Hopeless?

In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön writes,

Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring security or confirmation. Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring any ground to stand on. In fact, when your mind turns toward the dharma, you fearlessly acknowledge impermanence and change and begin to get the knack of hopelessness…

It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope…

Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.

This brings us close to what has become for me a key issue in practice and in experience. Chödrön goes on to point out that this sense of hopelessness, of “nowhere to turn” and no one to turn to, lies at the heart of non-theism. There is no cosmic babysitter, she explains: “In a non-theistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.”

Now, there is a decided attraction in such a point of view. For all the relinquishment of the sense of “a solid, separate self” it is fatally easy, down this road, to see oneself as some kind of Raymond Chandler anti-hero, hat pulled low, collar turned to the rainy night, face starkly outlined by the light of a match held in cupped hands. “There’s no hope now, baby. And y’know, that’s okay…” The End.

The Buddhist opposite, I guess, is shinjin. Here the practitioner is giving up not hope, but self-reliance. She abandons her self to the tariki, the “other-power” of Amida Buddha inherent in the nembutsu, the core practice of Pureland Buddhism. As Jeff Wilson points out,

The nembutsu that we say, that others can hear, is only the tip of the shinjin iceberg; the nembutsu we recite is only the most visible sign of the working of Other Power within the shadowy ego-self. That inner working of shinjin may show through as nembutsu, but it can also show through in a hug, a gift, a kind word, laughter.

Nembutsu is a vital avenue for expressing our faith, but it need not be taken for the whole iceberg. There’s really no limit to the possibilities of expression of the trusting heart….

Humility and trust go hand in hand, forming the second part of the true trusting mind. Shinjin is another name for this development of humility-entrusting.

Jeff Wilson, Buddhism of the Heart: Reflections on Shin Buddhism and Inner Togetherness

The issue of humility is one, of course, with which I had continually to struggle during my long years as a Christian contemplative. My practice was always the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” – a prayer repeated in very much the same manner as the nembutsu, formally for regular periods each day, and spontaneously from time to time for the rest of the day – and night, too, given the way it tends to pop up whenever one turns over in the night, or half-wakes to look at the clock.

The Nembutsu and the Jesus Prayer are both ways of abandonment: not of the abandonment of hope so much as the abandonment of self-will, of giving up not hope but self-reliance, of giving up oneself into the continuum of something not other but utterly interpenetrating. Jean Pierre de Caussade puts it solidly (in Christian terms of course) in his title Abandonment to Divine Providence or The Sacrament of the Present Moment. The fall out of self is the fall into now, into the ground of being, that isness that is always now and in which all beings rest.

The more I go on, the more fundamental this abandonment seems to be for me. However threadbare devotional practice can be, however compromised and compromising the religions we humans build around our moments of clarity and truth, there is no way past the frailty and limitation of the self, its littleness and its bombu imperfection. All its struggles for self-validation will sooner or later have to be given up in death anyway. To let it dissolve in light is no loss, but limitless grace.

#contemplative #death #faith #grace #JeanPierreDeCaussade #JeffWilson #nembutsu #PemaChodron

A window on what is

I find the study of phenomenology in my amateur way endlessly fascinating; it is all too easy to follow it down philosophical rabbit-holes, as I have done in several posts recently. But the contemplative life, related though it is to the practice of philosophy (as seen so clearly in some Buddhist schools like Yogācāra) deals in itself not with discursive thought but with direct experience; which is one of the reasons I have for so long been drawn to the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition of hesychasm, or to the Pure Land Buddhist practice of the Nembutsu – not primarily because of the nature of these practices themselves (repetitive prayer) but because of their extreme simplicity.

Now, phenomenal experience is sometimes characterised as a tunnel (Metzinger), a “benign user illusion” (Dennett, glossed so brilliantly by Susan Blackmore) or a mindstream (Yogācāra). The idea generally seems to be that what we experience from moment to moment is a transparent, essentially functional but ultimately illusory interface that the mind provides between reality and our (equally illusory) experience of a permanent self. Reality itself is far richer and stranger, and the self is “but one of the countless manifestations of the Tao” (Ho (PDF)). To say these things can of course provoke in the reader a myriad of misunderstandings, and to realise them oneself can cause a temporary existential disruption that is horribly like a classical bad trip. Misleading though many of its Perennialist assumptions may be, one of the best accounts of what is at stake must be Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. Donald Hoffman finds the same position in Erwin Schrödinger:

[Schrödinger’s] position boils down to this: what we call the physical world is the result of a process that Schrödinger called “objectivation”, i.e. the transformation of the one self-world (Atman=Brahman) into something that can be readily conceptualized and studied objectively, hence something that is fully void of subjective qualities. In the theory of conscious agents this amounts to the creation of “interfaces”. Such interfaces simplify what is going on in order to allow you to act efficiently. Good interfaces hide complexity. They do not let you see reality as it is but only as it is useful to you. What you call the “physical world” is merely a highly-simplified representation of non-dual consciousness.

Donald Hoffman, Schrödinger and the Conscious Universe (IAI News)

Last year I attempted, as I periodically do, to explain to myself how this paradoxical relationship between overthinking and contemplative practice could possibly work. I concluded:

I have written elsewhere of the profound stillness I experienced recovering from childhood meningitis; in many ways, my contemplative practice over the last 40-odd years has been an attempt, scattered as it has at times been, to recover that stillness.

These things are nothing new. The Taoist tradition beginning between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, and the Chan Buddhist writings in the early centuries of the present era, are full of wanderings “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao). And the central tradition of (at least Zen) Buddhist meditation consists of “just sitting” (shikantaza).

The falling away of purposeful action, in itself the very simplest thing, seems one of the hardest to achieve – perhaps because it isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposeful action. This appears to me to be the snag with so many programmes of practice involving concentration, visualisation, ritual and so on.

The paradox inherent in practice, any practice, only begins to thin out in sheer pointlessness, either the pointlessness of a repeated phrase such as the Jesus Prayer, or the Nembutsu, or of merely sitting still. The power of shikantaza is simply powerlessness, giving up, complete acceptance of what is without looking for anything. When you cease to try to open the doors, they open by themselves, quite quietly. Not looking, the path opens.

#AldousHuxley #contemplative #DanielDennett #DonaldHoffman #ErwinSchrödinger #hesychasm #nembutsu #practice #SusanBlackmore #Tao #ThomasMetzinger #unknowing #Wikipedia

✨ No one is too flawed or too late for awakening ✨

🪷 Encouraging wisdom from Master Huijing 🪷

💛 What helps you remember that practice is always possible? 💛

🔗 BDG on YouTube: youtube.com/@BuddhistdoorGlobal

#Buddhism #Buddha #Amitabha #Dharma #Mahayana #PureLand #Rebirth #Recitation #Buddhist #Compassion #Mindfulness #Meditation #Wisdom #Awakening #Spirituality #Amituofo #Nembutsu #Nianfo #Amida

New blog post! #Buddhism #PureLand #Zen #Nembutsu

http://nembutsu.cc/2025/09/10/highs-and-lows/

Made to Become So

"Here, Shinran is strongly advocating a sense of total reliance on Amida Buddha, with the belief that by fully entrusting oneself to Amida Buddha's compassionate vows (as depicted in the Three Pure Land Sutras), called shinjin..." #Buddhism #PureLand #Amida #Nembutsu

http://nembutsu.cc/2025/07/21/made_to_become_so/

The Junirai: The Twelve Adorations of Amida Buddha

As far as I can tell, this liturgy is found only in the Jodo Shinshu tradition, and is based on a document attributed to the Indian-Buddhist monk Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna (c. 150 - 250 CE) was a very influential monk in early, early Mahayana Buddhist tradition, and some documents related to Pure Land thought and Amida Buddha are attributed to him. I say "attributed", because ... #Buddhism #JodoShinshu #Amida #Nembutsu…

http://nembutsu.cc/2025/04/24/the-junirai-the-twelve-adorations-of-amida-buddha/

Morning Nembutsu reciting of Namo Amida Butsu whilst drawing Hamonshū.

#meditation #pureland #buddha #nembutsu

Misery

A candle flame doesn’t seem like much, but in a very dark place, that candle flame really stands out. #Buddhism #Suffering #PureLand #Nembutsu

http://nembutsu.cc/2025/03/01/misery/

"𝗣𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗼𝘀 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗮 𝗲𝗹 𝗽𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗹 𝗡𝗲𝗺𝗯𝘂𝘁𝘀𝘂"

- 𝗜𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗻 -

«SIN MORADA»
El registro de Ippen
– Dennis Hirota –

👇👇👇

https://elcaminoblanco.wordpress.com/preceptos-para-el-practicante-de-nembutsu/

👆👆👆

#ippenshonin #budismo #budismotierrapura #amidabutsu #amitabha #amitayus #amitabuda #nianfo #nembutsu #recuerdodelbuda #Sukhavati