This posting is a narrative recollection of our first meeting as I remember it. I am certain to be omitting some things and because of that I will ask JS (I’ll refer to this person by these initials) to also contribute his recollection of our first meeting. From here on out though I will record the discussions and post edited transcripts.
“Thus have I heard. The Buddha once lived on Mt. Grdharkuta in the City of King-House. He was accompanied by twelve thousand great bhiksus.” Lotus Sutra Chapter I
We began our first evening by reciting portions of Chapter I, all of Chapter II and the Yokuryoshu and chanting Odaimoku.
JS had written in an email wondering if this made me his Sensei and before we began I wanted to discuss my feelings about this. I explained to him that determining whether or not I was his Sensei depended on what his feelings were but that I would prefer to reserve that term specifically for those who have made a vow to become priests. It is officially custom that Shami or novice priest must use that term when addressing priests, but it isn’t a requirement for others to do the same.
I explained that my feelings about using that term were rather mixed. I don’t want others to feel that they too must refer to me by that title and then have the term loose its meaning. For someone to be another’s Sensei I feel is a relationship and commitment that the parties enter into with an understanding of mutual respect, and with a specific intention, but not something that comes about just because someone is their teacher or assumes the position of teacher. Perhaps I am giving it too much importance, that may be due to how I see it misused or at least cheapened by over use with no understanding of relationship or mutual agreement.
There are certainly enough instances where the term is bandied about with no other meaning other than a term of simple respect or formality. But since it is a foreign word that we are adopting into our language not to necessarily replace some other word but to use in a special situation then I think consideration should be given to it’s use in our language. In Japan the term may or may not always have any other significance other than formality, but we have enough of our own words to use without adopting another foreign word. So if we are going to use it, to incorporate it into our language then it should have some other reason than to replace already existing good words.
Oh well, I am getting off the spot here. We both did agree that using the term Sensei by JS when referring to me was not necessary to define our relationship.
We are beginning our discussion around the book “The Buddha in the Robot; A Robot Engineer’s Thoughts on Science and Religion” by Masahiro Mori, published by Kosei Publishing. The English translation was done in 1981, something that we both commented on indicating that we are certain to find many scientifically outdated concepts, but so far in our readings this fact may not actually be significant in any way than to make the book seem antiquated but certainly not irrelevant.
JS had finished reading through Chapter 2 and I myself had begun re-reading it through Chapter 3 as of this evening. Something I do when I read is to underline and frequently make notes in the margins of books that I own. Books that I don’t own I use post-it-notes or some other method. Since I own this book I had done this. I noticed however that JS had no markings and when asked to reflect on what he had read he was to some degree unable to recall specifics about his readings, though he had made some observations in his journal.
At this point we stopped and talked about the practice of making marginal notations. I encouraged him to do something along this line going forward so that he would be able to refer to specific things during the course of our dialogue. While I didn’t actually require him to write in his book I did encourage him to come up with a system that more closely ties his thoughts, observations, feelings, or comments directly to the text for easy reference.
One reason I like to do this, other than the fact that it makes comments close at hand and easy to find, it also is like a recording of where our thoughts are at a particular moment in time. If we were to re-read the book again in the future we have right there a record of what our observations were on previous reads.
Our discussion then took us to the Preface. I am a big stickler for reading any Preface or Forwards or Translator Notes or any such thing that appears at the beginning of a book. It seems to me that many people skip these things and begin with whatever chapter starts the book. Yet contained within these portions of the book we can discover many important things the writer or publisher or translator or others wish us to know that are not contained with in the main text.
So we began with the Preface of this book. JS felt at first when he was reading the Preface that perhaps he would not like this book because he felt it might be too metaphysical for his tastes. In particular he referred to:
“not all the billion of brain cells we are endowed with are functioning right. Our task is to try to make them work better. To do so is what I regard as religious conduct — the presence of those thousand wheels is what makes religion necessary for human beings…”
Yet he did admit that after reading the first few chapters his feelings had changed.
We did not dwell too long on this quote, though I feel there is certainly much that we could have discussed. Instead we got into daily practice, which of course is defined or suggested by our religion or our denomination.
JS commented that there were times when he felt guilty at not being able to do his daily practice, that he would beat himself up (not necessarily his words) over not going through the ritual or the formality of his daily religious routine. We talked about this for almost the remainder of our time together and the dialogue was interesting and in depth, but alas too detailed for me to recall much of the specifics, so I’ll just close with about where we left things.
I asked JS to consider his daily practice and see if he could determine what about it he finds of value, what about it he could separate out as formality and thus possibly of a different nature than the actual religious or spiritual aspect of his practice. This isn’t necessarily coming out so clear in this writing. But I wanted him to look at what about his daily practice about his daily worship that may be considered to be the lucky rabbit’s foot, while useful perhaps though not absolutely always necessary. Since JS likes to think of himself as a highly rational person one that doesn’t believe in superstitions and things unprovable scientifically I wanted him to find where the contradiction lay in his feelings that performing certain routines or rituals on a daily basis was a foundation for his happiness. Especially since he seemed to feel that by not performing these rituals and such caused him to be out of whack or out of kilter. Is our faith our religious belief our practice of Buddhism merely a collection of rituals that we perform for ‘good luck’ or is there something there at the core that truly does benefit us, is it the ritual or the thing within the ritual? Can there be improvement or betterment without the ritual per se?
These will be some of the questions we will probe in our next discussion, that and more.
I look forward to being able to present edited transcripts going forward as I am not endowed with the best memory. Also my recollections will not be same as JS’s and that is unfortunate. I think that this will be more interesting as a dialogue rather than a monologue. I look forward to your comments as well.
With Gassho,
Ryusho
