Going West

-by the late Keisho Leary

“Shakyamuni Buddha said to Shariputra, “If you travel westward from here, passing a hundred thousand kotis of Buddha-lands, you come to the land called ‘Ultimate Bliss,’ where there is a Buddha named Amitayus. He is living there now, teaching the Dharma.”

-From Inagaki Hisao’s version of the Shorter Amitabha Sutra

But this obviously can’t be true, the way it is written. Because where is “west”? “West” can mean two different things: you can either go west along the curved surface of the Earth, after about 30,000 kilometers returning to Kyoto from the east, and if you continue to go west you just repeat the same circle over and over again; or you can go west in a straight line, in which case you veer off the Earth into the vast universe of space, but never in the same direction from one second to the next because your starting point is on a continuously spinning Earth in a spinning solar system and spinning galaxy. In other words, there is no one direction that can be pointed to and called “west,” except in relation to the surface of our relatively small planet.

So the authors of this Mahayana sutra were living in an imaginary world, a flat-earth world, in which you could travel long distances to the west, past imaginary lands with imaginary Buddhas. And myself, living in a temple in Kyoto these five years while serving as a kozo, I recite this sutra daily, though not as a part of their program, but rather as an individual, an eccentric meditator, in a secluded sanctuary in a far corner of the precinct. The name of the temple I’d rather not give, since my own apparently strange meditations would reflect badly on their good reputation. For us three kozos living there, religious practice consists almost entirely of ordinary temple maintenance work, rising at the relatively late hour of 5:30 am, opening the temple doors and lighting the candles on which believers have written prayers, sweeping the fallen leaves, cleaning the seven halls and polishing the brass, striving to make the grounds and buildings attractive for the visitors, and four times a month preparing the sacred fire offering and subsequent vegetarian lunch for an expected 50 customers, finally at the end of the day closing the sanmon gate around 6:30 pm, doing this kind of work 363 days, with two free days a year.

After finishing the work of the day, I am able to part from my companions and go off and recite various sutras. Reciting the Shorter Amitabha Sutra, I come to a place near the end where all the numerous Buddhas in each of the six directions, east-south-west-north-below-and-above, in turn, offer their praise of Shakyamuni’s discourse and of the virtues of Amida Buddha. For each of these directions the sutra gives five or six names of Buddhas in that direction, names that mean almost nothing, such as Meru-Prabhasa Buddha in the east, for example.

Reaching this point in the recitation, and to tell the truth, being bored with imaginary names and imaginary directions, I overlay this meditation with real names and real directions. Well… maybe not exactly “real,” maybe as imaginary as those in the sutra, but anyway names with faces attached, faces that I can clearly see, and for each Buddha or bodhisattva I can call to mind his altruistic actions and Dharma teachings. Just like the imaginary Buddhas, these people too are praising Shakyamuni’s discourse and Amithaba’s virtues. For instance, I’m listening to the words of the sutra roll along, and when I hear my voice intone “TO HO’ (“eastern direction”), my thoughts travel along the surface of the Earth to various countries in that direction. likewise for south, west, and north. For “below” I go literally below the ground until reaching the opposite surface of the Earth. In this way, in five steps, all the inhabited lands of our planet are brought to mind, albeit in very abbreviated form since each direction has only about 20 seconds of recitation time.

I am sitting in the temple facing east. So east is straight ahead, and I visualize crossing over the great Pacific Ocean and coming to the land of North America. I am not aware of any Living Buddhas there but can remember the great bodhisattvas such as Yogi Chen releasing captive animals into the wild, 95-year-old Sasaki Roshi who in spite of his age continues to lead his students in retreats, Robert Thurman delighting and inspiring his audiences with humorous Dharma talks, and the late Dezung Tulku with his non-stop mantra beads. In these eastern lands the archetypal practitioner is seen as the reckless adventurer of Buddhism, not satisfied with his state of knowledge and Dharma experience, but undaunted by obstacles, plunging into mapless rivers to pursue the Holy Grail, canvassing wilderness and deserts and turning over every rock in search of the black widow spiders of religious experience.

Next, going south from Kyoto, to my right side, my imagination encompasses Taiwan, visualized as teeming with devout and gentle monks and nuns, and from Taiwan to Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and Australia, and I bring to mind Thich Nhat Hanh, associating him with Vietnam though he no longer resides there, himself maybe the most peaceful man on Earth and tirelessly working to lead others to that same Peace.

When hearing my voice chant “SEI HO,” my mind travels west, a mere hundred meters west from where I sit, to the abode of my master, and his smiling voice floats into consciousness. Then going farther west to Korea, China (particularly Mt. Wu Tai), Tibet, India, and Sri Lanka, I see the 14th Dalai Lama and the 16th Karmapa among others, and I characterize these western lands, including Japan, as peopled by great esoteric masters and “Living Buddhas.”

North from Kyoto, my mind recalls the extreme ascetics doing the 1,000-day kaihogyo on Mt Hiei, and from there on to an aging scholar-priest-bodhisattva in Tokyo, fluent in several languages and through his students spreading Japanese religion around the globe. On the map I notice that Tokyo is actually more east than north, however in my meditative globe it is “north,” and further north is Siberia. Continuing in that same direction I come to Europe and think of the great intellectual investigation of Buddhism going on there, these lands in the northern direction being characterized by extremes of asceticism and scholarship, bodhisattvas exerting superhuman efforts to carry out their vows and investigate the Truth.

“Below” would be Kyoto’s exact opposite point on the globe, somewhere in the South Atlantic Ocean, the closest lands being Africa and South America. In these lands, the Dharma is in its late formative years, in the process of taking root, and I am largely unfamiliar with bodhisattvas working there, other than Chagdud Tulku who now makes Brazil his home base. With Africa in mind. I recall the story of the man seen walking barefoot on glaciers high up on Mt Kilimanjaro, who later explained that this was his way of communing with God. When the Kilimanjaro Park Rangers spotted him through binoculars, they sent a helicopter to “rescue” him causing the man to conceal himself so that he could complete his worship undisturbed.

The sixth direction is “above,” and for me, this would be the seemingly infinite number of lands outside of Planet Earth, lands known to us by the light shining from their stars. There reside the Buddhas of the imagination, the Buddhas of meditation, Meru-Prabhasa Buddha, and all the others in the sutra. Meditating on infinity, I Can visualize the Omniscient Buddhas who at this moment are living in that vast Above.

That’s how Planet Earth looks to me sitting in Kyoto. But since I will soon pick up my zafu and bring it to California, I’m wondering, how much different will the globe look from there?

“Going West from Kyoto,” an article by Keisho, reprinted from The Kyoto Journal.