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Taking Responsibility An address delivered by Robert Aitken Roshi to the Buddhist Peace Fellowship 2006 Membership Gathering June 23, 2006 Entering an Epoch Time Hi everybody: I am pleased to be able to address you, and thus have some part in your convocation. It is appropriate that we should be meeting, high time, in fact. It is a point in our religious history, indeed in our secular history, for us to understand, to grasp and to internalize and make our own. Make no mistake. The Neo-Cons are in power and are betraying us and our political heritage. In just a short period, the ideals, groundwork and bulwarks of social justice set in place by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his supporters seventy years ago have been wiped away so that our very Constitution is called into question. Even trees and deer, protected by another Roosevelt a generation earlier ago, are endangered. At the same time, our nation has been launched on a ruthless course of murderous imperialism. We are in an important place in our religious history as well. Scandals rock the Catholic Church; Protestant churches are popular here and there for what seem to be superficial reasons, and here and there for what seem benighted reasons. Buddhist founders in the West are either dead or on the point of dying, and their successors seem just to be finding themselves, to speak generously in some instances. Muslims and Jews are mired in a bloody war. Spengler called such historical points as the one we have reached, “epochs,” giving appropriate weight to turns that might otherwise seem just to be part of the scene. I view the present political and religious crisis in Mahayana terms, but we in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship are made up of many kinds of Buddhists. Those of you who find your home in the Theravada or the Vajrayana tradition will have to reach for an analogy. You are stuck with someone brought up in the Zen tradition of the Mahayana, and I trust that you will be able to use my words in correspondence to points that are more familiar, and to realize that the present moment is indeed an epoch for us all. It is possible to show that in the course of history, epochs have marked the Mahayana with an unfolding of the religion steadily toward the intimate. Beginning with the Buddha’s experience under the Bodhi Tree, the movement has enabled students to take the twinkle of the Morning Star and the universe of its implications more and more to heart. You and I would not be here without the blood shed in the efforts of work horses of the past to take the steps necessary to make, for example, this gathering possible and appropriate. The Legacy of Baizhang Huaihai Scanning our heritage tree, important names stand out. Baizhang Huaihai stands out for me. Born just seven years after the death of Huineng, the Sixth Ancestor, and a Dharma heir of Mazu Daoyi, he was thus a part of the great flowering of early Chan that was also fertilized by such illustrious figures as Yunyan Tansheng and Nanquan Puyuan. Classical Buddhism evolved along in parallel with the teaching of those early figures. Disciples of the Buddha and their successors over many hundreds of years have kept the teaching of their founder as a closed system, with lay followers looking forward to rebirth as monks who have the true word—meantime supporting the fortunate monks of their time by taking care of their upkeep. Western Theravada teachers are breaking new ground in this field, and I would invite them to speak for themselves. When Baizhang was active, in the late eighth and early ninth centuries of our era, there were still Mahayana monks who applied the ancient precepts to their exclusive limit: A monk asked, “In cutting down plants, chopping wood, and digging the earth, will there be any form of retribution for wrongdoing?” Baizhang said, “One cannot definitely say that there is wrongdoing. How can one definitely say that there is no wrongdoing?” (1) Wrongdoing is not something out there. It lies in your intention, if it is there at all. Somebody has to clear the brush and chop the firewood. Your question is literally Classical. It is time to open the system. You are not a special fellow who can hold himself aloof from bad karma by getting somebody else to do your evil deeds. Baizhang clarifies his point in a dialogue with Yunyan, who went on to be an ancestor of the Soto School:
1. Thomas Cleary, trans., Saying and Doings of Pai-Chang: Ch’an Master of Great Wisdom (Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1978), p. 42.
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