When I look at history in a very broad sense, I see that civilizations come and go. There have been many. They arise, they prosper, they decline and they fall. Sometimes, a civilization falls and is quickly replaced by another one, a new culture that is rising. Sometimes, there is a period of chaos and nothing emerges for some centuries. Even great civilizations, great cultures, are subject to the rule of impermanence. They depend upon conditions and when the conditions change, they change; and when vital conditions are lost, then they collapse.
Each civilization tends to assume that it is, in some sense, permanent; though the great majority of them, historically, have worked on the assumption that things are getting worse. Most of the great cultures looked back to a “golden age” situated somewhere in the remote past: the time, when the first emperor invented agriculture and started to feed the population with rice, or whatever it might be.
So, this was the mentality of most people. Politics, economics, culture were all based on this assumption that the best time was in the past. Religions developed with this as their back-drop. Pureland Buddhism is no exception. At the time when Pureland became popular in Japan, this was the time when people thought that Kaliyuga had arrived, the dark age. There was a sense that the Buddha had lived and taught and that was a golden age, and, as time went on, we became more and more and more remote from the time of the great sage and so things got worse; and when you looked around yourself in Japan at that time you could see plenty of evidence: there were wars, there were plagues, there were earthquakes, there were fires, there were disasters of many kinds. It was, to the ordinary person, self-evident that things had been better in the past.
For the last 200 years we have been in a very different sort of culture. Since the industrial revolution we’ve had a sense of progress. We’ve had a sense that the future is always better. Each ten-year period is better than the previous decade; and this has been so for a couple of hundred years, so that people are now deeply in this mentality. Yet, early in the 21st century, something went wrong with this idea. In 2007 we had the great financial crash and things haven’t really recovered since then; and now, of course, much is going wrong. Right at the moment, as I speak, the corona virus crisis is getting worse. The economic situation, undoubtedly, will also get worse. The ecological problems that we face are certainly getting worse. We have exterminated 2/3 of the other animals on the planet already. So, there are many signs that we have crossed some sort of watershed, some sort of threshold, so that we are now in a period when there is much evidence that things are getting worse. The mentality of the public will change - has already changed to some degree. We haven’t quite got used to this new situation. Many people think we will get back to “normal” – meaning we’ll get back to an age where we believe in progress, where we believe things inevitably get better. Well, they don’t. Sometimes they go up, sometimes they go down. It all depends on conditions. We have to live with this reality; and if we are spiritual people, we concentrate on creating the right spiritual conditions, so that even if the material world falls apart around us, still we live in the right spirit. This is to invoke good in all situations.
Namo Amida Bu
Thank you very much
Dharmavidya
David
A passage from The Larger Pure Land Sutra: "Although a tathagata shares his knowledge and vision with innumerable other tathagata arhat Samyak Sambuddhas, it is nowise diminished thereby.
Why so? Because it issues from a cause inexhaustible. Thus, the Tathagata’s compassion never runs dry."
Glossary
"Tathagata" - an epithet for a Buddha.
"Arhat" - a saint, one who has defeated greed, hate and delusion and is worthy of offerings
"Samyak" - complete, perfect, whole
"Sambuddha" - complete/perfect Buddha
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