commandments given to us by Christ.

Yet the mystical Body of Christ is the Temple, and it cannot be desecrated by our hypocrisy, our intolerance or our attempts to whitewash the scandal, injustice and exclusion of others away. This week, we are reminded that Divine Love “knows our hearts”, and if our inner life is not joined to the Christ Consciousness — if our commitment still, after journeying with Christ in scripture, is not focused to loving, compassionate service and forgiveness — then we must take the steps necessary to get the inner in alignment with the exterior.

What are our pretensions? What can we do this week to show that we trust Christ enough to let them go? This is a good time to avail ourselves of the grace that comes from opening our hearts to reconciliation — to wipe clean those times when we have tried to appear more holy and righteous than we were in our hearts. It is an opportunity for us, as we recall the Gospel story, to become the prodigal son, and find the amazing homecoming Christ has prepared for us.

We often talk about spirituality as a journey back to Divine Love — the Source and Only Reality. It is unwise, as I understand it, to imagine that this concept we call “God” or “Goddess” is somehow distinct and separate from us. Neither is there truth in that unhealthy dogma.

All of Creation is by nature the Beloved One, just as ice by nature is water. Apart from water, there is no ice… likewise, apart from one another, there is no Father/Mother God.

If you want to experience the Divine, open your heart to see with the Eyes of the Beloved, the Indwelling Sacred in one another.

The Buddhist counterpart of the Catholic tradition’s Blessed Mother is Kuan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion. A bodhisattva, in the Buddhist tradition, is a being who is dedicated to attaining Enlightenment. Bodhisattva literally means “enlightenment (’bodhi‘) being (’sattva‘)” in Sanskrit. Bodhisattvas take vows to work for the complete enlightenment of all sentient beings. His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, considered by many followers of Tibetan Buddhism to be an incarnation of Kuan Yin, and is regarded by us as the living Bodhisattva of Compassion.

In the Dharani Sutra, an esoteric book which contains the verses and mantras used for protection from malign influences by those of us who practice Buddhism, we find the Great Compassion Mantra (Da Bei Zhow), given to the world by Kuan Yin Herself.

Kuan Yin is known as “the One who Listens to the Cries of the World”. The mantra She gives us has many miraculous attributes. In the Dharani Sutra, we read that those who recite and contemplate the phrases of this powerful chant will be spared the fifteen types of “horrible deaths”; that they will be born into the Paradise of the Divine Feminine, and subsequent births will be auspicious ones, conducive to our progress toward final Enlightenment.

It goes on to say that, “Those who recite and hold the Great Compassion Mantra will obtain the fifteen kinds of good birth. All gods and people should constantly recite and hold it, without carelessness.”

For those unfamiliar with Chinese, of course, the recitation and contemplation of this particular mantra is complex. However, for your practice, particularly, if you are not a follower of the Buddhist tradition, you may find it useful to meditate on a form of the Divine Mother more familiar to you, and recite a short mantra, such as “Blessed be the Name of the Mother of Compassion. Let compassion fill me now.”

I have promised, however, to share the actual ritual I use in my daily practise, for those who wish to follow along. You will want to have a small altar set up, with an image of Kuan Yin on it, before you begin. The following is the ritual with which I begin my day, at Midnight, prior to the celebration of the Gnostic Eucharist (Mass of the Gnostic Tradition).

1. Light incense and place beside shrine;

2. Prostrate 3 times to Kwan Yin;

3. Offer one (or more) glass(es) of water which Kwan Yin will bless;

4. Invite Kwan Yin to come to you and appear;

5. Bring the palms of your hands together in the prayer-mudra;

6. Invite all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas to come and be present.

7. Recite the following chant:

Lu Shian dza zo,Fa Je Mung Shin,Dzu Fo Haj Whey Shi Yao Wen,Swey Tsu Dje Shang Yun,Tsong Yi Fong Yin,Dzu Fo Shien Chuan Song.Na Mo Shian Yun Gai Pu Sa Mo Ko Sa. (3 times)

8. Recite the following lines to purify your speech and apologize for the pronunciation errors made by you during this practice:

An Sho Li Sho Lie, Mo Ho Sho Li, Sho Sho Li, Sa Po Ho (So Ha).

9. Recite the Kwan Yin Great Compassion Mantra 3, 5, 7, 21, 49 or 108 times.

10. Recite the short mantra 10 times:

Na Mo Kwan Yin Boddhisattva.

11. Finally, drink the water blessed by Kwan Yin. This water now has healing powers.

12. Dedicate this practice of the Kwan Yin Great compassion Mantra to the benefit and enlightenment of all beings.

What value does this practise have for those who embrace other traditions?

Like many of the stories of the bible, the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran, the story of Kuan Yin is Sacred Mythos. What we must understand is that mythos is not less real that “factual truth”: it is, in fact, more real. History tells of things that might or might not have happened, depending on who is “writing” the account. Mythos tells of things that transcend the physical world of “history”, and relates to Eternal Truth.

In Buddhism the Divine is seen in non-personal terms, and from the “subjective” point of view (i.e. as a pure state of being — Pure Love — rather than as a supernatural “Being”). This point of view does not conflict with the more explicitly theistic points of view found in Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Hinduism incorporates both views harmoniously. Buddhism, being a later religion, which grew out of the Hindu understanding, tends to economise the Truth down to a single non-personal aspect. Christianity, Judaism and Islam each economise the truth as they understand it down to a certain theistic aspect — personalising the Divine, so that others can more readily “grasp” the intangible.

In Kuan Yin we see the Holy Daughter, Our Saviour: the One Who Regards the Cries of the World, who has vowed to save all beings, even to the last blade of grass.

Transliterated Words of Great Compassion Mantra

1. na mo ho la da nu do la ye ye,
2. na mo o li ye,
3. po lu je di sho bo la ye,
4. pu ti sa do po ye,
5. mo ho sa do po ye,
6. mo ho jia lu ni jia ye,
7. an,
8. sa bo la fa yi,
9. su da nu da sia,
10. na mo si ji li do yi mung o li ye,
11. po lu ji di, sho fo la ling to po,
12. na mo nu la jin cho,
13. si li mo ho po do sha me,
14. sa po wo to do shu pung,
15. wo si yun,
16. sa po sa do na mo po sa do na mo po che,
17. mo fa to do,
18. da dzo to,
19. an, o po lu si,
20. lu jia di,
21. jia lo di,
22. i si li,
23. mo ho pu ti sa do,
24. sa po sa po,
25. mo la mo la,
26. mo si mo si li to yun,
27. ji lu ju lu, jie mong,
28. du lu du lu fa she ye di,
29. mo ho fa she ye di,
30. to la to la,
31. di li ni,
32. shi fo la ye,
33. zhe la zhe la,
34. mo mo, fa mo la,
35. mu di li,
36. yi si yi si,
37. shi nu shi nu,
38. o la son, fo la so li,
39. fa sha fa son,
40. fo la she ye,
41. hu lu hu lu mo la,
42. hu lu hu lu si li,
43. so la so la,
44. si li si li,
45. su lu su lu,
46. pu ti ye, pu ti ye,
47. pu to ye, pu to ye,
48. mi di li ye,
49. nu la jin cho,
50. di li so ni nu,
51. po ye mo nu,
52. so po ho,
53. si to ye,
54. so po ho,
55. mo ho si to ye,
56. so po ho,
57. si to yu yi,
58. shi bo la ye,
59. so po ho,
60. no la jin cho,
61. so po ho,
62. mo la nu la,
63. so po ho,
64. si la son o mo chi ye,
65. so po ho,
66. so po mo ho o si to ye,
67. so po ho,
68. zhe ji la o xi to ye,
69. so po ho,
70. bo fo mo jie si to ye,
71. so po ho,
72. nu la jin cho bo che la ye,
73. so po ho,
74. mo po li song ji la ye,
75. so po ho,
76. na mo ho la ta nu do la ye ye,
77. na mo o li ye,
78. po lu ji di,
79. sho bo la ye,
80. so po ho,
81. an si den,
82. man do la,
83, ba to ye,
84. so po ho

Namast