How to Help This Catastrophic World
Last week, my teacher the very venerable Khenchen (great scholar) Thrangu Rinpoche posted this “Call to Prayer”, and I want to share it as a clear example of how a Buddhist meditator ought to think.
In this world there are natural disasters that take the lives of many humans and other sentient beings, or that injure them and cause financial and other difficulties. In recent weeks, there has been an earthquake in New Zealand, which killed several hundred people, and the great earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which took the lives of over ten thousand people and destroyed the homes, possessions, and livelihoods of millions of others. Additionally, problems at a nuclear power plant have caused the release of radioactive gases into the atmosphere. Due to these circumstances, many humans and other living beings have been injured or fallen ill. Their minds are filled with suffering and fear. They are experiencing great difficulties living their lives. In such a time as this, I myself am making as strong aspirations and prayers as I can that such sufferings quickly be pacified, and I encourage my faithful students to also make similar prayers and aspirations.
Maybe we can’t fix the radiation leaks or help comb through the rubble for survivors, maybe we don’t have enough funds to make a difference with food and shelter but as Rinpoche reminds us, many peoples’ minds are now full of suffering and fear, and we do have practices and prayers to help with that. We can do tonglen (sending positive thoughts on the out breath to take away negative ones as we breathe in) or Medicine Buddha (setting the stage for healing) or Chenrezig (praying to vanquish suffering in any form). We can beseech Mahakala to remove obstacles to Japan's renewal. We can sing with gusto the prayer for everyone to find themselves in the joyful paradise of Dewachen where there is no sickness, death or suffering. We have the power to do something.
This call to arms--welcoming arms-- is such good news in such bad times. The world is such a moral mess of spilled egos, it’s hard to know where to focus first. On Japan or Libya or Bahrain or now Burma/Myanmar or Darfur or the pointless suffering caused by Wisconsin and Washington DC? A tsunami of self-absorption and hatred has flooded the planet and threatens to destroy us. Since it is composed entirely of negative man-made energy, and energy keeps morphing without decrease, who's to say the procession of "natural disasters", all the major storms and earthquakes of the past year, isn't simply "the gods angry with us", a way of saying Mother Nature is erupting in gastric distress as she struggles to absorb all our bile?
Rinpoche seems to be saying what he was saying the day after 9/11: what we can really do if we want to do something about these current catastrophes is to pour as much positive energy into the world as we possibly can. We can soothe the situation with mission creep. We can generate a flood of bright light that rolls up against and pushes back this overwhelming flow of black thoughts and negative activity. We can create a high tide of helpfulness against disasters both natural and man made. All that negative energy—that arrogance, aggression and lust for power-- has caused the very sort of suffering our minds have the power to counteract. We can, as Rinpoche says, realize how many minds are filled by fear and try to work with that. Mind-o a mind-o.
The beauty of this is of course that there’s just no way the pure intention to alleviate suffering by praying for others can hurt you. It may even help you vanquish your own.
~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
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Labels: Japan, Libya, prayer, Thrangu Rinpoche
posted by Sandy Garson @ 4:20 PM
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