Reflecting on Shinran Shonin’s passage called, “The Truth of Things as They Are,” I become deeply aware on how I used to think about my life’s circumstances. I use to say, regarding any situation that I found myself in, that ‘it’s the way things suppose to be or should be.’ This was my way to give any pleasant or unpleasant situation a cosmic rationale. Actually, many people in our culture think in this way. Nevertheless, nowadays, after practicing Shin Buddhism for awhile, I realize that this idea of ‘suppose to be or should be’ is not the right understanding. This idea assumes that there is some supreme deity guiding the destiny of humanity in order to fulfill his master plan that we don’t understand. I believe that this sort of erroneous thinking had engendered a deep sense of fatalism and predestination in my early years. However, if things are because they suppose to be or should be then my deep pain, happiness, anxiety, freedom, fear, hatred, physical appearance, self-torture are as things should be, likewise, the centuries of rape, murder, torture, genocide, intoxication, insanity, alienation, injustice, oppression, ethnic cleansing, holocausts, etc. are suppose to happen or as things should be, all directed by the gentle or wrathful will of the unseen deity behind the veil of history. This is absurd!

 

The “truth of things as they are” as I see it, doesn’t conform to any will or calculation of an egocentric god or by my own will power but naturally and selflessly manifests from within itself. “The truth of things as are they are” has nothing to do with egoic manipulation. Things are or happen because certain conditions are naturally present at a given place and time, nothing more.  As a result, something temporarily manifests. After a period of time, when the conditions no longer hold together, the dharma is no longer able to manifest itself.  This realization has helped me very much. I no longer look for a cosmic rationale or logic on why something appears or happens in my life or in the world. It just is and then it’s not.

 

With Namu-Amida-Butsu, I become more centered in the Now, the present moment, where the spontaneity and freedom of my life is constantly affirmed and renewed. Accordingly, I’m naturally enabled to loosen the fetters of my conceptual thinking, which because of my deep-seated self-centerness is always trying to justify life’s events, thereby struggling to manipulate and calculate reality in its favor. With Namu-Amida-Butsu, I ’m empowered, by the mystery of Life itself, to let go of what I think suppose to be or should be and live with things as they are. How grateful I am.