Sorrow/Joy
Joy/Sorrow
Sorrow/Joy
Nembutsu
Joy/Sorrow
Sorrow/Joy
Nembutsu
Lie #2
Amida's Primal Vow does not discriminate between the young and old, good and evil.
Lie #1
When the thought of saying the nembutsu emerges decisively from within ... in that that very moment we receive the ultimate benefit of being grasped never to be abandoned.
John Burdett, Bangkok 8 --
"No one in the market has seen the full potential of Viagra," my mother explains over a Marlboro Red...
"I suppose not," I yell above the traffic noise.
"I mean, everyone knows about it and the farangs know they can get it over the counter at any pharmacy anywhere in Thailand, but we haven't woken up to the new client potential which is coming onstream."
"It sounds as if you have, Mother."
"Think about it," she yells. "you're a seventy-year-old farang man and for the past twenty years your sex life has gone from extremely boring to nonexistent. You expect to die within the next ten years and you haven't even thought about sex for the last five. You've thought of yourself as totally out of the running and you've got used to your family and loved ones thinking of you as some decrepit old fool who ought to have the decency to pop off sooner rather than later so they can inherit the house."...
"Then one day someone at your old people's home mentions Viagra. Some old bugger even more ancient than you, who even you think should have the decency to pop off immediately, whispers in your ear that he recently spent a week in Bangkok and tried the blue pill and had an erection that lasted four hours which he used to sample three or four beautiful young women. Well, what would you do?"...
"You'd choke on your false teeth in your rush to book the flight to Krung Thep is what you'd do. So the market can't help but grow. There are more than fifteen million American men over the age sixty-five, after age fifty in America it is no longer the best of times no matter how much money you've got... They put up with it because they ran out of options a long time ago. At least, they think they did. I have good news for them. But do they really want disco music, techno, all that frenzy - girls in bikinis cavorting around steel poles, all that nonsense? Of course not. They want something from their own times, an environment that caters to their age group and is sensitive to their needs."
"Oxygen on tap behind the bar? An ambulance waiting in the street? Why not add a hospital wing to your brothel?"
"I wish you wouldn't call it that. I'm providing libido therapy to the aged. What I'm trying to explain is the matter of timing."
"Timing?"
"That's the thing. A young man gets an erection because a woman has aroused him, and for ten thousand years the trade has built itself around that biological fact."
"What else would it build itself around?"
"So we're still a primitive industry at the mercy of nature. We're still at the stage of hunting and gathering. But with the market we're targeting, the customer gets an erection more or less exactly one hour after taking the pill, it's the equivalent of a steak in the fridge. We've freed ourselves from Mother Nature and taken control of the timing. There's a four-hour window which he's not going to want to waste drinking beer and listening to junk music. He might want to relax later, but his main priority is to take advantage of the drug. Especially when he has probably read that it can cause heart attacks."
"I blink at the apparent incongruity of this last remark. She lights another cigarette. "Don't you see, in their minds this could be their last fling? They might have decided to go out with a bang, so to speak. We could be helping them to celebrate their last days on earth. They're trading in a couple more years of limping across the linoleum and endless card games with the other arthritic goners for maybe a week of ecstatic humping with the best thing they've seen for fifty years. This is a service of compassion and enlightenment. I'm sure the Buddha will approve."
"Not one and yet not two". --Yoshifumi Ueda
is -
Foolish Self Buddhism
Honen:
Persons of the Pure Land tradition attain birth in the Pure Land by becoming their foolish selves.
Shinran:
As for myself Shinran, I simply take to heart the words of my teacher, Honen, "Just say the nembutsu and be saved by Amida," and entrust myself to the Primal Vow. Besides this, there is nothing else.
Just in case you need a definition of self-power here is Shinran.
"Self-power is the effort to attain birth, whether by invoking the names of Buddhas other than Amida and practicing good acts other than the nembutsu, in accordance with your particular circumstances and opportunities; or by endeavoring to make yourself worthy through mending the confusion in our acts, words, and thoughts, confident of your own powers and guided by your own calculation."
The Collected Works of Shinran, p. 525, Lamp for the Latter Ages
"...endeavoring to make yourself worthy..." is the part that I hook into. Sounds like a formula for disaster.