A New Beginning

I am the artist formerly known as The Entity In The Chapel. In that blog, I discussed philosophy, religion, art, music, life as someone suffering with mental illness. I imagine that will continue here. But I started a new blog. I have been growing out of the negativity of The Entity identity. Through the use of art as therapy and the discovery of Shin Buddhism, I am learning how to be more at peace. These are qualities I hope to enhance in my life and perhaps share some of that journey with whomever reads my blog. I will always have a dark side. It's not gone forever. But even my dark side will fit under the Child of Amitabha blog because Amitabha calls most strongly for the most deluded and unenlightened people generating endless rebirths and deaths and drowning in samsara. That's me.

I have always been attracted to Buddhism. I have studied Tibetan Buddhism in-depth and Theravada and Chan and Zen to lesser extents. I knew about Shin or Pure Land Buddhism for some time but it never seemed rigorous enough as a discipline to qualify by my definitions of Buddhism. But I've started investigating it further because I was at the spiritual end of my rope and it kept coming up.

Pure Land Buddhism is the Buddhism for lay people. All the other varieties of Buddhism focus primarily on the monastic experience. To achieve enlightenment, you withdraw from the world, you use your own efforts to meditate and study and grow in perfection. Pure Land is for the people who can't or simply do not want to do that or lack the personal mettle to make it work. I am in the last category. I meditate but I will never be another Gautama. Pure Land begins with three Buddhist Sutras, the Pure Land Sutras. The longest and most detailed of these is the story of Bodhisattva Dharmakara's efforts to reach enlightenment and, in particular, his vows for enlightenment. In his 18th of 48 vows, he vows that all beings who sincerely speak his name even 10 times will be taken to his Western Pure Land to study Dharma in the perfect environment and become Buddhas.

That is a very very very basic introduction. Pure Land faith has gone through many changes over the years. Shin Buddhism says that the saying of the Name, the nembutsu, Namu Amida Butsu, is said in gratitude for the boundless compassion of Amida Buddha for making his Primal Vow. The saying of the name is not attempting to persuade him to let one into the Pure Land but instead to thank him for making it certain one will go there. It is a religion of joy in the midst of knowing that life is suffering, as all Buddhism agrees, and that we are the most helpless of beings, unable to stand up and claim enlightenment for ourselves.

Amitabha wants all beings, from a grasshopper to a man or woman, to achieve Buddhahood. Some will meditate and meditate and take countless lifetimes working on it and, for them, that is wonderful. It is good there are those like that. Others, myself included, follow Bodhisattva Nagarjuna's advice to take the easy way over the water, the water of the endless compassion of Amitabha. He is not a Jesus figure. He does not suffer and die. He just loves and teaches and waits for us through countless lives to join him in his holy place and to show us that enlightenment has been with us all along.