Last summer I had the opportunity to help out at an event at Fukushō-ji called "A Thousand Days of Visits" (Sennichi Mairi 千日参り). The name comes from the day's particular auspiciousness; it's said that visiting on that day has karmic benefits equivalent to offering prayers a thousand days in a row. Fukushō-ji's Sennichi Mairi is held at the end of summer, right at the run-up to Japan's "season of the dead." Obon (お盆) in mid-August and Ohigan (お彼岸) on the autumnal equinox are times at which the spirits of deceased ancestors are believed to return to our world and benefit from our offerings to them. In Japan, temples play an important role in welcoming and venerating these spirits. Perhaps because of the timing, many of the prayers offered at the Sennichi Mairi service, too, were dedicated to deceased family members. My teacher offered a brief sermon after the service:
"Thanks to everyone for coming. You know in Buddhism we're always putting our palms together in the gasshō gesture, but we don't stop very often to think about what it means. I think a lot of you have been busy with Obon obligations and have family on your mind, so I'd like to share one meaning of gasshō with you. Your left hand is you, and your right hand is your ancestors who have died. When you put your hands together gently, you create a little space in the middle; this is the space where you and your ancestors can be together. You can do this just by remembering them, thinking about what they liked, the sound of their voice, something they said that stuck with you. It's as easy as that: put your hands together, remember them, and be thankful for them."
I initially bristled at this sermon. I don't think it's an overstatement or secret to say that Japanese Buddhism is dominated by rites for the dead. Obon and Ohigan observances see priests of all Japan's Buddhist sects visiting up to 50 households a day to offer prayers at home altars. Aside from this, temples are often entirely reliant on funerals and periodic memorial services for their income. This has set Japanese Buddhism up for a slow-rolling disaster: long decades of economic stagnation mean regular folks have less money to spend on traditional Buddhist funerals, and the failure of Buddhist institutions to provide a holistic doctrinal context for such rites means that people no longer see a reason to spend their hard-earned money on them either. This decontextualized reliance on funerals has led many Japanese people to see Buddhist priests as downright ghoulish, bilking bereaved grandmas to buy ourselves Rolexes and BMWs.
This emphasis on rites of ancestor veneration is often framed by Westerners coming to Japanese Buddhism, as well as by reform-minded Japanese priests, as an example of inculturation gone too far. Confucianism or indigenous attitudes toward the bones and spirits of ancestors, they say, provided a convenient hook by which proponents of Buddhism made their foreign tradition intelligible to East Asians who might otherwise never have given it a second thought. Now, though, its dominance is thought to come at the cost of "real" Buddhist teaching. Ancestor veneration is, then, a cultural artifact not inherent to Buddhism, something we can discard as we bring the tradition to the West or deemphasize as we bring it into modernity in Asia. This was a perspective I shared, and one that gave me pause as my teacher preached to his Sennichi Mairi audience.
But looking at the faces of the listeners, I saw something that I had truly never seen during a dharma talk in Japan: where most audiences, which skew older, fall asleep within seconds of a priest opening their mouth, the folks gathered at Fukushō-ji that day were listening intently with their palms together. Some audibly sighed as the message hit home for them. Though I initially chalked this up to the same forces of inculturation as made me uncomfortable with the message, I was nevertheless impressed to see a Buddhist sermon provide such palpable comfort to folks when such things usually fall on deaf ears. Connecting Buddhism to family clearly gave it immediacy and applicability for the folks gathered there.
A few weeks later, around the equinox, I was talking to my dear Dharma friend Myōgen, a Tendai priest who was at the time recovering from several days of house calls offering prayers for parishioners' ancestors. We were discussing an unrelated point from the Brahma Net Sutra, the source of the "Bodhisattva Precepts" which have had such a lasting legacy on Japanese Buddhism. Primed by my experience at Sennichi Mairi and Myōgen's tales of their exhausting prayer rounds, the final lines of Precept 20 "On Failure to Liberate Sentient Beings" jumped out at me:
On the day his father, mother, and siblings die, [the Bodhisattva] should invite Dharma Masters to explain the Bodhisattva sutras and precepts. This will generate merits and virtues and help the deceased either to achieve rebirth in the Pure Lands and meet the Buddhas or to secure rebirth in the human or celestial realms. If instead, a disciple fails to do so, he commits a secondary offense.
There, in black and white, was an injunction from one of the most important Mahāyāna sutras to perform funeral rites! Though talk of Buddhist obligations to family and filial piety are without a doubt emphasized heavily in the traditions of the Sinosphere, they are also explicitly present in the Pali scriptures (as here and here) widely thought to be the earliest stratum of Buddhist teachings. Learning this, I found it increasingly difficult to dismiss such activities as extraneous cultural artifacts that can fall by the wayside as Buddhism jumps cultures.
Though I have now "left my household" (shukke 出家), as taking Buddhist ordination is often called in Japanese, a visit home over the holidays reminded me of how inextricable I am from the influence my mom, dad, and siblings have had on me, and I on them. Everything that we have ever been over countless aeons tumbling through birth after birth has led to our being born into our families; our familial relationships, whether wholesome or fraught, form a uniquely important part of our karmic situation. Without the baffling array of factors by which our parents met and made us, we would not have the opportunity to encounter and practice the Dharma. Though this situation of dependent origination describes our relationship to every phenomenon we encounter, engaging the impact of our families on us provides is a uniquely accessible doorway for reflecting on and experiencing it. Our lives, dedicated to the practice of benefiting others, have the capacity to send ripples of liberation right up and down our family tree and, by extension, all of reality. This is reflected in the lines leading up to the injunction to funeral rites in the Brahma Net Sutra:
A disciple of the Buddha should have a mind of compassion and cultivate the practice of liberating sentient beings. He must reflect thus: throughout the eons of time, all male sentient beings have been my father, all female sentient beings my mother. I was born of them. If I now slaughter them, I would be slaughtering my parents as well as eating flesh that was once my own. This is so because all elemental earth, water, fire, and air -- the four constituents of all life -- have previously been part of my body, part of my substance. I must therefore always cultivate the practice of liberating sentient beings and enjoin others to do likewise -- as sentient beings are forever reborn, again and again, lifetime after lifetime.
Inspired by these discoveries (new information, I'm sure, only to me) over the last few months, I made a point of visiting my grandparents' graves just before Christmas. This is something I recall doing only a few times in my life. Christian culture's perspective that the soul moves far away from the body, leaving the corpse to wait for reanimation at the End of Days means that graveyards serve as little more than storage facilities in advance of the eschaton. At the same time, being a white descendant of settlers means my family's history in North America is shallow; I am geographically cut off from the vast majority of my family tree. On top of that, growing up with American culture's hyper-emphasis on individualism means that I simply do not have the sensation of connection that made the folks at Sennichi Mairi get doughy-eyed over the thought of connecting to their relatives.
In spite of these reservations, I thought it was important to go and implement my teacher's advice: I went, put my hands together, remembered, and gave thanks. What I found was that although my cultural background definitely made my experience different from folks in Japan, making time to engage in this simple process served as a doorway for reflection on the infinite array of human factors that have lead to my existence, encouraged me to reflect on my own impermanence, and opened up a renewed sense of responsibility for being of benefit to those around me. What could be more Buddhist than that?
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