Tag Archives: Uchiyama

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last resort

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last resort (dictionary.com again)

A final expedient or recourse to achieve some end or settle a difficulty. For example, If you don’t improve, we’ll try this new medication as a last resort. This term originally referred to a court of law from which there was no appeal. [Late 1600s]

In sangha last night, we shared about the challenge of acting with compassion towards those who have caused harm.  Martine Batchelor’s talk given at Upaya Zen Center on compassion as an expression of ethics encouraged an open-hearted questioning of the challenges we face in families.  Sometimes a spontaneous expression of regret to someone who is suffering the consequences of their own actions can be seen by others as taking sides.  Sometimes it is just impossible to conceive of someone being worthy of compassion and feelings of hate arise.  The actual challenge we felt was in facing ourselves in our anger and vengefulness without layering on self-loathing.

Most people live by their desires or karma.  They go through their lives dragged around by desires and hindered by the consequences of previous harmful actions…. We are born into our lives with our desires and may live our whole lives just reacting or responding to them.

from Opening the Hand of Thought by Uchiyama

I suggested that perhaps the best we can sometimes do as bodhisattvas-in-training is to ensure that the potential for further damage stops with us.

In contrast to that (living by karma or desires) is the way of life of a bodhisattva who lives by vow.  The life that flows through each of us and through everything around us is actually all connected.

Then someone suggested that perhaps by living as best we can, we might develop a “herd immunity” to anger, greed, and misunderstanding.

Thank you for practicing and inoculating,

Genju

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last mile

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I was playing on dictionary.com and entered the word “last” + the wild card *.  Along with the usual suspects of “last gasp”, “last straw” and so on, was “last mile”.  But it wasn’t the last mile of a condemned person.

last mile

The phrase used to describe one of the problems in attaining higher-speed, higher-capacity information flow to every household. It refers to the copper telephone wire that still carries information to households. The limited capacity of the wire slows data transmission even though it is possible to send data over high-capacity systems from anywhere in the world to within the “the last mile” (give or take) before the house. The use of cable technology, fiber optic technology, and wireless satellite technology are several of the solutions used to address this problem.

I wonder if our wiring to receive bodhisattva-hood is similar?

Uchiyama writes that a bodhisattva is one who lives by vow and repentance.  I had to suspend my automatic assumptions of these words to understand his meaning.  To live without being derailed by emotions and thoughts, to devote ourselves to the growth and care of others,  to set the course in that direction is vow.  It is a life direction, the zazen practitioners’ whole life direction.  To repent is to know our inability to fulfill it.  It is not a matter for regret or seeking forgiveness but rather a willingness to face what is – life straight on.

When there is no vow, we lose sight of progress;
when there is no repentance, we lose our way.

You are a bodhisattva.  I am a bodhisattva.  Yet I also perceive things differently from you, experience things in ways that do not always transmit across that last mile. In that silence, I falter and get lost.  It makes me wonder what the attrition rate is for bodhisattvas?

But we try again, anyway:  to transmit across that last mile, to cultivate willingness to continue even when blind to any progress we may be making and lost to all but ourselves.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju