Attended the Sacramento Nichiren Buddhist Church‘s fall Ohigan service. This is the third of the regular memorial services held each year in Nichiren Shu – Spring and Fall Equinox and Obon in Summer. When you add in family memorial services to the mix it raised the question of why we have so many services honoring our ancestors. That was the subject of Ven. Kenjo Igarashi‘s lecture after the Ohigan service today.
Rev. Igarashi told the story of a woman who complained that Buddhists have too many memorial services. She decided she’d rather be a Christian – no memorial services.
Each memorial service has special meaning.
“Today I want to explain sandoku – three poisons,” he said. “These three poisons are why we suffer.”
What follows is my paraphrasing of the lecture.
The first of the poisons is greed. And greed is an essential component of living in this world. Everyone is competing with others all the time.
The second poison is anger. Everyone is fighting, fighting. Anger toward other people is easy.
The third poison is traditionallly translated as stupidity or ignorance. Rev. Igarashi suggested describing the third poison as “a lot of complaints. All the time complain. … All the time, I’m right and you’re wrong.”
Since these poisons cause our suffering that’s why Śākyamuni said we must eliminate these. If you don’t, you’ll never get happy in this life and after you pass away you won’t go to paradise or a good realm.
These three poisons are the reason we are born in this suffering world, but most people are ignorant of this fact.
People want to be happy. They want to be rich. They want to be famous. Everybody thinks like that. But we need to think about why we are born into this world.
The purpose of our Buddhist practice is to extinguish these three poisons. We can’t attain enlightenment or go to a good realm after we die without doing that.
It is hard to extinguish these three poisons. That’s why we had today’s pāramitā service.
The Nichiren Shu brochure on Higan offers this explaination of the pāramitās.
- fuse means to offer one’s self wholeheartedly and unconditionally, without any expectation of its return.
- jikai is to follow and maintain the general precepts of the Buddha.
- nin-niku suggests a resilience to persevere through hardship.
- syojin refers to the necessity of conscientious effort in accomplishing one’s goals.
- zenjo points to qualities existent in meditation, calling upon one’s concentration, adjoined by calmness and poise.
- chie is the Buddha’s wisdom, reinforced with its practical application.
How does this apply to memorial services for deceased ancestors?
“Maybe [those ancestors] are still in the suffering world,” Rev. Igarashi said.
Today’s service is called Higan, which means the other shore. The other shore is enlightenment.
“We are living on this shore, the suffering world, so maybe our ancestors are still in this suffering world. That’s why we practice in order to send them to the other shore with us.”
The six kinds of practices – the six pāramitās – are very important. With them we can extinguish the three poisons while at the same time helping our ancestors reach the other shore as well.
This is not a practice twice or three times a year. Every day is Higan or Obon.