THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
"THE BUDDHA WHO IS TO COME"
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu,
April 5, 1998.Buddha's birthday is Wednesday.
One of the first things that I need to say about Buddhism is that there is nothing that you are required to be, to be a Buddhist. There is nothing that you are required to believe to be a Buddhist. There is nothing that you are required to do to be a Buddhist. Indeed, the actions, the celebrations, the things that Buddhists do vary wildly from country to country. What follows is not Zen, or Tibetan, or anybody else's Buddhism. It may not be your Buddhism. It is Mike Young's buddhism.
There is this wonderful myth in Buddhism. The myth is that Siddhartha Gautama Sakiyamuni was not the first Buddha. There were others before him. There will be others after him. Specificallym, Maitreya, the Bodhisattva of loving compassion, is to come in the future. I'm sure that when American missionaries stumbled across this fascinating Buddhist myth they must have experienced considerable consternation. They must have said, "Wow! That's kind of like Christianity." Some of them must have said, "That's just the devil trying to copy and confuse." And there must have been those who said, "Hmmm, is it possible?"
There are people who hold the tradition that after Jesus was buried and before he rose Jesus went off to other places to preach to those who hadn't had a chance to hear the gospel. Jesus, after all, said, "I have sheep which are not of this pasture." Is it possible that Quetzalcoatl and the Buddha who is to come are echoes of those visits ? Some believe so.
But there is an interesting twist to the Maitreya story, for it functions at two levels, as so much of myth does. Joseph Campbell, in his TV programs and books has, to some extent and for many of us, retrieved the notion of myths from those days when "myth" meant a lie, something that wasn't true. Joseph Campbell helps us understand the nature and function of myth. The ancient myths of our species are narratives and stories that pick up and crystalize a piece of what it feels like to be a human being. They can both report and evoke that experience.
At one level the Maitreya myth says that there is another Buddha who is to come. The second layer of the myth is that the Buddha who is to come is you ! It is your own Buddha-nature as your understanding of who it is that you really are begins to unfold. It is not that you are inadequate the way you are and need to achieve something completely different. Instead, the Buddhist teaching is that you are already Buddha. In your own selfish and self-deluded involvement in the minutiae of daily life, and in the confusion of misunderstanding the way your own mind works, you may not have figured it out yet. You are Maitreya, the Buddha who is to come.
If you sit and really pay attention to your own life, everything that Buddha taught is available to you as well. Or so Buddhists assume. There aren't any esoteric hidden secrets. All of it is available to everyone. This is part of what is meant by the notion of the Buddha nature that is common to us all.
Buddhism is not a place to stay. It's not a set of behaviors that you do or things that you believe and you get to the place where, "Aha, I am enlightened!" If that ever happens, please know that you are mistaken. Buddhism is described as a raft for crossing the sea of ignorance. If perchance you should in fact cross that sea, what do you do with the raft that you used to get across? It would be dumb to carry it around on your back afterwards, right? It is an instrument, a vehicle.
Buddha was Buddha because he paid attention. Everything he taught is equally available to you if you pay attention, if you do it. Your teacher, ultimately, is not Siddhartha Gautama Sakyamuni Buddha. Your teacher is Maitreya, the Buddha who is to come, your Buddhahood. It is, indeed, in dealing with the thwarting and the frustration and the actual experiences of your life that your own awareness of your own connectedness emerges. Not that teachers are not useful, but notice that the most valuable function of a teacher is not to give you the faith. Indeed, if I as a teacher could hand you a wrapped and tied-up package that contained all of the things that you needed to know, believe and do; if I could hand it to you so all you had to do was to pull the pretty bow on top and it would open and unfold and you'd be there, I would be stealing from you. Buddhism is not a theft. It isn't even a gift. It comes closest to being a goose. A good teacher will goose you. A teacher will thwart you. When the teacher sees you running down blind alleys, the teacher will say, "I suggest you go back and try a different turn of the path." Or the teacher says, "Aha, look at this block that you don't want to look at, that you keep going around instead of through. Maybe you ought to take that block apart and go through it."
Unfortunately, the image of the raft that goes from one shore to another leaves the impression that this is a trip that you take from one place to another. You are already where you need to be.One of the traps here is our tendency to assume that all I have to do is follow my conscience, follow my own personal intuition. If yours is like mine, it is that small voice inside that tells me I'm right whether I am or not. The small voice inside that says, "Familiar. You know how to do this. Stick with what's familiar." Whereas, not always but frequently, the path I need to tread is the path into uncharted territory, my own uncharted territory. On the other hand, the Buddhist tradition insists that the teachings, the learnings will fit. They are not alien, disjunctive, strange, esoteric things. They will fit. Here, too, is where Maitreya, your Buddha who is to come, is the teacher. For, even if the piece that fits is not quite right, it is important that we listen and pay attention to our own journey.
One of the Unitarian Universalist principles is that you ought to believe whatever it is in fact that you do believe. You've heard people say, "I'm a Two-Seed-in-the Spirit, Evangelical and Reformed Expiationist, but I don't practice it." The only way to grow intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, IS TO PRACTICE IT! To be who you are, not someone else. It is your path, your journey, your life.
Do you know the incredible sculptures by Michelangelo called "The Prisoners" ? The huge blocks of granite have a figure just beginning to emerge from the stone, as if Michelangelo had stopped a third of the way through a sculpture. But they are finished pieces. As a child, did you ever try carving a boat out of Ivory soap ? You had a nice sharp knife and you tried to cut that boat out in one smooth cut. What did you end up with? A lapful of soap chips. But shaped one slice at a time, the boat emerges. And because it's Ivory soap, it floats.
Our spiritual journeys, our life's path is like that. Very few of us ever change by being turned 180 degrees around, BANG! and doing something totally different. We learn by paying attention to the pieces of our own lives and that path itself shapes us. There is a oneness which you are. It does not have to be achieved or created, only discovered.
One of the earliest, perhaps even the original symbol of Buddhism, was a simple imprint of the Buddha's footprints. Whose footprints are the Buddha's? We are challenged by the teacher to follow in Buddha's footprints, to follow Buddha. Whose footprints did Buddha follow in? He followed in his own. These are your footprints. Follow them.