In June I did a podcast about the Sincere Mind. The Sincere Mind is one of the three minds that were written about by the great Pureland Teacher Shan Dao.
The second of these three minds is the Profound Mind. When we say that we are profoundly affected by something, we mean that it has really touched our heart. It is no longer simply an idea, but something that has entered into our deepest feelings in a way that makes it a constant background to our life and part of the structure of our life.
When you trust somebody profoundly, you do not spend all your time thinking about how trustworthy they are. You just take it for granted. The trust has become part of the structure of who and what you are. A child might have that kind of trust in a parent.
Of course, sometimes, in the course of time, a trust that has been established in this way is broken and this causes a deep psychic wound. Probably, we are all carrying such wounds in varying ways, in varying degrees – unavoidable in the life in the world that we are in.
I think you can understand that such a deep trust is a form of unconditionality. One trusts unconditionally.
Thus, the child has been abused by a parent, they might spend many years trying to find out what he or she (the child itself) did wrong. Because, when trust is profound, it’s inconceivable, that the trusted person, the parent perhaps, could have been false.
Because we live in the world of conditions, in samsara, betrayals of this kind are unavoidable sooner or later. Love always brings some disappointment. Maturity is a function of the sublimation of the resulting grief.
Not only do we suffer the consequences of samsara, also we are part of samsara. We ourselves are part of it, we ourselves are also of the nature to let others down, to fail to deliver, we don’t deliver unconditional love. In fact, we are foolish beings, vulnerable, prone to error, caught up in tangled emotions and confused ideas.
It is precisely at this point that we profoundly realize that it is our nature that Amida’s light unfolds us. It’s the realization that I am completely powerless to expunge the grief from my heart. The inevitable grief is just a product of samsaric life.
I simply do not have the power in myself to achieve liberation. It’s this realization of helplessness that is the profound mind. Then what comes with it, is the faith that Amida accepts even such beings as this, as me, all in my hopeless case. This is a trust that will never be betrayed. In this way one is seized by Amida, never to be relinquished. So, the profound mind is the coming together of the heartfelt realization of one’s own feeble state, one’s bombu nature, together with true faith where, even so, the grace of the Great Buddha unfailingly unfolds.
The awakening of such faith in Japanese it called shinjin. It is a profoundly emotional event. When one has experienced shinjin, one feels a great humility and a great gratitude. We express that gratitude with the nembutsu Namo Amida Bu.
Namo Amida Bu
Thank you very much
Dharmavidya
David
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