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They vow that living beings forever escape their sick bodies and obtain the Tathegata's body. -- Avatamsaka Sutra Ten Transferences Chapter
“Kuo Chen, your worst fault is being sticky with people, especially with women,” said the Master, very clearly. This is called, “recognizing the sickness.” Step #2 is seeing how the disease appears in my behavior; and step #3 is finding a way to turn around. The Master’s statement is, of course, right on. He pointed out the cycle of cause and effect that brought my troubles. In this life I have harmed myself and caused a lot of suffering to others by my selfish misconduct. In the past I tied myself into bad relationships with women, which came to fruition in this lifetime as promiscuous, mutually harmful sexual behavior. Before I met the Proper Dharma in this life, I planted more bad seeds which are certain to flower in the future.
“If you can’t transcend sexual desire, you will not leave the dust,” says the Shurangama Sutra. If I don’t end sexual desire completely, just cut it off for good, I won’t be able to realize my goal of cultivation as a Bodhisattva and becoming Buddha. I won’t succeed. I believe in cause and effect. I see what I’ve done in this life, seen the bad I’ve done, because of the past karma. I saw the blueprint for the future that I was drawing up for myself, and it wasn’t a good one.
I want to change, and in the Dharma I’ve found a medicine to cure my illness. The medicine is called “Three Steps, One Bow and repentance and reform.” Every day I repeat vows to end sexual desire, and I recite a wish that together with all beings I can return to the root and go back to the source of original purity. The vow has a part that says, “I vow that all negative affinities already established will come to fruition in a way other than sexual. I will never again have to endure sexual embrace in order to repay my debts. Any debts owed me in this regard I now cancel.” Does it work? Can I really uproot the bad seeds I’ve planted in this life so that I don’t have to go through the same dance in the future that I endured in this life? I have faith that it will work.
Bowing past the shopping center parking lot in Aptos Village last week, I got an “offering of orange juice without the benefit of a cup,” as Heng Ch’au calls it. Showered with sticky juice from a passing pick-up truck, I thought immediately of my vow.
Later that same afternoon I took a bath in a cup of beer that flew from a blue truck. I repeated the vow with a wish to transfer all merit and virtue of my work so that all beings might return to purity. The next morning I poured a cup of scalding hot tea into my Sierra cup, and reaching for the thermos lid, I tipped the whole cup onto my bare foot. The boiling tea covered my lap as I sat lotus posture before doing zao ke. Scalding burns! And in my head, the memory of how much hot suffering I’d given to others through my lustful, casual, selfish behavior in the past. (Heng Ch’au’s comment: “That’s good tea, really wakes you up, eh?”) Are these incidents actually my sexual karma resolving itself in other form, as I wished in my vow? I think so, I believe so.
Three Steps, One Bow is making my cure possible. Who throws the orange juice and beer? My Good Advisors. They may be people whom I’ve hurt in the past. Who are the teenaged Santa Cruz High School girls who shower me with rocks and curses that would make a truck driver blush? I see them as my own behavior returning to me. As the Bodhisattva in the Ten Practices Chapter of the Avatamsaka Sutra says,
…as he sees a host of starving beggars coming to request his body’s flesh to eat, “these are my good friends. I am really getting benefit. Without being asked, they are coming to help me enter into Buddhadharma.”
I’ve just begun to see the extent of my illness. But this is a start, and with the good medicine I’ve got, bit by bit I will get well.
The Master explained the basic source of confused karma:
All the problems of the world come from the presence of the self. Without the self, who is there to be unhappy? Who is there to feel pain? The self is an illusion. You should have no self.
That is the voice of Good Doctor, ripping bandaids off the old wounds, not gingerly pulling at them, one scab at time, the way most of us do. Shih Fu wants us to get better now! Until we all make it to Buddhahood, he’s got to keep returning to doctor his unwell disciples. One of these great aeons, however, we’ll make it. The great hero’s work will be done, and we will all be able to gather in the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas and “mutually shine upon each other;s lotus thrones, in world systems like motes of dust.”
Disciple Kuo Chen
(Heng Sure)
bows in respect