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Summary
From the book “Gakko no kibon: Buddha ga shimputo jolly ikikata” by Soto Zen priest Fujita Kazuteru.
joyful way of life
What exactly is the “joyful way of life”? And what does it have to do with Buddha’s teachings? In this book, I focus on the “Buddhist way of learning” rather than the basic knowledge of Buddhism as an answer to these questions, saying that “learning” is a great joy for human beings and that it brings us closer to a “joyful life.
This “Buddhist way of learning” refers specifically to “asceticism,” and “asceticism” does not aim to have a special experience such as enlightenment or liberation by doing something difficult, but to “learn” from the very act of living, from all the daily activities that we do with our whole body and mind. This “practice” is called “gyo” in Buddhist terminology, and Buddhism is also defined as a “religion of practice.
The “learning” that takes place in ascetic practice is not the “school learning” of forcing oneself to engage in uninteresting studies and enduring the pain and boredom of the present while fantasizing about the future joy of achieving one’s goals. I call it “organic learning”.
This organic learning is not about the accumulation of knowledge, but about changing oneself by learning, growing by changing, encountering more unknown worlds as one grows, and becoming richer and more joyful by accumulating these experiences. Babies and children have an amazing ability to learn, and the source of this ability is the pure joy of learning.
As we grow older, we develop an ego that is troubled by thoughts and feelings caused by various knowledge and concepts, and these become barriers that make us forget this joy, and learning becomes a painful task before we know it, and we stop growing. The practice of asceticism is the process of reclaiming this act of learning.
It is like carefully watching over a seedling and nurturing it so that it becomes a big tree. It is like carefully watching over a seedling and nurturing it to become a big tree. The act of doing so becomes “joyfulness.
The first thing that is necessary for this practice is to “not work hard”. Rather, practice and enlightenment should be inseparable, and one should feel rewards (joy, peace, etc.) while practicing.
The next thing that needs to be done is to “touch and watch closely”. When we learn about the world, we become aware of what our own preoccupations and feelings are, and this changes the way we see the world.
This “touch and see” requires “eyes with high resolution. There are two types of resolution: spatial resolution and temporal resolution. Spatial resolution is the ability to recognize that a single system that appears pink to the low-resolution eye, for example, is actually a combination of two systems, one red and one white, while temporal resolution is a kind of dynamic vision, where phenomena that appear to occur simultaneously at low resolution actually occur back and forth in time. It is the ability to recognize that phenomena that seem to occur simultaneously when the resolution is low are actually two separate phenomena that occur back and forth in time.
For example, “suffering = pain x resistance,” which is a common theme in Buddhism, is generally thought to be “suffering = pain,” but when physical pain occurs, all we feel at the moment is the sensation of “pain. However, if we increase the temporal resolution, we can see that the body resists the sensation of “pain” and the tension in the muscles increases, and the suffering doubles as soon as the thought “Oh, I don’t like it” comes up.
This equation can be applied not only to the “suffering equation”, but also to the “happiness equation”. This is expressed by the equation “Happiness = Pleasure / Attachment”, and as we increase the degree of attachment to pleasure (wanting more, or trying to keep it all to ourselves), the degree of happiness decreases by division.
The book concludes that by using these resolution-raising approaches, we can live in a joyful world by carefully observing and distinguishing between the “pain” and “pleasure” that are inevitable and the “resistance” and “attachment” that come along with them. Living life as it is,” as often mentioned in Buddhist books, means accepting the pain and pleasure that we inevitably encounter in life as it is, while “abandoning attachment” means recognizing and reducing resistance and attachment, which are essentially different from these.
I think this kind of resolution-raising is an important concept that appears not only in the way we live, but also in the way we work.
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