Devotional practice as an antidote to karma/bad habits

The autumn term at The Buddhist House, in Leicestershire, is traditionally the busiest and often referred to as the training term. As well as training in living in community and serving others Dharmavidya has been presenting weekly dharma talks. So far this term Dharmavidya has given three talks about three of the most influential figures to the Pureland tradition of Buddhism. You can listen online here (Friends of Amida).

I confess, with all the business of moving house and so on I've not listened myself (the whole team of ministers in my order has promised to listen and have an online discussion) but I was with Dharmavidya yesterday and he gave the gist of his thesis.

The Indian sage Nagarjuna is most known for equating the term Shunyata, usually translated as emptiness, with Dependant Origination. Dependant Origination is often made into a metaphysics about the world, but the Buddha and Nagarjuna were really talking about how are habits are dependent upon processes in the mind. The thoughts and actions we have/perform today are dependent upon the thoughts and actions of our past. (This is where the image of karmic seeds comes in - when we act, it lays the seed to perform that action again.)  Nagarjuna's point was that the spiritual practitioner should realise this process is something that is empty of a fixed identity, and thus become liberated from unhelpful thought processes.

In his talk Dharmavidya translated Shunyata as zero-ness or zero-ing. A cutting through our habits that enables us to respond completely spontaneously, appropriate to the moment, not out of some mechanical thought process (driven by fear, for example).

Dharmavidya then spoke about Vasubandhu, and his model of devotional practice. In his final talk in this series of three he spoke about the Chinese Master Tan Luan and how he brought the ideas of Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu together.

The first time the term 'Other Power' appeared in Chinese it was as a translation of Dependant Origination, the process of habit forming described above. Now we usually think of 'Other Power' as referring to the influence of Amida Buddha. This shift in meaning hints at Tan Luan's theology.

In thinking of 'Other Power' as what drives karma we can think of this like an unconscious process that drives our actions and identity, like an engine that's pushing us to make the same mistakes over and over again.

Tan Luan's idea was that we replace this unconscious engine with a better one. Amida is the archetype of the perfect Buddha, completely accepting of everything he/she encounters and radiating light. Through devotional practice we let this archetype into our unconscious process and the engine transforms.

In this way we can imagine achieving the same kind of liberation or zeroing that Nargajuna described, and we can also see that this liberation is not really 'empty' at all but full of light.

And light is just the how those poetic Indian texts talk about love.