The Precept Body in My Life Part 2

There was one time I was having an argument with one of my Dharma brothers because I accused him of stealing one of my dharma instruments.  He would not admit to it and I still gave him the benefit of the doubt by trying to find it myself.  By the time I gave up finding it, I still accused him of stealing it and demanding him to return it to me.  I admit I have never been that angry about something like that before but that was one of those occasions where my whole precepts thing just flew out the window because I was so angry that someone I trusted would do that to me.  The temple custodian later found the instrument and gave it back to me, I asked where it was and he said under the table near the main shrine, it must have rolled off the table and fell under without anyone noticing.  At that moment I felt this big block of guilt on me, I took a few deep breaths after thanking the custodian and walked up to my dharma brother and humbly apologized to him and admitting that I wrongfully accused him of stealing and told him that I will be more careful before making such accusations.  My dharma brother accepted my apology and he went on with his business.  I on the other hand still decided to make three prostrations to the Buddha while contemplating back on the precepts and the Bodhisattva path before letting go of the incident.  I did not break down or anything but I made a prayer to the Buddha and told the whole incident and the whole process and repented for what I did.

The above incident may have been a more extreme example of when I did not uphold the precepts.  My Precept Master (Ven. Master Hsing Yun) gave a story about an Indian king returned to his palace from fighting a war and was unhappy with the meal he had so he ordered to have the royal chef executed.  The Queen, who was upholding the precepts at the time, wanted to save the royal chef’s life, so she invited the king to have a drink and requested an appetizer that only the royal chef knew how to prepare.  The king then realized that he just ordered for him to be executed and immediately ordered for him to be released, thus the queen successfully saved the royal chef’s life.  The queen violated the precept of consuming an intoxicant but that was her application of skillful means to save a life.  I think this is more like bending the precepts instead of breaking or defiling them because I feel like even though an unwholesome act was committed, the intention/mindset behind the action is more important so this may not necessarily mean that the precept is broken.  One experience I constantly have is with insects around my house.  Recently I found a wasp’s nest above my porch, there were still wasps swarming back and forth near my main entrance.  I did not know how to get rid of them since I was afraid that if I got stung I could get skin complications, and for the sake of my mother and young nephews, I had to seek professional help.  I called someone in and he sprayed some pesticide and at the same time in my mind, I was apologizing to the wasps.  That evening after everything got cleaned up, I did a smoke offering puja and dedicated the merit to the wasps that were lost.

The Way to Cold Mountain Part 1

Han Shan, or Cold Mountain was a legendary figure around the Tang Dynasty that was associated with a collection of poetry used by Zen, or Chan, Buddhists and Daoists alike.  He didn’t really keep to conventional tactics of paper, brush, and ink.  He carved on bamboo, wrote on walls, rocks, mountains, etc.  He is often depicted with Shi-de, the pair is always known as Han Shan Shi De.  Some believed that they were manifestations of Manjusri Bodhisattva and Samantabhadra Bodhisattva.  There were no clear dates, or even a given name about Cold Mountain, but the common understanding so far was that he was around sometime during the eighth and ninth centuries.  Most of his footprints were around the Tien Tai Mountains of the area south of Hangzhou.  Many of his works were written near the area.  He wrote about 600 piece of poetry, of which 313 pieces were collected till this day.  The content of his works mainly revolve around his experiences or encounters he has had with people he met or even his thoughts about society.  His works can be of simple observation, natural or social, but can definitely transcend what seem to be mundane facts into ultimate truths.  That was how Zen Cold Mountain was.  For this reason, and the attractiveness of overall biographical mystery, countless poets, scholars, misfits and Zen practitioners today count themselves amongst the devoted.  He never wrote by traditional brush and paper though.  He carved on the walls of the caved he lived in, the trunks of surrounding trees, bamboo husks, etc.  For this paper I will quote one of Cold Mountain’s poetry and share my reflections along with commentary from current Masters.

人問寒山道，寒山路不通。夏天冰未釋，日出霧朦朧．
似我何由屆，與君心不同。君心若似我，還得到其中。

There exist many translations of the above poem since the 1950s by writers such as Burton Watson, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, etc.  I have chosen two translations, one by Red Pine and another by the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas for the purposes of this presentation:

Trans. By Red Pine

People ask the way to Cold Mountain,

But roads don’t reach Cold Mountain.

In summer the ice doesn’t melt,

And the morning fog is too dense.

How did someone like me arrive?

Our minds are not the same.

If they were the same,

You would be here.[1]

 

Trans. By Josey Shun and Bhikshuni Heng Yin of City of Ten Thousand Buddhas

People ask the way to Cold Mountain:

There is no path.

How do I get there?

My mindset is different.

If your mind becomes like mine,

You will get there with ease.[2]

Cold Mountain himself lived in a cave and would sometimes travel down Tian Tai Mountain at times.  He would also stop at Guo Qing Temple as well.  When people wanted to visit him, they would not know how to find him or where to find him.  Navigation was not yet invented.  When Cold Mountain wrote this poem, was he thinking about the physical phenomena?  Could he have thought that since he could not install lighting to show where he can be located, that people could find him easily through his writings?  Masters such as Venerable Master Hsing Yun of Fo Guang Shan may think otherwise.  His take on the poem is referring to the Cold Mountain inside us.  Venerable Master Hsing Yun taught that because the common person’s mind still differentiates, he cannot connect with the Cold Mountain.  Someone can ask what Cold Mountain’s stage of cultivation was.  Such differentiation like that could not experience what Cold Mountain has experienced.  The mind is like free-flowing water, but because of a single thought of attachment the water solidifies into ice, and even under the summer heat the ice cannot melt.  The sun’s rays can shed light all over, but a single thought of ignorance can be like the thick fog, even the bright sun cannot penetrate through it.  Cold Mountain’s state of mind is like the vastness of space, the layperson’s mind has limits, the stages are quite different, but if our stages are similar, melting the ice mountain of differentiation, disbursing the fog of ignorant views, then our minds can meet each other.

[1] Shan, Han. The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain. Translated by Red Pine. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2000.

[2] Professor Yeh Chia-Ying. “Lectures on Tao Yuanming’s Poems (continued).” 萬佛城金剛菩提海 Vajra Bodhi Sea. January 1, 2000. Accessed December 08, 2017. http://www.drbachinese.org/vbs/publish/356/vbs356p035.htm.

Spiritual Distraction

There have been more than a few occasions where someone will have an issue and after consulting with a monastic or a minister, that person has prescribed to do a certain number of recitations and meditate for x times per day at whatever minutes per session.  After performing all those actions, the problem never seemed to go away in the first place, if not ferment into something worse.

I’ll give an example with fictional characters:

Mike has been out of work for over a year now.  He has been able to do some side jobs and some cash jobs to keep him afloat, but he knows that continuing to do that will not be sufficient in the long term.  He went to his nearest temple and talked to the resident monk about it and this is what he got:

Mike:  Sensei, I’ve been out of work for a while and I’m not sure where I can go.

Monk: How are you maintaining yourself?

Mike:  I have some side jobs that can barely make ends meet.

Monk:  I see, you should do some wealth-increasing recitations to help you along.

Mike:  I have.

Monk:  Oh! Then you probably have too much bad karma, you’ll need to repent all of that first.

Mike:  But I don’t have money to host repentance rituals.

Monk:  You do them at home, focus on repenting and nothing else, day in, day out, you’ll get good news sooner or later.  Trust me.

Mike: But…

Monk:  If you don’t get rid of that yucky karma you won’t be able to go anywhere.

Mike: Okay…

So the point is, some of these monastics don’t completely realize that not everything can be remedied with ritual alone.  I’m not arguing that it hasn’t worked in the past, but life has become much more complicated now and we all can’t wear a one-size fit all shirt.

During my chaplaincy program, I learned the hard way about not going that route, and later in the program, I completely understood why.  Let’s see what happens if Mike talked to another monk:

Mike:  Sensei, I’ve been out of work for a while and I’m not sure where I can go.

Monk: How are you maintaining yourself?

Mike:  I have some side jobs that can barely make ends meet.

Monk:  I see you’re trying real hard to keep yourself afloat during this transition period.

Mike:  Yes!  It’s stressful and I feel it’s getting in the way of my practice.

Monk:  Well, it’s still important that we have to take care of ourselves externally before working internally.  Could I suggest you maybe consult with an agency to maybe link you to some better-paying jobs?

Mike:  But I don’t have money to do that.

Monk:  I think you can do a little bit of research into that.  Most of them are free until you get hired I think.

Mike: Wow, I never knew that.

Monk:  I have faith you will find a job that will be of the best benefit to you.

Mike: But how about my practice?

Monk:  Well, of course, don’t lose faith and hope.  If you want to talk you can always come over, don’t be a stranger.

Mike:  Thanks Sensei.  I really appreciate it.

Monk:  Have lunch before you go?

Mike: Can I?

Monk:  Sure, it’ll take off one less worry, right?

Mike:  Thank you so much Sensei!

See?  Well, it may not be the most perfect form of spiritual care, but the second monk didn’t immediately impose the need to do ritual or address concerns too far away from the more pressing issue.  These are the kind of things I do on a daily basis, and it sort of gets me when I hear about too many encounters like Mike and the first monk.

What do you think?

 

Rice Pasta with Mushrooms and White Sauce

It was a full moon day at the temple, the Abbot and director had to go out of town leaving me and another resident monk on site.  I was asked to make dinner, so before I left home I found a can of truffle and mushroom sauce that I bought way too long ago.  I thought about pasta.

After evening chanting, I looked in the temple kitchen for some ingredients, mushrooms, butter, milk, etc.  There wasn’t any pasta available, but I found a pack of dried noodles made with rice and gluten shaped like linguine.  I also couldn’t find the flour, so I took a risk and tried rice flour.

I don’t have exact measurements for these ingredients, but for those that have experience, you can probably figure out the portions as we go along.

Ingredients:

• White button mushrooms with stems pulled and skinned if a little too old, cut into thick slices.
• Soy patties, diced.
• deep fried plain white tofu, sliced
• Butter, 2 Tablespoons
• Milk, about a glass
• Flour (rice flour in this case), about 3 Tablespoons
• Small can of truffle and mushroom sauce
• Pasta (or rice pasta in this case)
• Parmesan cheese

To completely vegan-ize this, the butter can be substituted with maybe a mix of avocado and peanut oil, the milk replaced with cashew milk, and the cheese with either a vegan cheese or just skipped altogether.

Cook the pasta a little bit under al-dente or whatever the instructions say.  For example, if the package says 10 minutes, cook them for maybe 8 or 9.  Then save up a little bit of pasta water, then strain.  Saute the mushrooms in a lightly oiled pan until the juices come out and have fairly reduced (I usually reduce to about 1/4) then add soy patty chunks and tofu slices.  Set aside for later.

In another clean pan, melt the butter with an extra tablespoon or so of oil, then add the flour and stir fry until slightly brown and mixed well.  Add the milk, stir around, if it’s too thick, use pasta water to dilute it some.  Season with mushroom powder and add cheese.  Then add the truffle sauce and lower the heat to low.  Stir for a quick minute, taste to make sure it’s not too salty (you can try to do a save with pasta water or milk but not too much).  If there’s not enough seasoning, add salt and pepper to taste.

Mix the pasta into the sauce and plate.  Top with the mushroom stirfry and some more cheese on top.  Serve immediately.

The tofu may sound like it doesn’t exactly fit, but it sat around for a while and needed to be used up.  After trying this recipe the tofu came out pretty nice.  The thing about cooking is that it doesn’t have to be always exactly step-by-step.  Once you can grasp onto the core concepts, for example, getting enough sauce to incorporate all the pasta while not wasting anything, you can change some of the stuff around.

The idea of Zen is that it can’t be completely fixed in stone.  That’s not what Bodhidharma or Hui Neng wanted.  Zen is lively and can be practiced and applied in different ways without neglecting our reflection and awareness of our own actions.  By the way, the final product was successful.

 

To Give… is to Still Give!

I recently ran into an article that talked about dedicating merit.  The contributors each talked about the importance of even dedicating the intention to practice, for the benefit of someone else.  You can find the article here.

For those that follow my other social media feeds, I’ve posted a video about Anguimala’s act of dedicating all his practices to the safety of a mother in labor in the middle of the road, I was going to include a link, but the video was taken down.  The gist of the video is about what Anguimala did at that moment when the mother was in the most need and how he reflected on it back to the Buddha, and the Buddha acknowledged that Anguimala was willing to offer whatever it takes for the mother and child’s safety.

I think a good way to go, just like what Jetsunma said in the article, is to just do it.  I’ve even read comments where the person commenting wrote a dedication, “may all those that read, hit like, and even rise the smallest wholesome thought benefit greatly.  May their merit and wisdom continue to increase.”  When do you ever get to see something like that?

One of my teachers taught me early on that dedicating your efforts for the benefit of all beings is what makes your efforts valuable, otherwise, your practice is no different than mere clockwork.  I take that to heart no matter what I do–the contemplative practices on campus, the rituals I perform, the patients I talk too, the manuscripts I’m working on, the blog posts I write, the books I read, the incense I burn, the candles I offer, etc.  Even if I’m performing a ritual for a specific person, I would still, on behalf of that person, dedicate merits accumulated from those actions to all beings.

Ching Ming, Qing Ming, Tomb Sweeping Day

When my allergies hit, I tend to go through tissue at a much faster rate.  Photo by Public Domain Pictures on Pexels.com

So to me, there are at least a few things that occur when Spring hits its…peak I guess.  One of them is the arrival of my seasonal allergies, and another is the blooming of my tri-colored peach flower tree.  In the Buddhist world, at least in the Chinese Buddhist world that follows the lunar calendar, there is the birthday of Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva (19th day of the 2nd moon), and the Qing Ming festival, which is usually around the fifteenth day of the spring equinox.  The reason it’s called Qingming is that it’s the time of year when the flowers and trees sprout and bud, that also symbolizes the farming community that they can get back to work at full speed from the winter in order to prep again for a full cycle of harvest in the fall.  It can also be a precursor to the rainy season

Another reason Qingming is important is because the Chinese community remembers its ancestors during this time.  Why so?  When Emperor Liu of the Han Dynasty won his empire he took a trip back to his hometown to pay respects to his parent’s grave.  Since wartime just passed, and the citizen’s top priorities were survival and food, not much maintenance was done, so, the cemetery looked pretty messy.   Emperor Liu sent his guards to look for his parent’s grave for the entire day but to no avail.  Emperor Liu became sad, I mean, you’ve become successful and you want to tell mom and dad, but you can’t even find them, of course, he would be sad.  So the Emperor tore up a piece of paper into shreds, since it got real windy, prayed to the heavens in the open space, and said wherever the papers stick to and do not get blown away by the wind will be my parent’s grave, and threw the paper into the air like confetti.  One of the guards found a piece of paper that stuck to a faded tomb marker and behold, it was the Emperor’s parents.  The Emperor had his people revamp the gravesite into an imperial tomb site and at every Qingming, he would personally come and pay respects to his parents.  Eventually, everybody else followed suit and it became a custom to visit graves and clean them up around this time.

The Buddhist community, on the other hand, takes a slightly different approach.  These days, there are families that have since moved away from their home countries and do not have the means to be able to travel back every year.  So local temples hold recitation rituals and repentance retreats so that families can honor and remember their loved ones in a retreat setting while dedicating something more meaningful than paper substances, their merit.   Some of the big cemeteries in the SGV now hold services during this time for the Chinese community, and local temples will at least devote anywhere from an afternoon to a week to the occasion.  Even Buddhist centers of other traditions held memorial services for their Chinese devotees.

Who Celebrates Three Birthdays?!

 

This week the lunar 19th of the second moon comes around.  Most communities will celebrate the birth of Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, or Kannon, or Guanyin (I’ll use Guanyin for the remainder of the post).  You may also hear that this Bodhisattva celebrates three birthdays?  Well, not really.  The 19th of the second lunar moon is considered the birthday, and 19th of the sixth lunar moon is considered Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva’s Enlightenment day, and the 19th of the ninth lunar moon is Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva’s Renunciation day.  Some communities will even devote every 19th of the month as Guanyin day and do related devotional practices then.  The most common explanation for the 19th is according to one of the stories of Guanyin when she was the third princess Miaoshan of one of the kingdoms when China was still divided into different empires.   The story goes that the Princess Miaoshan after experiencing Cinderella type treatment (minus the talking mice) and experiencing different levels of turmoil, she and her gang went through nine different obstacles to reach a certain heaven to be acknowledged by the Buddha and be given another assignment to continue to serve beings until that white-jade bottle gifted to her by the Buddha sprouted a willow branch and attain full enlightenment after fighting off the bad guy that’s been trying to steal the bottle.

The above may not exactly be true, but the TVB drama really drilled that message into its audience.  At least it stuck to me when I was kid watching this series with my mom multiple times.  I think the drama is still copyrighted, but I found the video of the theme song which shows some footage:

Guanyin is a pretty important figure in the Buddhist SGV.  If you pull up the phone book you can find at least five different temples or centers that have named their facility after Guanyin.  A lot of immigrant families, including my own, relied on devotion to Guanyin in order to safely escape from warfare and settle in the US or Canada or wherever.   Why so?  Guanyin made vows to respond to whoever wholeheartedy calls her name.  The famous Mani Mantra and Great Compassion Mantra also came from Guanyin’s compassion to be there when we need her most.

There’s a great video of all of Guanyin’s most common stories put together with sutra references, the English translation may not be the best, but I think the message can still get across.  It’s a long video but I reccommend you go through it.  For my mom’s birthday a while back I produced some DVDs with this video in it, leave me a comment if you’d like one:

The popularity of Guanyin has gotten so big that even Buddhist Wanna-be’s (or cults) are using Her as a tool to promote themselves.  I won’t name them here, but if you have a conversation with them and you have a background of what Guanyin’s great compassion is really about (beyond material gain and benefiting others just to name a few), then you can tell who’s who pretty easily.

There are many texts and practices that are directly related to Guanyin, like the Lotus Sutra, Surangama Sutra, Great Compssion Dharani Sutra, The Great Treasure King Sutra, etc.  There are also practices that relate to Guanyin as well.  Probably the most famous being the Great Compassion Repenance.  There’s a great description here for those that want to look into it more.  Here’s my favorite version of the recorded text:

That’s all for now.  What comes up for you when you think of Guanyin?  Let me know below, and I’ll see you next post.

Safety First!

Now that the lunar new year festivities have closed and I’ve had a chance to recap and reflect on what’s been going on, I ran into this story.  

Though there are many benefits that come with offering lamps or lights, we still have to be mindful of our current conditions.  Especially it’s hard to tell what kinds of materials are being used in the candles we use nowadays.  In general, leaving open flames unattended is not the best way to go.  It is true that some temples will have the traditional oil lamp that burns forever, but that is usually combined with a well vented environment, very low flame with clean oil and clean wicks every day.  Some places have converted to electronic lamps and even digitalized memorial placards to reduce their carbon footprint, but I’ll save that for another post.

I personally leave a candle offering outside on my porch on special days, but that’s outside and the candle would finish burning in about three hours and so far I haven’t had any issues.  What are your experiences with candle offerings?

 

Chow Mein

I still try to find time to cook whenever possible.  It is true that after my work at the temple the volunteers offer me a bento or food I can take back home to warm up for dinner, but that’s not always the case.  On nights when I don’t feel like making a three-course meal but would still like to cook something from scratch, chow mein has been my go-to dish to make.  It’s a good potluck dish for a party as well.

To make these noodles in your own kitchen you’ll need:

1 pack of store bought thick egg noodles or oil noodles as some may call them (for vegans you can use white noodles, just cook, strain, and wash according to package instructions)

1 pack of brown beech mushrooms or bunashimeiji mushrooms, with the bottoms cut off and ripped into individual pieces.

1/4 head of cabbage, julienned.

2 blocks of marinated bean curd, cut into matchsticks or julienned.

1-2T of vegetarian oyster sauce or soy sauce paste

1 cup of  warm water

Soy sauce and sesame oil to taste.

salt, pepper, mushroom powder to taste.

In a wok heated on medium-high, add about 3/4T of oil. After the oil heats up add the cabbage and stirfry well.  Sprinkle a pinch of salt to start the sweating process until most of the moisture has evaporated.  Then add the mushrooms, add the mushroom powder to start sweating those as well, stir fry for about five minutes then add bean curd, add another layer of seasoning and stir fry again for a few minutes.

Open up an area in the middle of the wok and add the noodles and half of the water.  With chopsticks, loosen up the noodles so that they are all drenched in the water, you can add more water a little bit at a time if needed but no more than 1 cup.  If you are using white noodles, 1/2 cup of water should be plenty since the noodles are fully cooked already.  Add the pepper, vegetarian oyster sauce and soy sauce, mix everything well and cover with a lid for a few minutes so the water can evaporate off.

Once most of the water has evaporated, stir everything again and check the noodles if they’re seasoned as you like, you can adjust the seasoning at this point.  Finally, toss in the sesame oil and it’s ready to plate.

This may not be the absolute perfect quality chow mein, but I’ve tried this recipe a few times already and so far, so good.  When temples serve chow mein during lunch, it’s considered a big deal because the cost of chow mein is higher than the cost of the alternative stir-fried rice vermicelli.  Most temples serve chow mein on special days or when someone donates the noodles themselves or offers a significant enough amount of dana for the kitchen to get an order to create this dish.  I use the thick noodles because they can cook in the wok together with everything else and I won’t have to worry about washing another pot.  Thin noodles can also work but I haven’t had enough success stories with them.  Thin noodles I actually like them pan-fried to a crisp on both sides with the ingredients made separately and poured on top.  Let me know if you tried this recipe and let me know what you think!  More recipes in the future perhaps?