MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
The Language of the Birds
A deep tranquillity pervades ancient Buddhist graveyards, an atmosphere of utter peace and rest, of sunlit silence and shady stillness, with nothing of the eerie, depressing, or sad. Now nature seems becalmed except for the occasional light breeze bringing a rustle and glint of leaves; for the year is at the spring equinox, when the Yang and Yin forces governing the universe are for a time in perfect balance. Listening to the earliest birdsong, I am reminded that at the equinox the dead are believed to return on a brief visit to their earthly homes; and so I liken the birds celebrating the arrival of spring with song to those winged apparitions created by the Buddha to preach the Dharma in his Western Paradise.
For as we have already had occasion to remark, birds and other winged and feathered beings in most Traditions symbolize the higher states of Consciousness. The Nembutsu is like a magic password to those aery worlds and enables us to understand the language of the birds. Have the blessed spirits of the deceased ancestors, I wonder, returned to earth in this form to sing likewise of the joys of release from life-and-death ? Who are all those celestial beings who are seen in the mandala paintings of Jodo, flying through the sky from other Buddha-fields to acclaim Amida and to hear him expound the Dharma in his own Pure Land ?
In one of his many illuminating insights, Shinran Shonin saw that the moment when all these Buddhas and Bodhisattvas accept Amida and sing his praises is that in which all sentient beings are instantly reborn in the Pure Land. Since all sentient beings participate in the universal Buddha-nature, as soon as they acknowledge Amida, their innate Bodhicitta awakes, and they realize that they are all those other Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, who from the transcendent viewpoint are the One and Only Transmigrant.