| Phrase |
Kanji |
Literal English |
| Ji ho san shi |
十方三世 |
Ten directions, three times |
| I shi fu |
一切諸仏 |
All Buddhas |
| Shi son bu sa |
菩薩摩訶薩 |
Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas |
| Mo ko sa |
摩訶薩 |
Mahasattva |
| Mo ko ho ja ho ro mi |
摩訶般若波羅蜜 |
Maha Prajna Paramita |
At the end of pretty much every Zen ceremony the whole assembly chants together the verse at the bottom of page 1 of our chant book:
All buddhas, ten directions, three times. All honored ones, bodhisattva-mahasattvas, Wisdom beyond wisdom, Maha Prajña Paramita
Once in while we chant this in Sino-Japanese - remember that's not modern Japanese but an archaic way of pronouncing Chinese characters which is what all of the formal Zen sayings and phrases are rooted in. We are working in translation here but so would a modern Japanese person.
Here's what that sounds like:
Ji hō san shi i shu fu Shi son bu sa mo ko sa Mo ko ho jya Ho ro mi
A bit like if we were sounding out the English of Chaucer's day. Some of you know our dear member Chris Patton, he's moved to Toronto but I think of him as very much a part of Red Cedar still - he's a poet and a scholar and wrote a book of poetry rooted in ancient English myth and at a reading he did he recited some in Middle English - you could almost make sense of it, so familiar but not quite understandable. Sino-Japanese is kind of like that.
It's interesting that our translation of the verse is a mix of English and Sanskrit isn't it? I did a little puzzling over the underlying Chinese and it looks like our translation is true to what's there. In the Chinese for the Sanskrit words there are characters that are being used to transliterate the sounds, not their meanings as Chinese characters, sounds that approximate the sounds of each syllable in the Sanskrit. Where we have English, the Chinese characters are used for their meaning looks like.
A literal translation of the underlying Chinese would be:
Ten directions, three times, all buddhas most venerable bodhisattva mahasattvas maha prajna paramita
But what does this statement actually mean? Really. What is it saying?
It's a list of nouns with a few enthusiastic adjectives, but no verbs:
All buddhas, ten directions, three times. All honored ones, bodhisattva-mahasattvas, Wisdom beyond wisdom, Maha Prajña Paramita
Let's look more at context that it's used in. At the end of service.
In Zen Ceremonies there are a bunch of offerings made. First we offer incense, light, and flowers at the altar. And this offering is empowered by the priest wearing the special okesa robe that we talked about last week. Then we offer our whole bodies in the deep bows. Then we offer the spiritual power of the special texts we chant: full of teachings and devotional statements. Then a really important part is the chant leader, the kokyo, makes statements of dedication on our behalf. She'll proclaim, with great spiritual energy, something like:
We dedicate the merit of this practice to the great teachers who have transmitted the lamp through space and time.
Or the merit is dedicated to a specific list of Buddhas and teachers listed by name.
Or it's dedicated to people who are ill, or have died, or are suffering in some way.
So what's this "we dedicate the merit of this practice to..." business?
This is interesting and important. It's a part of Buddhism that was, and often still is, quite misunderstood in our context. In the importing of all of this into Euro-centric Western culture it this stuff was often viewed with suspicion or rejected as cultural baggage. Superstitious nonsense. Below us modern scientific rationalists.
We liked the meditation part. And now there's neuroscience to show us meditation does good stuff to our brains so we're right in there. And most of us can get into chanting: good to use our voices and harmonize together. Who doesn't love singing?
In Buddhism there's a deep and important idea: the Sanskrit for it is puṇya. I don't hear the Japanese used much but it's 功徳 kudoku. The English word was chosen to translate this term is "merit." Merit is the underlying energy of the universe. It's behind and inside everything. More specifically it's the energy of karma - of cause and effect. And the flow of merit is an essential part of why Buddhist ethics make sense. Beneficial actions generate positive merit and result in good outcomes. Karma is complex so sometimes it doesn't look that way in the short term, but overall that's what happens.
And in Buddhism, building on the Brahminical religions in India at the time, one of the most powerfully positive forms of merit is from these practices of making these offerings. Even the meditation we do before this chanting is seen as an offering - not as something we're doing for ourselves to calm down or get better brain wiring.
And here's the thing: in a world of separate selves that our culture thinks we live in, this does seem like of transactional and maybe a little woo-woo and weird. We do all of what we do here at Sansui-ji to generate mysterious invisible energy we can give away to imaginary Buddhas? Yeah....
But in a the Buddhist world of no separate selves it makes perfect sense. Each of us has this sense of being a separate being, but can feel more and more how we're all waves emerging just-for-now in the same ocean of life energy. We start to understand, in our guts not just our heads, how temporary and ephemeral we each are. How this particular assembly of molecules and organs and systems and memories and thoughts comes together through some kind of complex scientific and karmic miracle - "how did I get here?!" David Byrne sings with us - and we aren't here for long.
And even thought we aren't really so separate and independent was we think we are, this presumed being here is powerful. Everything we do has an impact on this fluxating field of matter-energy doesn't it? We all know that. We are amazingly good at forgetting but we all know this.
Our presence, our choices, our attitude, even what's in the so-called privacy of our own heads, affects those around us and those effects just keep bubbling outwards and outwards. And the experience we think has some kind of clear boundary around it called "me" is actually co-created by all of these other self-ing energy nodes around us and all over the planet. The separateness is an illusion. And we co-arise not just with the constellations of energy-stuff we call humans. Also with the plants, the animals, the rocks, the weather. And the ideas and concepts that we make what we think is "sense" of all of this are also flowing around and making us who and what we are moment after moment.
So "merit" is also another way of acknowledging that's what's actually happening here. It's a kind of description of the continuous flow in this kaleidoscope reality that we actually are part of. We live in fields of merit.
The kokyo lists some specifics of where we'd like to share the merit of this practice we've just done and this little verse seems to be a kind of capstone. Don't forget that we always send merit to three important places too:
All BUDDHAS TEN DIRECTIONS
-
first the Buddhas - all of them - the more historical story of earlier Buddhism is there is just one Buddha in the world in the time. Note that even there he wasn't just some ordinary guy who was really good at spiritual practice, that story's a kind of modern Western clean up job to make Buddhism seem more rational and less religious. In early Buddhist teachings the being who became the Buddha of our age had practiced hard, and made many sacrifices too, in many many previous lives. But just one Buddha at a time. And here we have "all buddhas in all directions" (the ten directions means all directions).
The later Mahayana Buddhism we're a part of in Zen is much more cosmic and open ended. In this universe there are Buddhas everywhere across space and time so we send our gratitude to all Buddhas in the ten directions. And the three times are the past, present, and future but understood here to be all arising on every moment too.
BODHISATTVAS MAHA-SATTVAS
-
next we focus on the honored Bodhisattvas - awakening beings who live lives devoted to service - and to make sure we know how honored we call them maha-sattvas as well meaning great beings. The maha-sattvas part indicates the principal Bodhisattvas who are very much like gods, gods that specialize in certain positive qualities like wisdom, compassion, and energy. Our wonderful new addition on the Cloud Hall altar is a large statue of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Since it's a Chinese statue I've been calling her by her Chinese name mostly: Guanyin.
And in a broader sense though all honored ones, bodhisattvas maha-sattvas, also refers to all of us. Each one doing our best to be wise, compassionate, and enthusiastic in our service of this world.
WISDOM BEYOND WISDOM
MAHA PRAJÑA PARAMITA
- And finally we pay homage to the quality of understanding that allows us to see and understand this Buddha-verse we live in: a wisdom that goes beyond ordinary wisdom called Prajña Paramita. And there's "maha" again: great.
It sounds like a lot of control of something we can't see, taste or touch. Is that reasonable? And the whole thing can feel like a transaction: if we do this, we get that. And transacations somehow seems very unspiritual to people in a capitalist system. We do transactional stuff all the darn time, yes, but isn't the meditation hall and definitely the Buddhist temple a place that should be above the pettiness of that kind of exchange?
We all make choices and those choices have impact. In the Buddhist tradition it's felt that a particularly beneficial choice is to make offerings like we do in our Zen services and that it's even more beneficial if we're deliberate and aware that this is what we're doing. We're generating energy, merit, and we can invite that energy to benefit others far and wide.
So that's what we're doing. It's not that it's not a cultural practice we've adapted from Japan which was in turn adapted from China and from India. Remember I do think the intellectual/historical dimensions matter. It's not just that. We're generating goodness. So many cultures talk about this: chi, prana, good vibrations. And when we generate goodness we know we can't keep it for ourselves, there no self to keep it in anyway, so we feel the great joy of contributing to the collective co-arising of the universe. We give away the merit that arises from our practice as an expression of our love for this world. We give it away.
So this little verse we chant at the end is the kind of capstone of that process.
We chant it just to make super sure we know we're giving it away we chant this list of the ultimate recipients of our good energy: Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and at the end a surprising dedication to what seems like an abstract teaching: to a wisdom that's beyond conventional wisdom, or in it's Sanskrit terminology: prajna paramita.
And the three treasures are in this little verse too, but not in the usual order:
BUDDHA - all Buddha's Ten Directions, Three Times
SANGHA - All being bodhisattvas mahasattvas
DHARMA - wisdom beyond wisdom, maha prajña paramita
In all of our traditional practices we do have the interesting question of how literally to translate things. Too literal and it's pretty confusing and we have to be constantly explaining - kind of re-translating on the fly. But if we're too loose and explain-y in how we translate maybe something of the original is lost? Is there a going too far in kind of making these traditional texts make more sense to us from how we word things in English?
One of my sources for this talk is this little book by Kazu aki Tanahashi - Kaz he's called. Kaz does a lot of work with Roshi Joan Halifax at Upaya Zen Center in New Mexico and there they tend to lean towards more figurative translations. He shares that they added a few words to this verse so it's intention is more understandable:
All awakened ones throughout space and time, honored ones, great beings, who help all to awaken, together we realize wisdom beyond wisdom!
A nice statement of the intention of the verse and pretty far from the literal. No Sanskrit there.
Back to the end of the verse. Where it leaves us is important.
WISDOM BEYOND WISDOM
MAHA PRAJÑA PARAMITA
This is the wisdom that goes beyond conventional ideas of knowing. It's the space of fluidity; of the freedom of no rigid separate self; it's where the waves dance freely on the ocean: happy to be waves for the moment and with no resistance to slipping back into the ocean. And merit is the current in that ocean I guess you could say.
We might think of this closing part of the closing section of our merit making and giving that merit away as saying: I let go of myself as I give away this merit. That there's no one here to make that merit, to hold onto the merit, or to give it away.
This is true freedom.
It's reminding us that this whole merit generation and dedication thing isn't "okay Buddhas! hey everyone! We worked hard over here doing our practice and here you go! We hope you like the merit! You're welcome!"
Closing the very final capstone dedication with this deep acknowledgement of true wisdom is saying something more like "The natural flow of the universe continues. I will use this temporary experience of "me" for the good of all as best I can. Any thing that seems to be mine, even though I know there is no me or mine, I give it all away. Freely and fully. Enjoy!"
