MURYOKO

'Infinite Light'

Journal of Shin Buddhism

Harold Stewart

Spiritual Pollution

On leaving home I was soon caught in a fresh shower of snow that united heaven and earth in its white void, so that I could no longer see my way, but in which, because of my spiritual blindness, I still left behind karmic footprints of slippery ice, unlike Lao-tzu's 'superior traveller, who leaves no traces'.

The transformation of nature, and even the ugly works of man, by this gift of snow, like a descent of divine grace into the material world, suggested the contrast between this impure land, or Edo, and Amida Buddha's Pure Land, Jodo. The problem of the pollution of our geophysical environment is now the cause of serious concern, since our very survival in an industrialized world is in question. Equally a matter of life and death is our mental pollution by drugs, alcohol, political propaganda inciting to violence or conditioning to conformity, advertising to multiply but not satisfy desires, and morally debasing entertainment, not to mention the insidious spread of sheer technological ugliness. But almost nothing is heard of spiritual pollution, although this is the ultimate root of all other branches of contamination; for as long as we are spiritually unclean, our moral and social defilement, as well as the laying waste of our natural surroundings and their resources, is inevitable. But what, it will be asked, constitutes spiritual pollution ? In the final analysis, this is nothing more than the illusion of ego, whether it be individual, familial, social, institutional, national, or racial. It is the egoistic illusion that produces the Three Poisons: greed, enmity, and foolishness, those klesha which defile the innate mirror of the clear Buddha-Mind and so are the real cause and origin of our mental and environmental pollution. As the Buddhist proverb says: Bonno kuno, or defilements are suffering. Conversely, it is inner spiritual purification alone that can remedy our outer material uncleanliness; and this results from a realization of the truth of anatma (Japanese:muga): that from the beginning there never was a self, and only our egoistic delusions divorce us from that innate purity, the divine principle or Buddha-nature in man.

Yet how can we purify ourselves spiritually by our own individual or social efforts? This is manifestly impossible, as anyone knows who has tried, since it is the ego that, by its own self-will and effort, undertakes the task. And so all its endeavours, no matter how altruistic and well-intentioned, must inevitably end in failure because of its heavy load of karmic residues: the past thoughts, words, and deeds of ourselves and all our ancestors, which contaminate with egoism everything that we think, say, and do. Only the Awakening of Faith, that radical change of heart caused by the gratuitous transference of the boundless merit of Amida Buddha from his supra-human store, can now purify us spiritually, and so mentally and morally, and thus redeem our physical environment. Individual unselfishness or social morality, economic and political panaceas, cannot accomplish this alone. Only the death of the ego in utter selflessness, that metanoia, or 'turning about in the deepest seat of conscious being', the only miracle recognized by the Buddha, can transfigure us and our world with wonder, like the silent benediction of snow. It is the stage that in European alchemy is called albedo.