“Ritual without meaning is pointless, just like a thank you without gratitude is empty.”
On any given Sunday during service, we engage in the practice of gassho multiple times. But what does it mean to gassho? Often we associate the act of gassho, placing our palms together, and reciting Namo Amida Butsu as the same thing. They are in fact two separate acts. To gassho, according to proper Jodo Shinshu etiquette, we place our hands together, palm to palm, with the fingers and thumbs aligned. Our o-nenju encircles the hands and is held lightly under the thumbs. Our elbows should be fairly close to the body and the hands should be at mid-chest at a 45 degree angle. If we are bowing in gassho, we bend at the waist until our palms are parallel to the ground, exposing our head. But are we bad Buddhists if we do not gassho properly, if we are lazy or sloppy or if our hands do not bend properly?
The act of gassho is not simply following this etiquette. We’re not trying to earn points for proper execution—there’s no Olympics for a proper gassho. “Buddhist etiquette is more concerned with the refinement of our behavior in relationship to the Buddha, the Teachings, and the Sangha…it is more important to move with reverence and gratitude in all things regarding the Buddha. Reverence and gratitude for the Wisdom and Compassion of the Buddha are integral aspects of Buddhist etiquette. Learning and practice of outward gestures alone are empty and meaningless. Gassho is meaningful only when it is the Nembutsu in action—when it is the expression of our gratitude and reverence. Therefore we practice Buddhist etiquette because we are inspired to put in to action the reverence and gratitude which we feel toward the Buddha.”
Before the Buddha reached enlightenment and became Shakyamuni, he left home and took up ascetic practices. For six years he either ate one meal a day, or one meal every two weeks, or one meal a month. It is said his arms and legs became like withered reeds, his spine like braided rope. His hair fell out in clumps. He did not bathe as mendicant practice required. He wore burlap or discarded clothes. His skin became ashen and he slept at nights in the graveyard, where corpses and bones lay scattered or piled up in heaps. He pushed his ascetic practices as far as any man had ever done and still he was unable to attain the Dharma. He finally decided to seek a new path. When he left the path of an ascetic, the people he practiced with were angry and abandoned him. Siddhartha gathered his strength and made the decision to sit under the beautiful Bodhi tree until he reached enlightenment.
I can only imagine the anger of the five other mendicants was that of sadness and disappointment. Perhaps in your own journey you have felt this. The people we have practiced with outside of the temple may feel the sting of betrayal and abandonment when we left what they understood and thought was the best path. I know for me, my parents were so sad when I left the Roman Catholic Church during college. When I left Christianity all together, we didn’t really talk about it but when I began exploring and practicing Buddhism, denial turned into sadness and anger. I have family members that do not want to talk about it all. Because they believe so strongly in their own path, they do not know how to accept other belief systems. This does not make them bad people. Mostly their feelings are over concern for my wellbeing.
After Siddhartha became enlightened, he wanted to share the truth of the teachings and he sought out the very men who had left him. It is said that when the mendicants saw him they were struck by the transformation of their former friend, by his serenity and the radiance of his personality and that they spontaneously placed their palms together and greeted him with deep bows. They greeted him in gassho. They recognized in him, not the man they knew as Siddhartha Gautama, but his Buddhahood—his awakening. When we study this path, those changes begin to happen in us as well. We seem calmer, more content and at peace. For me, some family members still do not want to talk about my Buddhist path but people like my mother, recognize a change in me that was not there and have begun to soften to the idea that this is the right path for me.
Ken Yamada, from the Berkeley Higashi Honganji Temple, another Pure Land School observed, “Gassho is more than a pose. It is symbolic of the Dharma, the truth about life. For instance, we place together our right and left hand, which are opposites. It represents other opposites as well: you and me, light and dark, ignorance and wisdom, life and death. Gassho also symbolizes respect, the Buddhist teachings and the Dharma. It also is an expression of our feelings of gratitude and our interconnectedness with each other. It symbolizes the realizations that our lives are supported by innumerable causes and conditions.” Gassho is the most noble pose we may take.
When we encircle our hands in the o-nenju, it symbolizes our Oneness with Amida Buddha. Our left hand represents samsara, our right, nirvana and we recognize the great compassion and wisdom that surrounds our life. We offer our gratitude for all that has been given to us and we take refuge.
Gratitude and thanks go hand in hand (no pun intended). If you’ve been around a temple for even a short while, you have seen these acts of gratitude in other places. In service we “Itchidaki” the book. That is the act of bringing the service book up to our foreheads and then back down. We do this to give thanks to the teachings that are contained within. The teachings of the Buddha, Amida Buddha, and Shinran are treated as something special because it is so difficult and unlikely that we would come in contact with them in our lifetime.
We don’t put our coffee cup on top of the service book or put it on the floor or under our armpit. It’s not to be militaristic or uptight. We choose to treat it as something that is precious. When I was at Berkeley, many of the students even itchidaki the collected works of Shinran. And if the word “ichidaki” sounds familiar, it is. Before meals we put our hands together in gassho and say “itadakimasu.” The expression itadkimasu means, “I will raise it to my head”—an act of respect and gratitude. Without food, we could not survive long enough to encounter the Dharma.
Whether we are vegan or carnivores, we exist at the expense of life around us. The land and resources it takes to sustain humans comes at the sacrifice of other life, at other beings and their potential. In the same way that we give thanks in gassho to the teachings of the Buddha and all the causes and conditions that brings those teachings to us, we give thanks and gratitude to not just our food but the items that protect and sustain us. Food, clothing, cars, roads, homes, money…the list goes on ad infinitum.
A few years ago a book by Marie Kondo came out called “The Magical Art of Tidying.” In the book, meant to declutter your home and life, Kondo helps the reader minimize the resources they consume, to keep and purchase only items that bring joy, and to be thankful for the tangible items we do have. My wife Becca and I went through the book and her method is pretty methodical. You start by gathering all of your clothing from everywhere in the house, pile it up in one spot and you go through item by item and only keep what brings you joy. If something is ragged and needs to be thrown, you thank the item for how it sustained you and then move on. Coming from a hoarder type family, the method was a bit difficult for me. I like to hold onto things for sentimental reasons or because you never know when you might need or want it. Kondo’s method helped us discard several hundred books, 23 bags of clothes and boxes and boxes of nick knacks and various unnecessary items.
At the time of the “Magical Purge” in our home, I found a white dress shirt that my grandmother had made me in high school. As a kid, we were very poor and my grandmother would make some of our clothes from time to time. She was quite talented. The sleeve had a tear in it and one of the buttons was broken. The white wasn’t very white anymore. The shirt defied the odds of fitting. It became abundantly clear the shirt had served its purpose. It was time to say goodbye.
Now my grandmother was simply the most important person in my life. She helped raise me, helped our family stay together during bad times and was the person I called when I needed to talk or laugh. She was the first person to accept I was gay and embraced Becca right away. When she passed away, it was the hardest thing I ever went through. Saying goodbye to the shirt felt like it was going to be discarding a piece of her. But Becca and I talked, shared memories of my grandmother and thanked the shirt. Thanking the shirt was like thanking all of the things that made up my grandmother. Her love and care and all of the ways that she helped me become the person I am today. Letting go of the shirt was so hard and I cried in way I hadn’t cried since her passing. Yes, I could have kept the shirt, but those memories and truths were not in the shirt, they were in me.
To me, this is the heart of gassho. We honor all of the things that are part of who we are or help us become who we will be. Gassho is a tangible way we can show how moved we are by the clothing that sustains us, the food that nourishes us, and the teachings that ease our suffering.
So back to those original questions; are we bad Buddhists if we do not gassho properly, if we are lazy or sloppy or if our hands do not bend properly? No, we are not bad Buddhists if we do these things. There is no such thing as a good or bad Buddhist but we are responsible for our path. When we become aware of all that has been given to us, why would we want to treat gassho as something empty and undeserving of our reverence? Ritual without meaning is pointless, just like a thank you without gratitude is empty.
Namo Amida Butsu
In gassho
Rev. Melissa Opel
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