Читать книгу Shinto Meditations for Revering the Earth - Stuart D. B. Picken - Страница 6

Does religion puzzle you? An old professor of mine explained this by using the analogy of a tiger—it fascinates you, but you are nevertheless afraid of it. Do you ever feel that you want to belong actively to a group that seeks the cultivation of human spirituality? Do you also become disappointed that, often as not, these groups demand in return that you submit to articles of faith you really don’t find “believable”? And doesn’t it seem difficult to choose among the wide array of faiths open to you? Do you feel a special reverence for nature and the environment but lack the means to explore this feeling or reference it in your daily life? If the answer to any or all of these is “Yes,” then this book is for you.

I would like to talk to you about the most straightforward and basic approach to religion that there is or ever has been. I would like to help awaken you to what religion began as, when nature was the spirit’s only guide. Before prophets and gurus, priests and preachers, human beings followed their own inner stirrings, and their religion was natural religion. It was not man-made, artificial, or invented. Its sentiments, beliefs, and responses were drawn from direct communion with the natural. It does not mean that its followers merely worshiped nature, but they did possess a special feeling toward it. They lived within it, and—unlike us today, who are so far from the natural, the authentic, and the immediate—it lived within them.

This religion really was in every sense of the term “pre-historic.” It emerged before history was invented to tell us who we are, where we came from, and what we should do with ourselves. It predates the great religions of history. Before the Buddha was born in India, or Jesus of Nazareth preached to the Jews, or Lao-tzu wrote about the Tao, it was there.

This simple approach to religion that listens to nature, that enriches spirituality, and that restores purity does exist. It has survived in only one modern technological society. It is called Shinto, and it lives in modern Japan.

The word Shinto (pronounced like “sheen-toe”) is a compound of two Chinese characters, shin, which is a kind of generic term referring to the divine, and do, which quite simply means “the way.” So in short, it refers to the “way of the divine.” As its name implies, it is not a teaching but a way, like a well-trodden forest path. It is there for all to see.

But you might protest, “So? Another religion?” To this the answer is “Yes, but with a difference. There is no known or remembered founder. There is no holy book. There are no systematically worked out doctrines, and there is no central or overarching authority.” And, there are people who have discovered it without ever having heard the word Shinto and without having visited Japan.

Let me tell you a true story .

I met Mari on a flight from Boston to Prestwick in Scotland. She had been working as a chaplain in an AIDS center in the Bronx in New York City. She had been born in Scotland and had studied Law and Divinity, planning to be a minister in the Church of Scotland. She felt called by her faith, and in obedience went to the United States to the place where she was working at the time I met her.

It was very clear that the work was filling her with sadness and depression simply through exposing her to misery and suffering on a daily basis. I asked her how she dealt with it: prayer perhaps? Then she told me this story. I should preface it by saying that she was of Highland stock, a descendant, as I am, of the ancient Celts, people who lived close to nature.

“I was desperate for a break from the pressures last year,” she said, “so I asked for a month’s leave and flew back to Scotland. I rented a car, drove north to the island of Skye, and checked into a small hotel that was on the edge of nowhere. It was spring and the life of nature was reviving. I felt a little ray of hope was lighting on me. I went for a climb up the hills, and it being early in the season, there were no other climbers in sight. After pushing my way through a clump of bushes, within a small wooded patch a few hundred feet up, I came on a small pond that was fed by a waterfall.”

I watched her eyes begin to sparkle as she came to this point in the narrative. “I felt as though it was inviting me. I am a Scottish woman with all the inhibitions of our Calvinist tradition, but I resisted myself. I peeled off my clothes and plunged in. I swam under the waterfall, naked, and stood there, letting it wash me. I felt that its cold, fresh, and pure waters were cleansing me, restoring me to a purer self, and healing the wounds that the sufferings of life had inflicted. I felt uplifted and left the pond feeling completely renewed. It was as though I had been born again.”

She had discovered Shinto without knowing its name and without the help of a teacher.

Then she asked me, almost with uncertainty, “Is that strange?” “No,” was my reply. “You have, in that simple experience, discovered what religion was like when nature itself was the guide. You found it by yourself. I found it in Japan. There, it is called Shinto.”

I was really moved. It was eloquent confirmation of what I have believed and seen. If Mari could find this experience, so can you or anyone else who wants to find rebirth and restoration in a natural way.

Climbing mountains has been practiced in Japan for countless centuries as a way to find purity. Let’s use that metaphor of steps toward the divine—not intellectual or doctrinal leaps of understanding, but progress based on pure, unmediated, and authentic experience, with nature as our teacher and our guide.

I would like to walk with you through the steps of this ascent.

Stuart D. B. Picken

Nagoya, Japan