The following in one form or another will be in the final publication although it is presented here out of order and in a very rough draft.
Temporary Nature – Ichinen Sanzen
Today I would like talk about Ichinen Sanzen, 3000 conditions of mind in a moment. Ichinen Sanzen is a very complex theory in Buddhism and frequently is gets reduced to simply explaining the 10 Worlds. However there is an aspect of Ichinen Sanzen which I would like to explore with you. In a way this is a developing realization. That is the way it happens for me. I’ll think and think about something, turning it over and over in my mind. Then one day something will happen, perhaps someone asks me a question, or some situation arises and then all of a sudden a light bulb goes off and ‘bam’ inspiration lights up.
Ten Worlds
Many of you know about the Ten Worlds, and so I won’t go into a lot of detail on each of the individual worlds. However what I would like to illustrate is how they are mutually always present. There is a therapy philosophy called Internal Family Systems Theory, IFS for short.
IFS is considered an integrative systems model of psychotherapy which was begun by Richard Schwartz, Ph.D. Briefly this theory states that our mind is made up of relatively discreet subpersonalities each with its own view point and qualities as well as capacities to process experiences.
If we think about the Ten Worlds we can see a certain correlation between Ten Worlds and IFS. We as individuals in any moment in time has a potential to experience any of the Ten possible conditions such as Hell, Anger, Hunger, Animality, and so forth. When we are in any of these ten conditions we also have the potential to experience any other condition. So when we are in hell we still retain the possibility to be enlightened.
Also, when we are in any one of the Ten Worlds we view our environment and experience in different ways than we would in another world. On a good day, if you are cooking and burn something on the stove, it might simply be a funny experience, one you can laugh about and shrug your shoulders and begin again. On a bad day this same incident might cause you to yell and throw things, cuss and have a break down.
There is another aspect to this that we frequently do not consider and this is age. Now you may ask what does age have to do with the Ten Worlds. Consider this for a moment. Do you think that you respond to experiences the same way now as you did when you were three years old, or ten years old, or even 20 years old for those older than 20. Think about this for a moment. The you, you are now is not the same you, you were in the past. The hell of a five-year-old, for many, is not the same experience as hell for a twenty-year-old.
A five-year-old hell is not being able to stay up all night, or have desert before the main meal. A five-year-old hell might be made to clean up a mess. A twenty-year-old hell might be a boyfriend breaking up with his girlfriend. A twenty-year-old hell might be not being able to find a job, or not being able to get off from work to attend a rock concert. Can you imagine a five year old being in hell because she can’t find a job, or can’t date a certain boy? And yet when each of these persons are in hell, they are in hell for them in their current state. Different things will cause the experience, yet hell is hell.
The same can be said of enlightenment or any of the Ten Worlds. So while the Ten Worlds all exist simultaneously in any given moment they are also changing in nature according to our age and circumstances. They are not fixed in any moment and no moment is fixed in time.
Ten Suchnesses – Junyoze
The Ten Suchnesses we read every time we recite Chapter II, in Sindoku they are the nyo ze phrases we repeat three times. They are briefly; appearance, nature, entity, powers, activities, primary causes, environmental causes, rewards and retributions, equality.
Is your appearance today the same as it was when you were five or twenty? I know for myself it is much different. I didn’t have all these wrinkles and as many grey hairs when I was twenty. When I was twenty I was living in Hawaii, having a good time going to the beach everyday, riding my motorcycle, spending time in the wind and sun. Today I wear the badges of all of that as large liver spots and an abundance of wrinkles. As a twenty year old I had no concerns for my youthful skin, after all don’t most twenty year olds think they will remain twenty years old all of their lives? Maybe not?
I am, as you all are, much bigger than you were when you were five or ten years old. So appearance changes with time, this we know however we sometimes forget and think the person I was as an eight year old is the same as the sixty year old. The same is true of your nature, which is you basic tendency in life. Your nature is perhaps only just being formed when you are six, seven, or ten. Even today, though perhaps much more slowly, your nature is changing. Buddhist practice is one of the best influences to changing our basic nature. Our nature is greatly influenced by our appearance, though appearance is objective and nature is subjective, they are still tied together.
Entity is our form and power is our potential. As a ten year old you have no power or for most people only limited power. Your form is diminutive and you are mostly controlled by others, such as parents, or teachers. A ten year old does what others tell them and doesn’t initiate many actions of their own. Yet that child is still processing experiences.
Primary cause and environmental cause are our ways of processing our experiences which then in turn influences the ways in which we respond. So an eight year old is forced into some labor of a less than savory nature, they have no power, not control over their environment, they merely do as they must. Now this is very important to understand.
Later on that eight year old grows and learns the true nature of the activity they were forced to do. They learn that what they did may have been immoral, or harmful to others. This may be an extreme example but it applies to each and everyone of us to some degree.
The eight year old grows to become a fifteen year old and carries the memory of those actions as a eight year old. But the eight year old girl no longer exists in reality. This gets into the reason why we recite these Ten Suchnesses three times.
One aspect of these Ten Suchnesses is they are temporary. I’ll come back to this in a moment. Please bear with me this material is actually difficult to talk about in a linear manner.
Finally in the Ten Suchnesses we have effects, rewards and retributions, and equality. As you can tell I am not going into a lot detail on each one of these, merely a quick overview.
As little children we make all sorts of causes for which we receive effects throughout our lives. Some of us may have learned to lie effectively, some may have learned to be overly sensitive to emotions of others, some may have learned to avoid conflict. Now virtually no young child knows they are learning these things, a child doesn’t have the mind of an adult in order to process that complex of a thought. We can see in this that indeed, each of us is a product of both our environment, experiences, our physical characteristics, even our biological DNA. We are extremely complex beings.
We make causes every moment of our existence, those causes though yield different outcomes depending upon a variety of circumstances. Consider this, anger as a ten year old generally looks and manifests differently from anger as a thirty year old, don’t you think. Yes there are likely to be some general similarities but picture a thirty year old holding his breath while laying on the floor screaming. That isn’t generally how at thirty year old acts, but certainly how some ten year olds act.
A thirty year old may go get drunk and cause a fight, not generally something a ten year old is capable of doing. A thirty year old might hit someone, at ten year old might also hit someone however the damage a ten year old might cause is frequently less than what a thirty year will.
Even the remorse changes as we age and become more self aware of our potential for harm or good.
Three Truths – SanTai – Ku – Ke – Chu
This is perhaps one of the most difficult concepts to explain and understand and I will probably only do a poor job, however I will attempt to do my best.
Roughly translated ku is voidness, ke is temporary, and chu is the middle way. This idea is actually used in various ways in Buddhist theory. This is my understanding as I am now and as I relate it to all of the above.
Today, I am as I am and you are as you are. Today we all carry memories of our past, we know what we did to varying degrees when we were children. We have memories. Those memories change within us depending upon how we learn to process and even that changes as we grow, and mature. For example my relationship with my deceased parents and the way they treated me as a child has changed dramatically just over the past two years, even though they are dead.
Thanks to some insight from someone I was able to view some of the actions of my parents in a different light. The same actions which occurred over 40 years ago are now interpreted in a different way and so the effect of those causes has changed, yet this change only occurred in my mind. So those causes while seemingly fixed an unchangeable actually are quite changeable. They are in a way both temporary and also void.
Those causes no longer exist, they are memories only, and the memory of them is subject to change. The original cause is ku or void. The memory is ke or temporary and changeable. The middle way is to realize that both ku and ke are reality at the same time.
Let me offer another example. I will use a general story shared to me by a woman I know. She will recognize the story and some of her close friends may as well. Her story though is actually the story of many people and provides a lesson for all of us.
As a young girl during World War II she sorted clothes that belonged to Jews in the concentration camps who were killed in gas chambers. Of course we all now know the true horrors and atrocities of that time. When this woman was a young child made to do this work by parents who needed the small income it earned in order to survive she had no idea what she was really doing.
As children will do, she made a game of it. She along with her fellow children made the work into fun. It is often how we process things when we are children. As children we are really not programed yet to deal with complex thoughts. Play is a survival technique; think of the person who always makes fun of themselves even though they are in great pain. If we laugh it takes away some of the hurt.
Now we fast forward 70 plus years and this woman, no longer a child of eight, a woman who has grown in wisdom and knowledge, a woman who has carried the guilt of the actions of the eight year old for most of her entire life. The eight year old both exists and yet does not exist. If we looked everywhere possible we would never discover the eight-year-old child. We have perhaps evidence of the existence of the child in photographs and memories but that child no longer has any physicality. It is the same for the 80-year-old woman. If we look at the photos of the eight-year-old girl we can see no pictures of the 80 year old lives today. The 80-year-old woman is only a potential of the eight-year-old girl.
I hope I have not made this too difficult to understand. This is an important and often neglected aspect of Ichinen Sanzen. In IFS theory we have all manner and number of parts that comprise out self. At the core of self are these characteristics. We are compassionate, connected, concerned, centered, creative, there is actually a long list of ‘c’ words that describe the individual at their core. Don’t these sound a lot like how we think of enlightenment? I think there is great similarity.
The parts that surround this core self are different aspects of self. For me, one part I identify as the ‘five year old boy’, this boy was bullied, teased, beaten, always told he was not good enough. There is also the ‘twenty year old guy’ who thinks he is a real bad-ass, a tough guy, who will not take any crap from anyone. There is also ‘the Buddha guy’ who tries to be empathetic and actually has a hard time because he feels the pain of others so realistically. There are also many other parts who have developed either as survival techniques, or as a result of internal growth. Please do not think about this in terms of split personality because they are not the same. In IFS there is a complete integration of all the parts, in other words all of the 3000 conditions of mind are all present, all connected, all related always.
So back to our 80 year old woman today who carries the memory of the eight year old. The 80 year old has tools available to her today she did not have as an eight year old. The eight year old had neither the skills nor capacity the 80 year old has. Think about the Ten Suchnesses if you will, think about those as an eight year old and those as an eighty year old. Big differences can be seen.
So, the eight year old existed but no longer exists as anything but a memory. The eight year old has influence today, even though there is no physical power present because the eight year old is we could say dead. The eight year old girl died a long time ago. She maybe hasn’t been buried yet, but she is dead. In her place now, in her reincarnation if you will, there have been a multitude of women who have come and gone. The reincarnation process, the cycle of birth and death, continue in every moment endlessly and without interruption.
So what is real, and what is not real? This I believe is where the middle way come in. All of it is both real and unreal at the same time. Can the 80 year old woman touch the eight year old girl? Yes at times the eight year old girl is perhaps painfully present, and yet where is that eight year old girl? She is no where to be seen.
Ok, we all have similar experiences, things we have experienced, things we have done at different stages in our lives. We may have regrets we may have pride. Yet all of those things both existed, no long exist, and only exist temporarily and are no more.
Life is a very fluid experience though we frequently wish it to be solid an unchanging.
So, how do we proceed. I think what our Buddhist practice calls on us to do, is to understand the true nature of our existence which is transient, always changing, always dying, always being reborn, in every moment of our lives. Mind blowing isn’t it?
So, today I make peace with my past. I am not the same person I was 60 years ago, and I’m not the same person I will be a week from today. I am responsible for my actions in this moment, but no longer in control of have power over my actions in the past moment. This moment only allows me to experience the effects of previous causes and decide how I will proceed into the future. In a way the past does not truly exist, though we cling to it as if it were life and death, when in fact the past is only death, and the present represents our life.
The eight year old girl only has power to the degree the eighty year old woman allows it. We are each tasked with making friends with our past selves and past experience and past causes. We are not given the job of passing judgment on the actions of our past selves. This is not our Buddhist practice. Judgment is not really compatible with Buddhism. Instead we are called upon to life skillfully in the middle way.
There is much more I would like to say about this however I have gone on long enough. I thank you for your time and attention. Please feel free to ask me questions. Your questions are a benefit to me because they may trigger some idea in my own mind.
Please be well.
