Today is the third day of Higan week, the three days before the equinox and the three days after. As explained in a Nichiren Shu brochure:

For Buddhists, this period is not just one characterized by days with almost equal portions of light and dark. Rather, it is a period in which we strive to consciously reflect upon ourselves and our deeds.

Each of the days before and after the equinox are devoted to one of the Six Paramitas, the practice of perfection taught to Bodhisattvas. Today we consider the third perfection, Tolerance.

A variety of techniques is offered in the sutras and other texts for getting past anger and hatred. Calming meditation is considered the most effective because its focus is on state of mind, especially on bringing passions such as anger to a still point. But there is also a variety of techniques related to insight meditation, techniques that encourage the practitioner to transform his or her understanding of the situation in a way that dissipates passionate antipathy. The three most common are (l) meditative reflection on the thought that every negative thing that is done to us is a direct karmic result of our own past actions; (2) contemplative reflection on the idea that those who treat us unjustly and with malice are, unbeknownst to them, serving us as our teachers in the perfection of tolerance; and (3) reflection on the basic Buddhist concepts of “dependent arising” and “no-self” in order to depersonalize interpersonal relations.

Today is the second day of Higan week, the three days before the equinox and the three days after. As explained in a Nichiren Shu brochure:

For Buddhists, this period is not just one characterized by days with almost equal portions of light and dark. Rather, it is a period in which we strive to consciously reflect upon ourselves and our deeds.

Each of the days before and after the equinox are devoted to one of the Six Paramitas, the practice of perfection taught to Bodhisattvas. Today we consider the second perfection, Morality.

The fact that the ideal motivation for moral action is selfless compassion toward others does not mean that other more worldly motives do not play a significant role. Indeed, Mahayana sutras and other writings sometimes appear to feature what might seem to be selfish motivations for a moral life. It is true that moral life tends to bring many mundane and worldly benefits—the respect, trust, and goodwill of other people, worldly success and plentitude, enlightenment for oneself, to name just a few – and these are not insignificant. The fact that these are just the beginning of the “wealth” that morality confers on its practitioners does not invalidate them. This is where the path begins and, given the fact that the sutras are written to inspire initiating the journey, this is where they often focus their attention. Thus the texts frequently point to the reward of a good rebirth or the respect and fame that truly moral people receive.

This is the final day of Paramita Week

Eschewing emphasis on afterlife as a primary concern, Buddhists have carefully examined the character of human existence, the complex human setting of desire, suffering, impermanence, relativity, and uncertainty, which is exactly the sense we have about the life-world in which we live. Wisdom is needed precisely because we do not know timeless truths, because we do not have direct access to a metaphysical order underwriting the world in which we live.

Understanding this as our situation in life, we acknowledge human finitude, the fact of always being immersed in the world in some particular time and place, and experience the reality around us from that specifically shaped and contoured point of view. To be useful for us, therefore, wisdom must be the capacity not to reach outside of our finitude to a permanent order beyond this transitory one but rather to work effectively within it. Although it is tempting to envision a truly wise person as altogether exempt from ambiguity and limited vision, as earlier traditions have done, that would be a state of omniscience, not wisdom. Accepting finitude as the starting point for these meditations, we begin to contemplate wisdom not as the end of uncertainty but rather as a capacity to face uncertain and ambiguous situations with integrity, composure, and reflective insight. Wisdom, therefore, will need to be reconceived as a quality of character that prepares us to function with fine-tuned ethical sensibility in changing contexts of extensive complexity and nuance, while still acknowledging fallibility.

This is the sixth day of Paramita Week

All types of meditation cultivate and focus on the development of at least one level of human mentality.

What are these levels or structures of human consciousness? We can think of human consciousness – as some modern philosophers have – as composed of three layers or levels of awareness. At the most basic level is immediate experience, direct awareness of some appearance, internal or external. We hear sounds in our environment; we see objects, movements, shades of light, colors; we smell fragrances, taste flavors, and feel the tactile character of our world. …

A second layer of human consciousness – reflective thinking – goes beyond direct awareness. In thought we step back out of immediate awareness in order to inquire and reflect on some dimension of it. When engaged at the reflective level of consciousness, we raise questions about what we have experienced, we deliberate, and make judgments: Is this really what it appears to be; is this tool really the best one for this purpose; does this activity conflict or cohere with my moral or political convictions? By employing the mental tools of critical thinking, the reflective level of awareness enables broader and more nuanced understanding. This expansion of consciousness makes deliberate choice among alternatives possible, and its cultivation enhances our capacity to make sound decisions. …

The third form or level of human consciousness is self-awareness, or reflexive consciousness. At this level, the mind bends back in awareness of itself. Beyond the objects of our awareness at the first level and our thinking about them at the second is the self-awareness of the one whose experience this is. Whereas the things of experience and our thoughts about them can become objects of reflection – we can get them in front of our mind’s eye in order to contemplate them – the one who does this cannot be similarly objectified. This is so because every time you attempt to step back to look at yourself or your current engagement in any activity, the one who steps back to look is the one at whom you hope to look. I cannot see myself as subject – my subjectivity as such – in any direct way because I am always the one doing the seeing. …

These three levels of consciousness constitute the structural options of human awareness, at least so far in human evolution. In immediate experience we are aware of the world. In reflective experience, we step back out of immediacy to question or ponder this world. And in reflexive experience, we encounter or get a sense of the one whose experiences these are. Since everything we experience falls within one of these three domains of awareness, or some combination of them, it is helpful to think of meditation as developing the skills and insights associated with each of these levels.

This is the fifth day of Paramita Week

The role of energy in ethics can be highlighted by reflecting on ways in which we might fall short in life. There are two basic ways in which it is possible for a person to fail ethically. The most obvious of these is to act unjustly, to commit crimes against one’s society and oneself, to be a negative, destructive force. But another way is to fail in the positive, failing to live constructively on behalf of oneself and others. This second failure signals a deficiency of energy, a lack of constructive striving toward something worthwhile. Failing in this sense, people may never commit a crime against others or do anything explicitly wrong; their failure consists of not generating the energy of constructive life, thus failing to live a life in keeping with their capacity.

This is the third day of Paramita Week

Perhaps the most widely recognized Buddhist phrase is the first noble truth, the Buddha’s initial assertion that “life is suffering.” This claim has prompted a great deal of critical questioning, even rejection of Buddhism, on the grounds that its negative assessment of human life fails to emphasize human happiness and the joy of life. But this response is based on a misunderstanding, a misreading of the way suffering is positioned in Buddhist thinking. The mistake is understandable, though, given the stark form that this pronouncement takes: “Life is suffering.” Without working through the meanings of the Sanskrit suffering – the reasonable tack taken in introductory books on Buddhism – let us simply rephrase the first noble truth in order to get on with the point behind this first meaning of the perfection of tolerance. Suffering in human life is unavoidable; life always entails periods of suffering. All human beings, no matter how privileged their circumstances, will encounter hardship – we will all get sick, we will all injure ourselves, we will all encounter disappointment, we will all face obstacles, we will all feel the pain of depression, and at some point, we will all confront our own death.

Although every one of us knows that, we nevertheless hide from its truth; we wish otherwise, hope otherwise, and invariably become disillusioned when we encounter pain in spite of our best efforts at avoidance. The Buddhist first noble truth is a frank, startling call to awaken from this avoidance and to face the truth of suffering directly and wisely. As the Buddhist teachings unfold around the first truth, we recognize that, far from a passive rejection of happiness in preference for despair, the teachings demonstrate enormous insight into the human situation by outlining paths of action for overcoming the destructive impact of human suffering. Buddhist teachings begin with a stark warning: Life does entail suffering and, unless you face that fact thoughtfully and courageously, your own habits of response to it may deepen the impact or negative effects of suffering, pushing you toward diminished forms of life.

This is the second day of Paramita Week

Buddhists have recognized that all of us begin the cultivation of morality from within whatever quality of self-understanding we happen to have. That means, of course, that our initial motives for moral action will be predominantly self-centered. But as moral practice matures and the accompanying mental transformation progresses, practitioners gradually recognize how the perfection of morality is grounded in compassion and sincere concern for others.

Buddhists claim (1) that everything is change, and this flux is without beginning or end, (2) that all things arise and pass away dependent on the force of energy surging forth from other things, which themselves were similarly generated, ad infinitum, and (3) that therefore there is “no-self” or essential unchanging core to anything, since all things are temporary formations of energies that are simply passing through their current states.

No traditional metaphysical system, whether religious or philosophical, comes as close to prefiguring modern physics as the Buddhist one. Contemporary physics works out of an understanding of energy as the generator of all things. Energy is thought to take a broad range of forms – from nuclear energy, gravitational energy, electrical energy, heat energy, chemical energy, kinetic energy, elastic energy, radiant energy, to mass energy. We are told, by no less a source than Albert Einstein, that matter is energy – that the two are essentially interchangeable. The various theories of creation in contemporary physics all point to the energy required to give rise to the universe. The leading theory – the Big Bang – sees the cosmos resulting from a primordial explosion of energy that is still expanding into increasing complexity. Nevertheless, we are told, the amount of energy in the universe is constant. It never changes, even though the forms it takes are constantly changing. The energy of an exploding star is the same as that of a boulder tumbling down a mountain, which is the same as that stored in a carrot, released in the spin of Einstein’s mind or the play of a small child.