Quote:
Fred Little wrote:
Quote:
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So, your meditation hall, your dojo, is your sacred place. Your cushions are your own personal dojo, your own personal Bodhi Manda, your own personal spot of realisation. Thus it is very important to keep the dojo as a sacred place of realisation. It must be spotlessly clean, it must be in regular order with a figure as the focal point of devotion - a Buddha or a Bodhisattva. Before the Buddha or Bodhisattva, you should have incense, flowers and a candle. The candle represents enlightenment, the flowers represent compassion, the two sides of any genuine religious experience. The incense is an offering to the Buddha, as of course candle and flowers are as well.
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I wonder if the Buddha would turn in his grave if he knew that his image has been turned into an object of deification and religious devotion....
Whilst I concur with the need to keep one's sacred place clean (the idea that environmental clutter reflects a cluttered mind and vice versa), I think symbolic representation can also be carried too far.
One of my primary school teachers once said to me, "You don't have to go to Church to pray. You can pray anywhere, at any time". It struck me at the time that it was a rather enlightened perspective of the Christian faith, given that God is supposedly omnipresent.
Whilst I am also aware of the spiritual/philosophical underpinnings of many East Asian TMAs, its full extent is a foreign concept to my Western upbringing, and I suspect, many in the West.
However, since the Tao beget the 10,000 things, I don't see why it could not be referred to as a
dojo, so long as it remains a place where the Way can be perceived and practiced. That is, irrespective of whether one is consciously aware of the fact, or an unwitting participant.
That said, a
dojo also need not necessarily be bound by 4 walls and a mat.... nor does the presence or absence of symbolic artifacts define or detract from it.