Hi Everybody,
Hope all is well with you. Thanks for coming to the blog. I try hard to keep it going at least once a week, but it's been really busy this week completing a script. So to recap, we're in the middle of what I think is a really important section exploring the meaning of myoho in the mantra we chant, nam myoho renge kyo. I notice I give fully 5 pages to this section which is an indication of how important an understanding of this phrase is to the practice. Anyway, we've reached the cart and horses!! This is an analogy that is often used because it presents such a graphic picture of the relationship between the myo and the ho aspects of our life.
So, our life is the cart and it's pulled along by our myo horse, or our deepest spiritual energy, and our ho horse, our physical life. In general it's true to say that we are accustomed to spending a great deal of time and effort nurturing the strength and the well-being of our ho horse, because of course it is so visible and so accessible to us. We can look at it in the mirror for example and worry about its shape! We can feed it three times a day and take it to the gym to work out and off to play sports to ensure that it is kept fit and healthy and suitably diverted. As a result we tend very much to equate our happiness and our sense of satisfaction with life with how well we are getting on with looking after our ho horse.
By contrast we tend to spend relatively little time, if any, nurturing and exercising our myo horse, because of course it is wholly unseen and and in general has a less powerful presence. The result is a gross imbalance in the pulling power of these two dimensions of our life. The wagon of our life is pulled off strongly in one direction dictated by our physical needs, our strong ho horse. Indeed it is often pulled round in circles, repeating patterns of behaviour, because the spiritual side of our make-up hasn't been nurtured enough to influence, to change that is, our habitual behaviour. We can, as we all know so well, become very much creatures of habit, tending to repeat patterns of thought and behaviour even when they lead to considerable pain and suffering in our lives. People very often for example, go through a whole series of similar relationships each one of which might follow a very similar pattern of rise and fall.
What we need to do, Buddhism tells us, is to become aware of the effects of this gross imbalance between the strength of our physical and spiritual lives, and so allocate more time and energy to keeping both horses, the myo as well as the ho, in a fit and active and healthy state.
That is very much the role that is played by the daily Buddhist practice, it is the regular daily work out for our myo horse.
That's plenty enough for this episode.
Next time we are on to renge.
Hope to see you then.
With all my best wishes,
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon and as a download on Kindle and if you read it and enjoy it, I would be immensely grateful if you would be prepared to put a few words into into the review section. Readers reviews are apparently a very powerful factor in encouraging new readers. And please accept my gratitude in advance!
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