Dharma Glimpse by Gredd Cundiff

Returning home from a Mothers’ Day brunch at my sister’s home, I had a rather long wait on a train platform. I ran up to the stop thinking I had heard a train horn. Well, no I hadn’t. What greeted me was a schedule board indicating a 30 minute wait. It was a nice day so I didin’t think much of it. I could txt some friends and check in on a dating app.

A young guy arrived and stood maybe 15 feet from where I was standing. Nicely dressed he started fumbling with something in his bag or pocket – I couldn’t tell which. Next thing I noticed was the aroma of an herb garden wafting in my general direction. He was smoking weed from a pipe fashioned out of an old soda can. It is legal in a about 9 or 10 weeks, so who cares.

Then two rough looking characters walked up and sat on the ground. Smoking cigarettes and grumbling at each other. One about hurt feelings. The grumbling turned dramatic and one guy would start to walk away. The other would chase after him offering a certainly insincere appology. They would the go back to their spot on the floor and bicker some more. This cycle played out several times. In the mean time another guy walks up and sits on a bench at the other end of the platform.

The argument was about money and hurt feelings. It started to get loud. Each one yelling blah, blah blah, Yo! Now to get the full picture of what happens next it is. neccesary to understand who each of the players is. The bromance boys having the fight were white 20-somethings from Dundalk or Brooklyn – a step or two below working class. The pot smoker was young African American man about the same age as the bromance boys. The guy on the other end of the platform was an African American man is late 20s to early 30s.

Emotions escalate and the younger bromance boy starts calling the older one the “N” word. Next enters the middle age African American guy. “What did you say! You can’t use that word! You’re disrespecting me!” Round and round this goes for a few minutes. Stoner guy walks up to the tussle and I’ m starting to get a little worried. This is Baltimore after all and you don’t reallly know who is packing. And folks around here like to shoot at each other. Nobody flashes a weapon and I can relax. Stoner guy walks up to the bromance boy he figures is being picked on and offers a handshake and a “are you ok?”

Thank goodness the train appears. Thank goodness nobody gets pushed onto the tracks.

The Dharma lesson? That was for me. I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t mentally take sides. Everyone wants to find happiness and avoid pain. Everyone wants to find happiness and avoid pain. I’ve heard the Dalai Lama say that a dozen times if I’ve heard it once. Yeah, that sounds good. Put it into practice? Not quite as simple. But this time I did. I’ve heard it so many times from so many people in a variety of words and settings. Sunday it played itself out. There was nothing I could do to control anything that might have happened. So I wasn’t chickening out or shirking some duty or another. I lived through it. I didn’t get phyically or emotionally envolved. I didn’t form opinions about any of the players.

This is not really about me. It is about the dharma the seeds taking root and growing. We’re Pure Landers so we take a lot of things on faith and trust. This time I had real world evidence that it does work. The seeds do emplant and they do grow.

Namo Amida Butsu

A Dharma Glimpse by Greg Cundiff

I entered the military a conservative. Not a fire breathing conservative but a my family are all liberals kind of conservative. An act of rebellion conservative. Not a fire breathing conservative, but conservative none the less. I left the military a fire breathing liberal. And I knew everything worth knowing. I was more liberal than my family by a long shot.
This newfound world view worked out quite nicely. Nicely, as long as I surrounded myself with people who thought and talked like me. My friends in San Diego were all lefties. My church was mostly lefty. My partner even pretended to be a lefty so I might find him more appealing. Oh everything was right in my world. I had a neatly defined sense of us and them.
Boy did all that change when I moved back to Baltimore. Yes, Maryland is a blue state – but trust me it has never been all that blue deep down. Thems started popping up all over the place. I even learned that my family wasn’t as lefty as I had always painted them.
One afternoon in a senior literature seminar a classmate looked at me after I had made a comment about something, I don’t remember what, said, “you sound like a Buddhist.” I could tell by his tone that it wasn’t a put-down. The only thing was, I had no idea what he meant.
By and by I started reading about Buddhism. I thought of myself as a Buddhist. I even put it in my Veterans record. Still a lot of us and them. The more I listened, the notion of us and them started to slip. Not perfectly, but slip it did. How many times does the Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Hahn have to say that everyone wants to have happiness and avoid pain until it starts to seep in. I don’t know. But if you listen. And I do mean listen. It does start to sink in.
One Sunday morning I was chatting with one of the farmers at work. This was a person that I had a lot of fun being around. In the middle of a conversation about something to do with farms he mentioned that he was a big supporter of the then current governor. And yes he said, that means that I’m a Republican – I guess you hate me now. I can remember a time when I would have. At that moment I didn’t feel any hatred or dislike toward him. Of course I don’t, I told him. Everyone seeks happiness and wishes to avoid pain. Yes it sounds nice. Listen to it, really listen. Think about it some. Compare the idea to how you live your life. After a while and probably when you least expect it, compassion sinks in. Not complete compassion, but enough for now.

Dharma Glimpse by Alison

Written 08/05/23

Recently I met a Chinese speaking Buddhist community in Malvern.  After this meeting I realised what I’d been missing.  The uprootedness of continually having to leave behind my friends and familiar surroundings, such as when I left Asia after eight years of living there, had left an enormous hole I hadn’t even noticed until I found myself in another Asian community.  Sometimes, when we shut out the pain of things taken from us, we can’t always see what causes the pain until we confront it again.   I suddenly saw, in a flash, that what was needed to restore connection and to heal this gaping wound, was to begin building bridges.  Bridges from ourselves to all the things of our heart.

In England, I find myself picking up all the pieces of my broken life and stitching them back together again.  It’s a long and laborious process.  I’ve been reminded that, in Japan, there is a tradition of restoring broken objects by putting gold into all the cracks of broken ceramics.  This is known as Kintsugi.  This has the effect of creating resilience and beauty.  The cracks are the most prized parts – they are signs of growth;  of hard lessons learnt;  of journeys travelled;  stories lived;  of acquired wisdom through experience.  The cracks are what make us resilient and more beautiful.  The more cracks we have, the more resilient and beautiful we become.  

After having moved about so much, I’m starting to think that perhaps it doesn’t matter whether I can return to all the places I’ve called home, but what matters most are the connections we make here and now.  Separation requires connection to heal.  What once used to be found by travelling far and wide can also be experienced in the here and now, if we simply remain open and receptive to what is here –  right now.  There exists the potential to bring the whole world into a single grain of sand.  By stitching the past, present and future together we can find Wholeness.  Wholeness in this moment now – right here.  In order to help restore this Wholeness, we need to build bridges to the things of our heart.  Restoring, reconnecting, recreating.  

Picking up the broken pieces and stitching them together with golden thread, we can find a beautiful Whole, laced with strands of golden wisdom, beauty and resilience.  

A Dharma Glimpse by Alison

I’ve been contemplating the importance of boundaries since moving into the temple. The subject has come up a number of times and different people have referred to their need of them. It seems that boundaries are an important topic and that most of us find putting in boundaries, when relating to others, extremely difficult. I am no exception.
What is a boundary? It’s a protective zone, or space, we can imagine having around ourselves to keep us safe and stop us from becoming hurt, or hurting others. It might take the form of limits we need to put in place that show other people how far they can go in their interactions with us -what’s appropriate and what isn’t.
Our parts (parts of ourselves, especially the vulnerable ones) need boundaries to feel safe – we need to make them, but – we also need them made by others. We need to feel walls on all four sides of us to feel safe. If we don’t set boundaries, others will step into our space, especially those parts of others that are either vulnerable; needy; seeking love, or to be liked; needing attention; wanting to feel special and also those parts wanting to feel superior, prove a point, or to rescue another and to be useful. Sometimes we need to reign parts in that seek to burrow holes as deep as they can without obstruction. Healthy boundaries provide safe space for all to manoeuvre – space to grow. I’m imagining how it is for the plants. They need space to grow, unfurl leaves, space to stretch their roots in the soil, to drink the rain and to reach up to the sunlight.
When we give enough space we allow growth. Having space allows us to grow into our selves, just like the plants in the flowerbed. The sun’s rays can reach out to all the plants, shining down on every part of them, no matter how perfect or imperfect they are.
In order to be able to give ourselves, and others, this space, we can do as the plants, bringing all of the parts of us, including those vulnerable parts, to the Buddha or to Self (as it’s called in Parts Work or Internal Family Systems). These parts can be met by self compassion, or the warm compassion of Amida, in the same way the plants are greeted by the sun. There’s enough room for every part and all parts are received, just as they are. Perhaps, if we can learn to love and value all of the vulnerable, flawed parts of ourselves, we can show others how to do the same.

Dharma Glimpse by Philip

I was driving down to the temple recently in my slightly battered, but beloved, Twingo. It has a temperamental and capricious CD player (yes, it is pretty old!). I kinda love that about it. Choice isn’t always a good thing in my opinion and when a CD finally works it feels more joyous than being able to play whatever I want all the time. I’m not particularly in to Bob Dylan, but I stumbled across an old ‘Best of’ CD which I threw into it which miraculously worked. It played ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ before unceremoniously, and loudly, spitting it out! Bless it!
A couple of days later I was walking in the Malvern Hills. It was a beautiful, warm and sunny afternoon. It felt good to be alive. I was blessed to have spent some time with much valued templemates, and temple dogs, in the hills over the previous couple of days. I was now blessed to be spending some time with myself. Coming down the path towards St Anne’s Well I was taken by the trees swaying gracefully in the light breeze. Their luscious, beautiful green leaves being thrust towards the sky from their trunk and branches to bask in the sun’s rays whilst their deep, sinuous roots would have quietly and imperceptibly grown over many years to give them the necessary stability and provision of other life-sustaining nutrients. I remembered the Bob Dylan lyric “The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind”.
If not THE answer, maybe trees can tell me quite a bit about the dharma I thought. I remember a friend told me “trees are our munda”, meaning trees are our temples. I wondered if we need to quietly, humbly cultivate our spiritual roots in order to catch the light of Amida. Or perhaps the light of Amida helps us cultivate our spiritual roots of being connected to something deeper and life sustaining. Maybe it is a symbiotic relationship (always wanted to use that term as it sounded clever when I heard people using it!). Maybe Western spirituality and the self-help culture frequently promotes the equivalent of the leaves basking in the sun, rather than the less glamorous work of immersing oneself, and growing, in the soil and earth.
I feel lucky to have come across Pureland Buddhism. I confess when I first entered the temple I did not understand how it differed from other branches (pun intended) of Buddhism. I’m slowly learning it seems to emphasise the importance of immersing, or ‘transdescending’, oneself in the soil of life rather than trying to transcend it. That the soil, sometimes seen as just ‘dirt’, gives the same life-sustaining nutrients as the sun. Whatever you take ‘life’ to be. And the soil is also fed by the sun. It is all interconnected.
Namo Amida Bu