Part 1 – Hozro: To be in harmony with one’s environment.
In recent years we have been living with the consequence of rapid climate change around the world. The last few months have been especially noteworthy in the northeast U.S. and Canada. Up until recently climatologists and meteorologists have been hesitant to attribute specific weather events to anthropogenic climate change. That is no longer the case. There is now a clear pattern and conclusive data confirming what we feared.
Wednesday, July 19th marked the 17th straight day with global temperatures hotter than any prior days on record. According to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction. Some experts say that this Fourth of July may have been the hottest day on Earth in 125,000 years, the last interglacial period. We know this through ice-core samples, tree rings, and geological data. Though, this time, there is no ice age in sight, only catastrophic, human-caused climate change.
Forget about the overused expression, “the new normal,” to describe our current climate moment. As Friedericke Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London writes, “We’re nowhere near a normal. Whenever we stop burning fossil fuels we can begin to figure out what ‘normal’ means again.”
Climate change has resulted in increasingly severe storms, increased number of wildfires, more extreme hurricanes and typhoons, changing patterns of snow and rain. There is evidence that large cities are sinking due to a draining of aquifers, changes in earthquakes due to fracking.
The heating of the earth has contributed to another factor in climate change. Since 1980, each pole has moved roughly 13 feet. In addition to melting glaciers, the pumping of groundwater has contributed to the shift in Earth’s axis. Climate scientist Vincent Humphrey of the University of Zurich, Switzerland reports that in the past, only natural factors such as ocean currents and the convection of hot rock deep in the planet contributed to the pole drift.
He goes on to write that the Earth spins around its axis like a top. If the weight of a top shifts, the spinning top would lean and wobble as its rotational axis changes. The same thing happens to the Earth as weight is shifted from one area to the other due to melting glaciers.
Humphrey told the Guardian that this “tells you how strong this mass change is – it’s so big that it can change the axis of the Earth.” The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. This change will not result in a change of seasons or how we keep time. It is changing, ever so subtlety, currents in the ocean and the winds that circulate around the globe. This in turn can have a profound effect on weather patterns and the climate in general.
You may be thinking, why am I reading this in the Shingi? This is in the daily news, and I am experiencing it in my daily life.
Until recently climate change, let’s call it what it is climate catastrophe, was something on the horizon, we were concerned for our children, grandchildren, and generations not yet born. Not many of us thought we would be experiencing the ramifications of human disregard for the environment now, not sometime in the future.
We were content to hinder real action, inconvenience ourselves, and assume that solutions, mostly technological, would resolve this thorny issue. Bam it’s happening now. That may be good news.
Whatever we are currently experiencing is just a glimmer of what’s on the horizon. It will get worse before we can turn it around. But, we can turn it around.
There is an analogy I would like to use. There are people who are informed by their doctor to watch their diet, stop smoking cigarettes, exercise more, and make other lifestyle changes before it’s too late and they suffer a life-threatening heart attack.
Some of those people experience a severe heart attack and die at an early age. The end.
Others suffer a relatively mild heart attack; they spend some time in the hospital, perhaps undergo a procedure, and upon their release make the changes that they were encouraged to do years earlier. They go on to live long productive lives because they make the changes and improve their circulatory prognosis.
What we are currently experiencing in our climate now is like a mild heart attack. There are things that we can do, some technological, many have to do with our lifestyles. It is not too late to ease and reverse the damage already done.
Wisdom teachings are all around us. We hear or read them and go about our lives not embracing what they have to teach. We accept this guidance at an intellectual level only.
In Buddhism we have the concept of interpenetration. It is exemplified in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, that is the mutual containment and interpenetration of all phenomena.
In Taoism there is yin and yang – that describes how obviously opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another.
Hozro is a Navaho word meaning to be in harmony with one’s environment, at peace with one’s circumstance and free from anger or anxieties. To quote Tony Hillerman, from his novel The Ghostway, “Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality, man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.”
The key to all of these is interconnectedness and harmony. We must go beyond our attempts to ‘fix’ what we have done to the earth. Certainly, we must repair what we can to the extent we can.
We must acknowledge our actions, primarily due to greed and as well as for our selfish desire for convenience to an extreme that Śakyamuni Buddha instructed us to avoid through the Middle Way.
Moving beyond fixing what we have broken, we must seek to live in harmony with the world in which we are a part. Until we are living harmoniously, recognizing the nature of interpenetration, yin and yang, Hozro, we will be working at the margins of the real problem, greed, extreme individualism and material delusion.
Let us see the current difficulties for the disguised blessing they are, a concrete warning to make the necessary changes to bring our world back into balance and harmony.
Part 2 – The Betsuin Gyo: Doshu/Soryo Training
The term gyo is a shortened version of the term Shugyo. Shugyo is a process. A process to reveal one’s character, develop a new way of perceiving the world and find one’s strengths and weaknesses.
When people hear about monks training as gyo they understandably relate it to a seminary activity (Monk is a direct translation from the Japanese soryo, and is used in to refer to both male and female ordinands.) A gyo is not the same type of training or environment as is found in a seminary. We often use the term training, but that can be misleading, though there are aspects of training involved. The Japanese term, shugyo might elucidate what is actually occurring. Shugyo can be translated (from Japanese) as ascetic training.
Shugyo refers to the Buddhist conception of ‘mind-body as one entity’. The practice of shugyo is an aspect of traditional Japanese culture, derived from this Buddhist concept. It is applied in many different forms of training, including, Japanese dance, theater, tea ceremony, martial arts, etc. In this context it is a deep mind-body training in which physical training masters the techniques perfectly so that the practitioner’s body internalizes the techniques completely as second nature. Yuasa Yasuo wrote about shugyo’s importance and Buddhist origins as, “a pragmatic enterprise aiming at spiritual training and improvement of character through training of one’s body.” (Yuasa, Y. (1990) Shintairon Toyoteki Shinshinron to Gendai (Theory of the Body: An Eastern Mind-Body Theory and the Present) Tokyo: Kodansha; 101; emphasis is the original).
As Isaka writes (see reference below), “Not only is the body an identity kit, but it, in effect, is the mind.” Isaka goes on to write;
“Shugyo consists of two phases: repeated somatic training (such as that of posture and movements) and internalization of the technique in question as second nature. Thomas P. Kasulis deftly summarizes Yuasa’s point about shugyo as follows: “Gradually . . . the posture becomes natural or second nature. It is the second nature because the mind has entered into dark consciousness and given it a form; it is an acquired naturalness. (Isaka, M. Bardsley, J. and Miller, L. (2011) Box-Luch Etiquetts: Conduct Guides and Kabuki Onnagata.” (In) Manners and Mischief: Gender, Power, and Etiquette in Japan. (ed. by Bardsley, J. and Miller, L.) University of California Press; p. 55)
In the shugyo model, the student takes only a handful of skills or forms and repeats them time and time again. Each repetition refines the skill or deepens one’s knowledge.
The model of shugyo is characterized by an emphasis on the depth of knowledge, wisdom, experience, and technical ability. Body, speech and mind are one entity. The monk gains his or her knowledge about Buddhist teachings through study, intellectual and reasoned. He or she learns, internalizes, practices and builds the character necessary to be an effective sangha leader through gyo. The aim here is total mastery over one’s object of study and oneself to the point where both subject and object disappear into the void of experience… awakening.
We follow the tradition, and virtually all the methods and the practices that Tendai monks are required to observe at the gyo on on Mount Hiei, with some modifications to compensate for the differences between the environment, facilities and to an extent, the culture between upstate New York and Mount Hiei.
From a practical perspective, each day starts at 3:30 AM and ends at 9 PM. It begins with water purification (drenching the body with a bucket of water fresh from the well while reciting a mantra) and ends with a practices class. There is a half an hour a day for personal hygiene, a shower, laundry, cleaning dorm rooms, and such. The gyoja (as the participants are called) are moving all day long with no breaks. There is no time for idle talk.
While there are lessons on how to conduct meditations, gongyo, chanting, shomyo, etc., it is the internal development that is the most important outcome. This ensures that Tendai sangha outside of Japan are led by people who have been trained, tested, and proven to be worthy of leading sangha. Not everyone is ultimately ordained. It is something earned not assured.
We started the doshu/soryo gyo in 1998. It is with deep privilege that the Betsuin is able to conduct the gyo this year after a three-year hiatus due to the COVID pandemic. We also recognize that the sangha of Tendai Buddhist Institute contributes both materially and spiritually to make each gyo possible and worthwhile.
We thank you for the sacrifices you make as members of the sangha who are all participants both directly and indirectly, to such an ancient and enriching experience.
With Love and Gassho . . . Monshin