GrasshopperMan17
04-01-2021, 05:31 AM
i'm going through What Is Zen? Plain Talk for a Beginner's Mind, and i found this quote enlightening:
"As a person who'd grown up a practicing Jew, I didn't particularly appreciate or understand the idea of bowing to statues. So I asked my teacher (who, probably not accidentally, was also Jewish) why this was necessary and what it meant. He took me up close to the altar, which enshrined a particularly small Buddha statue. He pointed out to me that the statue's hands were in a bowing position. 'You bow to the Buddha, the Buddha bows to you,' he told me (or words to that effect). The idea was, I think, that when you are bowing to the Buddha, you are not bowing to any external power - there are no external powers in Buddhism. You are in fact bowing to yourself, your true self, which is identical to the Buddha. So, in a sense, your bowing is conditioning you to respect what is deepest and truest within you - and in everything and everyone else."
Coming from a Christian background, bowing to buddha statues always felt a little weird, but I like this description of bowing to Buddha as bowing to the Buddha-Nature in us all, and i thought you guys might like it as well!
Gassho, John
ST/LAH
"As a person who'd grown up a practicing Jew, I didn't particularly appreciate or understand the idea of bowing to statues. So I asked my teacher (who, probably not accidentally, was also Jewish) why this was necessary and what it meant. He took me up close to the altar, which enshrined a particularly small Buddha statue. He pointed out to me that the statue's hands were in a bowing position. 'You bow to the Buddha, the Buddha bows to you,' he told me (or words to that effect). The idea was, I think, that when you are bowing to the Buddha, you are not bowing to any external power - there are no external powers in Buddhism. You are in fact bowing to yourself, your true self, which is identical to the Buddha. So, in a sense, your bowing is conditioning you to respect what is deepest and truest within you - and in everything and everyone else."
Coming from a Christian background, bowing to buddha statues always felt a little weird, but I like this description of bowing to Buddha as bowing to the Buddha-Nature in us all, and i thought you guys might like it as well!
Gassho, John
ST/LAH