Here is today's podcast. It is about how nembutsu is defined by one's sincere intention.  Sincerity is one of three dimensions of mind that give fullness of meaning to the practice.

Shan Dao 善導 (613-581) was a great Chinese Pureland teacher.  In Japanese he is called Zendo. In his commentary on the Contemplation Sutra he stressed the importance of the "Three Minds", viz. the sincere mind, the profound mind and the mind that transfers merit.

The Contemplation Sutra is one of the “Three Pureland Sutras”.  The other two are the Sutra of the Buddha of Limitless Life, generally known as the Larger Pureland Sutra, and the Amida Kyo, also known as the Smaller Pureland Sutra.

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In the last podcast I talked about how, even though it’s sometimes difficult for us to receive each other’s love, Amida always receives our devotions as long as they’re genuine, no matter what form they’re in. This has a number of implications.

One of the first implications is that sincerity is more important than form. Sincerity is the first of what are called the Three Minds. The Three-Minds-teaching came to prominence in Shan Dao’s commentary on the Contemplation Sutra. I’ll say more about the other two minds in subsequent podcasts. Here it’s enough to establish that sincerity is an important first step.

Sincerity can’t be the whole picture; we can see this from commonplace examples. It’s perfectly possible to be sincerely wrong. At the moment there is quite a lot of discussion in current affairs about the phenomenon that suddenly sprang up of people pulling down or defacing statues. In this issue it is perfectly possible to be sincere in being for or against: Some people might sincerely believe that it is a terrible thing to have statues that represent values that are counter to what we want to be important in society today, and that these statues must be pulled down. Another person might just as sincerely believe that history is important, you can’t change the history that you’ve got, it’s very important to respect it and that pulling down statues is a terrible thing to do. These two positions can’t both be right, but people can both be sincere in thoughts about it. There’s a number of other positions that people could sincerely take as well.

So, sincerity is important, but it’s not the be all and end all. This is why there are three important minds, not just one. In a sense we might say: three dimensions of the mind of spiritual devotion.

The second important implication of Amida’s acceptance of our devotions in whatever form they come, of sincere intention being more important than form, is that the form can be various. This is obvious at a simple level. The nembutsu “Namo Amida Bu” takes a different form in different countries, according to the language. If you’re in China, then perhaps it is “Omito Fo” or “Namo Omito Fo”, if you’re Vietnamese: “Namo Adida Phat”, and so on. But it can also have completely different forms. Japanese: “Namo Amida Butsu” is very close to “Namo Amid Bu”. But in Japanese it could also be: “Ki myō jin jip-pō mugekō nyo rai”. There are many different ways in which you can say the nembutsu.

But even beyond saying, the basic structure of Pureland teaching is, that once you have selected the nembutsu, that when the nembutsu has become your fundamental practice, then it starts to pervade the whole of your life, so that many things can become nembutsu; and so, instead of it being, as it were, “a practice”, something that you do deliberately for an hour a day or so many repetitions, it becomes something that pervades all your activity, everything you do. I spend quite a lot of time sawing up pieces of wood, partly for firewood, partly for construction, and so on – each stroke of the saw can be a nembutsu. I might say the nembutsu as I use the saw or I might just imagine that this is nembutsu. So, any action can become nembutsu; and this means, of course, that many different practices can become nembutsu as well.

So, the Pureland approach is very flexible, but is has a fundamental, solid basis; and that basis is the nembutsu. So long as it is sincere, whatever is intended sincerely to be nembutsu, is nembutsu.

Namo Amida Bu
Thank you very much

Dharmavidya
David

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