Running Hot & Cold
Spring is quickly approaching and we will be having our Spring Ohigan seminar and service. Traditionally, spring has been thought of as having the perfect Dharma listening weather. It is neither too hot nor too cold so that we may focus on the teachings without distraction. With our modern luxuries of central heating and air conditioning, this may not be as relevant as it was in the past but the tradition continues. This is also the motivation for the Fall Ohigan.
I didn’t really appreciate the importance of the weather until I traveled to St Louis on business in both the winter and summer. Their winters are extremely cold even with a bright blue sunny sky and the summers are unbearably hot and humid. This is much like the weather in Kyoto, Japan. Without heat and air, it must have been very difficult to practice in these conditions.
As they say, “everybody complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” Well, I am one of those people who foolishly tried to do something about it. I would like to share a personal story of my own foolish battles with the weather.
In our tradition, we often hear ordinary people described as “foolish beings” or as being “deluded” and “filled with blind passions”. I think this is true but not for the reasons we often think. We have to be careful not to assign any moral and ethical value to these statements. We are merely confused and lost in our thoughts. It is not just ordinary people that find themselves in this predicament, but it is all people, monks as well. We are all just ordinary, foolish beings.
When I was young, my family would drive to Lindsay California to visit my grandparents. In the winter, it was quite cold in the San Juaquin Valley, often 30 degrees or less at night. But I always found my grandmother’s house to be usually hot, I mean really hot especially to a fourteen-year-old boy. The reason was that she set the thermostat to 74 degrees in the winter. To me it always felt like 80 degrees. Maybe I was sitting too close to the vent.
I would often lower the thermostat to 70 degrees when she wasn’t looking. But she would always catch me and turn it back up again. But then I notice that she had a standing lamp near the thermostat so I would turn on all the lights to high and move it right in front of the thermostat so that the heat from the lights would cause the thermostat to turn off the heat. But she also caught me doing this and would turn off the lights and move the lamp away from the thermostat again.
I finally complained to my mom and she said that when we are at my grandma’s house she gets to have the heat to her liking. But I later realized that when she visited us at our house in the winter the thermostat was still set to 74 degrees. I asked my mom why does grandma get to do this at our house as well? She explained that grandma was our guest and she gets to do whatever she wants as a guest (so frustrating).
My grandmother also did this in the summer, setting the AC to 68 degrees, I was now freezing. And it made me wonder why 68 was too cold for the winter and 74 was too hot for the summer. But I caught myself doing this very thing recently in our Hondo. I fanaticized recently at how happy I would be if the Hondo in the winter could be as hot as it is in the summer and if the Hondo could be as cold in the summer as it is in the winter. In that moment I had become my grandmother, always wanting things to be different and not even in a consistent way.
My family often teases me because all summer long I say that I can’t believe how hot it is and then in the winter I say I can’t believe how cold it is. In the summer, I yearn for the winter and in the winter I eagerly anticipate the return of summer. I am always living in the future, not happy or appreciating how things are now.
How funny it is that my ideal temperature is also based upon my thoughts and feelings. I love 68 in the summer but not in the winter and love 74 in the winter but avoid it in the summer. But this is our reality. We mistake our opinions and preferences for facts and objective truth. This insight into our foolishness helps us become more a flexible and much less dogmatic. Our minds become more supple and gentle. As Dennis Hirota explains,
“[Using] Shinran’s metaphor, the light of Amida’s wisdom-compassion illuminates and pervades human existence ‘unhindered’ by blind passions. Further, Shinran emphasizes the transformative power in the Thirty-third Vow, which states that beings touched by Amida’s light ‘become supple and gentle in body and mind’” (CWS I: 117).
This experience also helped me realize that I am just like everyone else. We are all foolish, ordinary beings every day. We are all doing the best we can. And realizing our foolishness is a precious gift. It humbles us and opens us up to new experiences. When we see and accept our foolishness we can truly connect with others. We can embrace everyone as they are. All hierarchies dissolve. We are all now part of the same family no matter what the weather or the temperature. We can now always live in the spring and fall of our lives, where every day is the best day to listen to the Dharma.
Namuamidabutsu, Rev Jon Turner
