This story from the Buddha’s time expresses the gratitude that we have for the things that we are lucky enough to have the use of, as well as our care for the environment. As Buddhists, using things carefully, and expressing our gratitude for what we have, is part of our basic practice, whether we train as monks or as lay people.

For the monastic community, the gratitude for all that we have is particularly highlighted by the fact that monks are supported by donations, a practice which goes back to the time of the Buddha. The Buddha and his disciples, for example, would go out with their alms bowls, and whatever food they were offered, that would be their meal for that day. When that is all you have to eat for the day you really look after it, because if you waste it or lose it you won’t get any more until the next day.

This is also a very skilful way of training with, and learning to let go of, our preferences. Irrespective of whether the food that comes into our bowl is something that we ‘liked’ or ‘wanted’, it is all we have to survive on for the next 24hrs, and so of course we are grateful for it, for just being supported. We make the best use of what is offered, and we don’t waste a single bit of it. That gratitude is the basis for treating all things respectfully. We look after things and are careful in using them, because that is just the right thing to do, and the right way to see the world around us; the things of the world don’t belong to us, so we don’t have any rights over them; but if they are available to us then we have a responsibility to make the best use of them that we can.

This story is from the Vimalakirti Sutra, a scripture in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition which was perhaps written at the end of the 1st century CE. The central character is the lay person Vimalakirti, who is portrayed as being profoundly enlightened. He has trained very deeply in Mahayana Buddhism, and in the early part of the scripture many of the Buddha’s disciple describe how they have been shown up by his deeper understanding of the teaching.

In The Scripture of Great Wisdom, also known as the Heart Sutra, there are the following lines:

From the perspective of emptiness, there is… no knowledge and no attainment. With nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on Great Wisdom, and thus the mind is without hindrance.

These lines emphasise that Buddhist practice is not a matter of attaining something, but a few lines later on the scripture also says:

All Buddhas of past, present, and future rely on Great Wisdom and thereby attain unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment.

If Buddhist practice is not a matter of attaining something, what does it mean that all Buddhas attain enlightenment? Is the scripture disagreeing with itself, or is there something deeper that is being pointed to here?

In the last part of Shariputra’s conversation with the goddess, the Vimalakirti Scripture explores exactly this issue of the meaning of attainment, and several other scriptures address it as well.

This story is from the Vimalakirti Sutra, a scripture in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition which was perhaps written at the end of the 1st century CE. The central character is the lay person Vimalakirti, who is portrayed as being profoundly enlightened. He has trained very deeply in Mahayana Buddhism, and in the early part of the scripture many of the Buddha’s disciple describe how they have been shown up by his deeper understanding of the teaching.

Following the incident with the flowers (see part 1), Shariputra continues to talk with the goddess, asking her lots of questions about her practice. She answers them very fully and eloquently, and Shariputra is clearly impressed by her wisdom. Shariputra apparently thinks that, since the goddess has the power to make herself visible or invisible, she must also have the power to appear in any form she wants, and assumes that, if this is the case, then she would of course prefer to be male rather than female.

This story is from the Vimalakirti Sutra, a scripture in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition which was perhaps written at the end of the 1st century CE. The central character is the lay person Vimalakirti, who is portrayed as being profoundly enlightened, having trained very deeply in Mahayana Buddhism. The scripture uses various different characters and encounters, some of them quite humorous, to highlight the difference between Mahayana teachings and what the Mahayana tradition sees as the more narrow understanding of early Buddhism, which is often represented by the characters of the Buddha’s disciples.

At the point in the scripture where this story occurs, a vast assembly made up of “eight thousand bodhisattvas, five hundred of the Buddha’s disciples, and hundreds of thousands of heavenly beings” has gone to Vimalakirti’s house in order to witness a debate between Vimalakirti and the Bodhisattva Manjusri, who is the Bodhisattva of Wisdom.

Kosho Uchiyama (1912-1998) was the abbot of Antai-ji Sōtō Zen Temple near Kyoto, Japan. This story is from Uchiyama Rōshi’s book Approach to Zen, published in 1973, and it was also retold in his best known book Opening the Hand of Thought, first published in English in 1993. Uchiyama Rōshi introduces the story as being from the Edo period in Japan (1603-1867).

Quarrelling Squashes
Behind a temple there was a field where a lot of squashes were ripening. One day a fight started. The squashes split up into two groups and made a big racket shouting at each other. The head priest heard the uproar, and when he went to see what had happened, he found the squashes quarreling. The priest yelled and scolded them saying, “Hey, you squashes! The idea of fighting among yourselves! Everyone do zazen!”

This story is from the Jataka Tales, which are described as stories of the Buddha’s past lives. Whether or not we take them literally as former lives of the Buddha, their main purpose is to illustrate different aspects of Buddhist practice. The introduction to this particular story sums this up as, ‘Even when provoked, a virtuous person doesn’t resort to doing harm, having trained themselves to refrain’.

Part one: Setting the scene
It is said that the Buddha, whilst still training as a Bodhisattva, once lived deep in a forest as a woodpecker, and had beautiful feathers of many colours. Although she was a woodpecker, she didn’t live as other woodpeckers lived, eating grubs and insects, because out of her great compassion she didn’t want to harm any living beings.

Instead she satisfied herself with the young shoots of the trees and their sweet and delicious flowers, as well as with their fruits, which were of all different colours, smells and flavours.

The Flower Sermon is a very well known teaching in Zen Buddhism, and acts as a foundation story for the lineage and the tradition. In a few short sentences it illustrates the direct passing on of the teaching, which is an essential feature of the Zen tradition.

The Flower Sermon is an incident in the life of the Buddha which appears in Mahayana Buddhist sources. In the Flower Sermon the Buddha directly passes on his teaching to his disciple Mahakashyapa, who the Chan tradition in China and the Zen tradition in Japan both look to as being the first ancestor in their lineage. As a result of this, the Flower Sermon is considered to be a symbolic origin story in Zen Buddhism, and the founder of Japanese Sōtō Zen Buddhism, Great Master Dōgen, writing in the 13th Century, quotes it time and time again in his great work the Shobogenzo.

There is an ancient story which tells of someone living in a very dry dusty country, who feels the call to make a journey, without being entirely sure why. The Seeker, as this person is called, has some sense of which direction to go in, but there is no one to point the way, no map to consult, and there are no roads or even tracks to follow.

The inner call to leave the familiar surroundings of the home village becomes stronger and stronger, and the Seeker eventually sets out, because not to do so is no longer a satisfactory option. Leaving the landscape of life-so-far, the Seeker heads in the direction that seems to be necessary. Travelling by day and resting by night, the journey continues on and on. As the days become months, with no end in sight and the beginning almost forgotten, life becomes the travelling, and the travelling becomes life.

In Buddhism we don’t try to convert people, or persuade them that they ought to practice. The motivation to engage with Buddhist practice has to come from each of us individually, and no-one else can give that to us. This story is a metaphor for how Buddhism is passed on to other people, both from the perspective of the teacher and of the student.

The story is from the foreword to a book of teaching by the Japanese Rinzai monk Sokei-an Sasaki, who first came to the US in 1906 and ended up living in New York from the early 1920s until his death in 1945.

For forty years a fisherman in China used a straight needle to fish with. Of course, people found that rather odd, and asked him why he didn’t just use a regular bent hook like everyone else, as he might catch a few more fish that way! When he was asked this, the fisherman replied, “You can catch ordinary fish with a bent hook, but I will catch a great fish with my straight needle.”…

This story, involving a western trainee staying at a large Japanese monastery, illustrates how easily we can be caught up in our own views and opinions, even when those around us are doing their best to help and support us in going beyond them. It can be very difficult to let go of our own preconceptions of what Buddhist training ‘should’ be.

This story is taken from The Wild White Goose, a book by Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett, the founder of the OBC. The book is based on the diaries she kept in the 1960s whilst she was training at Sōjiji Temple, one of the two main temples of Sōtō Zen in Japan. Kōhō Zenji was Rev. Master Jiyu’s master, and was the Chief Abbot of the temple. Rev. Master Jiyu was the only female monastic and the only foreigner in the monastery, and she faced many difficulties whilst she was there as a result of this.

The story consists of three diary entries, from March and April 1966, and starts a few weeks before the large Jūkai retreat at the temple. This annual retreat is a week of meditation and ceremonies during which those attending make a commitment to living by the Buddhist Precepts. During the week the ceremony of Lay Ordination is held, which in the Sōtō Zen tradition is the way in which someone formally becomes a Buddhist. In the UK the Jūkai retreat is held each year at our main monastery, Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey, in Northumberland.

This story is about the Buddha’s teaching of anatta; that there is no separate self. The story shows that although there is no separate self, yet there is still a functioning being, and that these two things don’t stand against each other. They are sometimes described as ‘Emptiness and Form’, and sometimes as ‘All is One’ and ‘All is Different’.

King Milinda was a Bactrian king who ruled the north-east of India, including parts of present-day Afghanistan, in the late second century BCE. His meetings and conversations about Buddhism with a Buddhist monk called Nàgasena are recorded in the Questions of King Milinda which is thought to have been written in the first century BCE.

King Milinda had heard a lot about the Buddhist monk Nàgasena, and one day he travelled by chariot to meet him. When the two of them met they exchanged greetings, and the king sat down respectfully to one side of Nàgasena. Then the king asked, “How is it that you are known Venerable Monk? What is your name?”

Nàgasena replied, “O king, I am known as Nàgasena, but that is merely a convenient and conventional label; there is actually no separate individual here that it refers to.”

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The festival of Segaki is held every Autumn in the larger temples of our order, usually in October. Gaki means Hungry Ghost in Japanese, and Segaki is the Festival of the Feeding of the Hungry Ghosts. The origins of the festival go back to the time of the Buddha, when the Buddha’s disciple Maudgalyayana (Pali: Moggallāna) wanted to rescue his mother from the Hungry Ghost Realm where she had been reborn, and asked the Buddha’s help to do so.

The story of Maudgalyayana rescuing his mother is told in the Ullambana Sutra:

This is what I heard, at one time the Buddha was living at Shravasti in Anathapindika’s Park. One of the Buddha’s chief disciples, the Venerable Maudgalyayana, had deepened his practice to the point where he had developed the Heavenly Eye which can survey other realms, and he used this Heavenly Eye to look for his deceased parents, as he wanted to find out which world they may have been reborn in. Maudgalyayana managed to find his father in a heaven realm, but he couldn’t find his mother anywhere, and asked the Buddha for help.

In this story, the Buddha uses the image of blind people meeting an elephant for the first time, but only feeling a part of it, to point out that we so easily think that the whole of the world, and the whole of Buddhist practice, must be just the same as our own experience of it. It is this story that Dōgen refers to in Rules for Meditation when he says, ‘do not spend so much time in rubbing only a part of the elephant’.

Once, when the Buddha was staying near the city of Sravasti, some of his disciples came to him and said, "Lord Buddha, there are many wandering hermits and scholars living here in Sravasti, all from different religious groups, and they are constantly arguing and quarrelling. They all have different views and opinions on what they consider to be the most important questions of the day. They argue, for example, about whether the world will go on forever or whether it won’t, and they argue about whether the universe has any limits, or whether it doesn’t. In fact, it seems that almost anything that they talk about, they have different views and opinions on. They are always disagreeing, and their disagreements turn into conflicts, and because of this they are not able to get along with each other. Lord Buddha, how should we think about these quarrelling people?"

The Buddha answered them with this story:

In this story from the Vimalakirti Sutra, the Buddha explains that the reason we don’t see this world as the Buddha Land is because we are not seeing clearly, not because of any fault of the world. The Buddha helps his disciple Shariputra to see the true nature of the world, allowing him to let go of his doubts about the teaching that the Buddha has been offering.

In the section leading up to this story, a Bodhisattva called Jewelled Accumulation (Ratna-rasi) has asked the Buddha how to purify lands so that they become the Buddha’s Pure Land. The Buddha answers by saying that it is not about making the world around us pure, rather that the straightforward mind of practice is itself the Buddha Land. He summarises this teaching by saying, “Jewelled Accumulation, a bodhisattva who wishes to acquire a pure land must purify their mind. When the mind is pure, the Buddha land will be pure.”

One of the Buddha’s chief disciples, Shariputra, is sitting in the assembly, and when he hears this he thinks to himself: “The Buddha says that if the mind of the bodhisattva is pure, then his Buddha land will be pure, but when the Buddha first decided to become a bodhisattva, surely his intentions were pure. Why then is this Buddha land so filled with impurities?” Shariputra is looking around at the world he sees, and he doesn’t like it.

This well-known Buddhist Story is about how we so easily respond to events with indignation, and about how important it is to let go of this indignation, rather than carrying it around with us as a mental and emotional burden.

In our meditation practice we do our best to notice when we are stuck in repetitive trains of thought, and we do our best to not carry them on any more. This can be a challenge with any kind of repetitive or obsessive thinking, but it can be particularly hard to let go of when we think that we are in the right and that someone else is in the wrong. This sense of indignation can be triggered by events in our own life, or even by something we hear about in the media which is really nothing to do with us. We may hear a story of someone acting in a way that seems to us, and perhaps to most people, to be very inconsiderate, or uncaring, and in our minds we may become very indignant about this. ‘How could they?’, ‘Don’t they realise…?’. We may find ourselves thinking about it for hours, just continually going over the same old ground.

Why do we do this? And why is it so hard to let go of?

This story involves two Quakers from the late 17th century, but the teaching in it is very Buddhist and relevant to us today. It emphasises the importance of exploring for ourselves what is the appropriate way to behave in a situation, rather than just following rules imposed from outside.

The two people who feature in this story are the founder of Quakerism, George Fox (1624-1691) and William Penn (1644-1718) who is best known as the founder of the Province of Pennsylvania in North America, and who became a Quaker during his lifetime. The first written account of this story appears nearly 150 years after William Penn’s death, and perhaps over 180 years after the events in it are said to have taken place, and as a result Quakers now generally regard it as an invented story. The teaching in it, however, is very real and very pertinent to how we explore what right action is in our lives.

When we have a growing sense that there is something we are doing, a way we are behaving in our lives, which we feel uncomfortable with, what do we do about that? Perhaps we are not quite sure why we feel uncomfortable, or exactly what the problem is, but we realise that we can’t ignore it. What should we do?

The story of the Master who beat the deer is about the nature of compassion, and the different ways in which this can appear. It also reminds us that we should try to understand the whole situation, including seeing things from the perspective of others, not just basing our actions on our own desires and preferences.

In Ancient China there were a very large number of Buddhist monasteries, and many of them were in rural locations. They were often on mountains, and it was common for the monastery to be named after the mountain that it was on. There was one particular monastery which had very large grounds extending to many acres, and these grounds were also surrounded by forested hills. Because of this there was a lot of wildlife around, and over the years the monastic community had developed a real fondness for all of the birds, mammals and other creatures that they shared the mountain with. Just as people do today, they put out bird feeders and food for the animals, and tried to do what they could to help and support the wildlife. As a result, the monks felt that they were really living in harmony with the world around them, and had a close relationship with the plants and animals that lived nearby. Amongst the many animals that lived around the monastery were a herd of deer, who particularly liked being on the monastery grounds as there weren’t any hunters there, unlike the rest of the mountain.

The monks certainly weren’t hunting them, and the deer had become so used to being around them that they would come right up to the buildings looking for food. The monks in turn would put out food to attract the deer, as it was a wonderful experience to see these elegant creatures at such close quarters. Eventually the deer became so used to being near people that they would even eat out of the monks’ hands. They were so tame that they almost seemed to be domesticated. Even though they were still wild animals, they had no fear of humans.

The story of how the bandit Angulimala gave up his extreme violence after meeting with the Buddha shows that whatever mistakes we have made in our lives, change is always possible. We can stop doing the harmful things that we have been doing, and commit ourselves to living in a way that benefits all beings, including ourselves.

On one occasion the Buddha was staying at Anathapindika’s monastery in Jeta’s Grove, near the city of Shravasti. One day, after he had eaten his mid-day meal, the Buddha picked up his robes and bowl, and headed in the direction of the Great Forest of Kosala which was not far away.

Now at that time, a bandit named Angulimala was living in the forest. He had a reputation for being extremely brutal and had blood on his hands from the numerous victims he had killed. He showed no mercy to anyone.

As the Buddha walked towards the forest, the cowherds, shepherds and farmers who saw him called out to him, “Don’t go along that road, Lord Buddha, or you will be attacked by Angulimala the brutal bandit. He has blood on his hands from the many victims he has killed, and shows no mercy to anyone. He wears a gruesome necklace of fingers, and even groups of thirty or forty men have fallen victim to him.” The Buddha heard them and acknowledged their warnings, but just kept walking on in silence.

A second time and a third time they called out to warn him, but again the Buddha heard them, acknowledged their warnings, and just kept walking on in silence.

As the Buddha entered the forest, Angulimala was sitting at his lookout post on the top of a high cliff overlooking the road, and when he saw a lone figure on the road below he sprang into action. Rushing down from the cliff, he was determined that today would see the fulfilment of the long and arduous task that he had been set many moons ago.

The story of Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed shows how the Buddha used skilful means to help someone who was in a very difficult situation.

During the time of the Buddha, in the city of Shravasti, lived a young woman named Gotami who had been born into a very poor household. She was so thin that people called her Kisa Gotami, meaning Skinny Gotami. Kisa Gotami married very young and gave birth to a son, who she was very devoted to. One day, soon after her son had learned to walk, Kisa Gotami was out in the street with him when he suddenly tripped over and fell, and lay there motionless. Kisa Gotami rushed over to her son and tried to revive him; she tried everything she could think of, but nothing seemed to work. She was convinced that he had just been knocked unconscious, and that if she could only find the right thing to do he would soon recover. In her anguish and grief she was unable to see, or unable to take in and comprehend, that her son had died.

When she didn’t manage to revive him herself, Kisa Gotami rushed home and asked her relatives to help. They could see that the child was dead and tried to convince Kisa Gotami of this, but she was determined that his small limp body was still alive, and that there must be some medicine that could restore him.

Carrying his dead body in her arms she went along the street, going from door to door asking if anyone had the medicine that would cure her son. It was clear to everyone she asked that the child was beyond the help of medicines, and that poor Kisa Gotami was so distraught that she couldn’t accept the reality of her child’s death. They tried to help her as best they could, gently pointing out that medicine would be of no use, and that she must accept that the boy was dead and take him to the cemetery to bury him. But Kisa Gotami’s sorrow and anguish was so deep that she was unable to process what the townspeople were saying to her, and when they couldn’t get through to her, all they could do was to say that they didn’t have the right medicine, and that she should try somewhere else.

Kisa Gotami still wouldn’t give up, and continued on beyond her own neighbourhood searching for the medicine. Some tried to help and console her, some just thought she was mad and closed the door to her, and some even chased her away. But Kisa Gotami was determined to cure her son, and carried on asking door to door. Eventually she came to the house of one of the elders. The elder was very wise and thought, “This child is clearly beyond the help of medicine, but the mother is in great need of help. No medical doctor can help the child, but there is a great doctor nearby who will know how to help this poor woman.” So the elder said to Kisa Gotami, “Good woman, go and see the Buddha, the Enlightened One, and ask him whether he has any medicine for you.”

This story describes the Buddha’s response when he was asked various metaphysical questions about the nature of the universe and the nature of reality.
 
 
Turtles all the way down

      There is a story about a famous scientist who was once giving a lecture on astronomy and the structure of the solar system. After the lecture an elderly lady came up to the scientist and said, “Professor, your theory about the earth rotating around the sun has a very convincing ring to it, but I’m afraid it’s completely wrong.”
      “Oh yes?” said the professor politely, “So what is the correct explanation?”
      The elderly lady looked the scientist in the eye and said, “The correct explanation, Professor, is that the earth is a flat plate, which is supported on the back of a giant turtle.”
      Not wanting to offend the lady, the Professor tried to gently point out the basic flaw in the theory, “If that is correct, madam, what does this turtle stand on?”
      “You’re very clever Professor, and that’s a very good question,” she replied, “but the answer is simple: The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, which stands directly beneath it.”
      The scientist sensed that the lady was not going to relinquish her theory, but nevertheless gently persisted, “But what, madam, does this second turtle stand upon?”
      Beaming, the elderly lady crowed triumphantly, “It’s no use Professor; it’s turtles all the way down.”
 

The scientific approach and the Buddha’s approach

Professor Stephen Hawking starts his 1988 book A Brief History of Time with a version of this story, and then comments:

“Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better? What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these longstanding questions. Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the earth orbiting the sun—or perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises. Only time (whatever that may be) will tell.”

Science tries to find answers to these big questions, but the Buddha’s approach is very different. He was actually asked some very similar questions to the ones that Stephen Hawing poses, but didn’t give answers to them, for a very specific reason, as the following story involving the monk Malunkyaputta shows.
 

The Buddha’s response to some big questions

The Buddha was once staying at Anathapindika’s monastery in Jeta’s Grove, near the city of Savatthi. A monk called Ven. Malunkyaputta was also staying there, and whilst he was sitting alone these thoughts occurred to him: “The Buddha has never told us his position on these crucial question: ‘Is the universe eternal or not eternal?’, ‘Is the universe finite or infinite?’, ‘Is what we think of as a living being identical to the physical body, or are they different?’, ‘After death, does a Buddha a) exist, b) not exist, c) both exist and not exist or d) neither exist nor not exist?’ I’m not happy with this. I can’t accept that the Buddha has not declared his position on these questions. I’m going to go and ask the Buddha about these questions, and if he will declare his position on them, then I will continue to live as a monk and follow him. If on the other hand he refuses to declare his position on these questions, then I will give up being a monk and return to my previous life.”