Ksitigarbha, or Jizo Bodhisattva

(Follow this link to see the March 2022 Priory Newsletter where this was originally published.)

The fourth of the four practices, “Practicing the Dharma” is as follows (from the Red Pine translation):

Fourth, practicing the Dharma. The Dharma is the truth that all natures are pure. By this truth, all appearances are empty. Defilement and attachment, subject and object don’t exist. The sutras say, “The Dharma includes no being because it’s free from the impurity of being, and the Dharma includes no self because it’s free from the impurity of self.” Those wise enough to believe and understand these truths are bound to practice according to the Dharma. And since that which is real includes nothing worth begrudging, they give their body, life, and property in charity, without regret, without the vanity of giver, gift, or recipient, and without bias or attachment. And to eliminate impurity they teach others, but without becoming attached to form. Thus, through their own practice they’re able to help others and glorify the Way of Enlightenment. And as with charity, they also practice the other virtues. But while practicing the six virtues to eliminate delusion, they practice nothing at all. This is what’s meant by practicing the Dharma.

The Dharma is the truth that all natures are pure. In a note for this fourth practice, Red Pine says: “The Sanskrit word dharma comes from dhri meaning to hold, whether in a provisional or an ultimate sense. Hence the word can mean thing, teaching or reality.” This fourth practice corresponds with the fourth noble truth which is the means to the cessation of suffering. Practicing in accord with the Dharma is practice in accordance with reality, whether provisional or ultimate: thus Buddhism has no argument with scientific reality, even though it does hold that there is something beyond conventional reality. It is interesting to me that Bodhidharma apparently bypasses volumes and volumes of Buddhist teaching and instruction on practice to focus on this one thing: all natures are pure.

This Purity is the Pure (shunyata) mentioned in the Scripture of Great Wisdom and is often translated as emptiness or voidness. Using the word Pure, in this context, underlines that emptiness in the context of Buddhist Wisdom does not mean a kind of blank non-existence. It would be closer to say that an appearance in existence is empty of a concept of a self: it is pure of the overlay of self or any concept or overlay.

The Dharma includes no being because it’s free from the impurity of being, and the Dharma includes no self because it’s free from the impurity of self.

We get confused by the idea of purity and impurity. We think of it like we might think of excrement. Excrement is impure, in a physical sense, because it makes us sick if we are not careful of it. Impure equals sickness, sickness equals bad. In this equation – which works provisionally in conventional truth – impure equals bad. Defilement equals bad. But this is all relative to our self; excrement is only bad relative to the self that does not want to be sick (which is reasonable).

In another important sense though, excrement is just a complicated thing in the world and is neither good nor bad. Excrement, in this sense, is just a step in the process of life. It even contains its own kind of life (which is why we have to be careful of it!). In this sense of it being neither good nor bad, excrement is pure; it is free from the impurity of being one thing or another. What Bodhidharma is pointing at here, relative to our mind, is that, if we have mental suffering around excrement, or around anything, (like, we have a mental or emotional aversion to dealing with whatever it is) we are quite possibly making it impure by holding onto a view of it. Letting go of our view of a thing or situation doesn’t mean that we somehow transform it into something that we no longer have to be careful of: like excrement, it could still make us sick. But not holding onto a view of a thing, enables us to deal with it most effectively.

From this perspective, much of our practice is coming to see where we hold onto some view or opinion about our self or about the world. As I mentioned earlier, the second noble truth says that the cause of suffering is attachment. We normally think of attachment to objects, things and conditions, but we should also be very careful to understand that attachment also applies to our views and opinions about everything. Being attached to our views and opinions is likely to be the most significant area where we create suffering for ourselves and others.

Those wise enough to believe and understand these truths are bound to practice according to the Dharma. If we are suffering, if we are in conflict with others, especially with the Sangha, we might look into whether we can let go of how we are looking at things; let how we are looking at things change. If we are practicing according to the Dharma – and practicing according to the Dharma is practicing in accordance with what is real – we can at least seriously consider the possibility that there is some further idea, opinion or way of looking at our life or the world, that we could let go of.