Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Amidaji members: Shaku Hogen (United Kingdom)

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My Dharma name is Shaku Hogen and I live in Bristol, England.

Although I was brought up in the Salvation Army, to be honest, as a boy I had little interest in spiritual matters.  I was a believer in scientific materialist.  But in my late teens I saw a film about Carl Jung’s mystical experiences and heard a radio programme about the Buddha which opened a window in my mind.  My spiritual search began.  This was before the internet, so I read all I could find at the library, and haunted many bookshops for answers.  And although I had a career in engineering, my search became the most urgent concern of my life - “the great matter of life and death”.  Mixing and matching teachings from a wide range of spiritual traditions was enthralling as it gave me hints and glimpses of the goal, but it was also confusing, and I quickly realised I needed to find a solid tradition and a practice. 

My job took me to London on a three years secondment and I had a flat around the corner from The Buddhist Society.  This gave me the opportunity to learn meditation and attended courses and Dharma talks at the Society.  At that time, the Theravāda teacher Ajahn Sumedho had just arrived from Thailand and was setting up monasteries in the Thai Forest Sangha tradition.  He was made the honorary president of the Buddhist Society and gave many talks there.  Sumedho was an inspiring figure and I began to consider myself a practicing lay Theravāda Buddhist.

As luck would have it, when I moved back to the West Country from London, one of the Forest Sangha branch monasteries had just opened up not 20 miles away from where I lived and I become a regular visitor at retreats and evening pujas.  The focus of the Forest Sangha in the UK was providing support for a growing order of ordained monks and nuns who followed the strict Vinaya (moral discipline). The teaching for us lay folks was the practice of basic mindfulness and metta (loving kindness) meditation.  Which was all fine.  But when it came to the rest of the Dharma (i.e. ‘the great matter of life and death’) it was thin gruel indeed - a liberal mix and match drawn from the world’s spiritual buffet, indistinguishable from humanistic psychology and all wrapped up in a Buddhist bow. No mention of rebirth, samsara, nirvana etc.  To be fair, I suppose they misguidedly thought that presenting hard-core Dharma as it was would scare people away.

I then moved to Preston Lancashire.  The only Dharma centre locally was that of the New Kadampa Tradition which is in the orthodox Geluk tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.  Their teachings were founded on the Lam-Rim (stages of the path) which gives a comprehensive presentation of all Buddha’s teachings in a logical sequence.  I found this very helpful indeed, and still do.  The meditation practice was that of Vajrayana (esoteric) Buddhism.  All of the Geluk’s teaching are founded on a fundamental understanding of absolute emptiness as taught by Je Tsongkhapa.  At first that was fine, but as I progressed, the complete emptiness of everything, including all the Buddhas, became disorienting.  The ground was slipping from under my feet and I began to feel unwell.   For a serious 24/7 practitioner living in cave for 20 years supported by an enlightened master this might be a great sign of progress, but for me holding down a busy job it was not a good place to be.

During one of my lunch breaks, and not feeling great, I came across a Christian bookshop.  I went in and bought a small book of Christian prayers drawn from the English Mystics.  I began praying to God.  Devotion to a non-empty, other-power was a lifeline.  The god I prayed to seemed like solid ground supporting the empty flux of the world.   I tried to understand the Christianity as it was presented in churches, but I quickly found that the “other-power” I was praying to was certainly nothing like the God that the Christians feared.   So, I continued considering myself a Buddhist but trying to reconcile all these ideas and experiences.  Eventually I found the Buddha-nature teachings together with the positive other-empty (shentong) interpretation of Emptiness, and this turned out to be an important piece of the puzzle.  This authentic view of emptiness was not nothingness, but replete with innumerable Buddha qualities and the real source of true Buddhas.  My very existence was now not founded on shifting sands, but on the reality of Buddha-nature. 

As time went on though, another, more important, issue arose.  Although I was in a comfortable human existence, old age was catching up with me and I knew I did not have the spiritual muscle to complete the path in this lifetime.  What was next(?) I might lose all the progress and insight I had gained.  Given the vastness of samsara, that seemed highly likely.  I had hit the problem of retrogression.  

I was now retired and studying music at Bristol university.  I would go into the library to pick up scores and music books to study, but I noticed that a few shelves down from the section on music there was the theology section which, amazingly enough, had a good selection of books on Pure Land and Nichiren Buddhism.  I would spend hours reading them.  There were classical texts by Shinran and Nichiren which seemed to be addressing the very problem of retrogression I was wrestling with.  But as I read wider I found that the presentation of these texts by modern scholars - Unno, Bloom, Hirota etc placed them in the context of Buddhist modernism.  They seemed to be saying “don’t read these texts too literally, these masters wrote like that for people of their age but for us more sophisticated people today…” etc.   So it seemed that although these traditions may have once held the answers, today, in the West, the tradition had radically collapsed.  So another dead end. I was stuck with my own synthesis, and just needed to keep my fingers crossed that everything would work out fine in the very long run.

Interestingly, there was a highly respected professor of Buddhist studies at Bristol University at the time, Paul Williams, famous for his massive academic treatise ‘Mahayana Buddhism’.  It turned out that he was in a similar position - wrestling with the problem of retrogression.   His solution was to convert to Catholicism!  His decision absolutely shocked the English Buddhist establishment who could not understand him at all, probably because they had themselves all given up on the ‘great problem of life and death’.  It should have been a wake-up call.

Still searching I came across a video by Paul Roberts on YouTube and became aware that although academia and most scholars had embraced the modernist interpretation of Pure Land Buddhism, there was a group of western Buddhists who were passionately insisting on a real Amida Buddha, a real Pure Land and real Shinjin.   Paul Roberts had just died at this point but a little exploration lead me to a certain Romanian priest, Jōshō Adrián Cirlea.  I found in his work the pure authentic orthodox Pure Land Buddhism based on Shinran and Rennyo.   He did not reinterpret it or water it down for “the western mind” or make Shakyamuni politically correct.  Here was the answer to retrogression I could trust.  Notwithstanding all the Dharma I had accumulated, overnight I changed from a sophisticated, critical, well-read, serious, experienced, smug bodhisattva into a complete bombu (spiritual idiot!) who could rely on nothing but the Other Power of Amida.  And what a relief it was!  I eventually plucked up courage and contacted Rev Jōshō who kindly accepted me as a member of his Amidaji sangha.  He gave me the Dharma name of Hogen which means Dharma Eye in recognition of my lifetime’s looking for the Truth.  It seems to me that all along Amida was the “Other Power” I had intuited.  In fact, it was the magnetic force of Amida’s light that was, bit by bit, drawing me to Him.

I feel great admiration for Rev Josho in standing up for the authentic orthodox teaching of Amida Dharma and traditional values in a western Dharma world increasingly contaminated with secular psychology and woke politics.  I feel very grateful to have found the Amidaji sangha and above all to Amida who accepts me just as I am.

Namo Amida Bu

 

Here is an interview with Hogen on Gankai's youtube channel:

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Dharma talks on my youtube channel