I talked online on Saturday about the Verse of Atonement, the gatha with which we start the online Saturdays and, of course, we chant first thing every morning on sesshin.
All evil karma ever committed by me
On account of my beginningless greed, anger and ignorance
Born of my body, mouth and thought
Now I atone for it all.
I won't say anything here about any of this except to share some exploration of the word 'beginningless'. I have always been struck by the idea that Buddhist cosmology is so utterly different from that of, say, the Abrahamic faiths, in that it does not posit a point at which the world comes into being, there is no creation myth in the canon. This is a topic for another day, perhaps. But for what it's worth, this is what came to me on the topic of 'beginninglessness':
There is something of the eternal about us – don't make too much of this, it is not personal! But under the layers of habit and personality and history, under our joys and sorrows, our guilts and our vindications, under our cherished notions of who we are and our loves and losses... under all that is timeless being. Our original face before our parents were born. Our primal conscious matrix, which is not individual, which is part of the warp and woof of the universe. Our fleeting glimpses of this are like the slightest touches a mayfly leaves, tapping the surface of the pond. And while we return to the light of our conscious lives, the dark depths of that eternal and unchangeable AMness is unmoved and undifferentiated by it.
(This is what image creation tool ideogram.ai produced
when I gave it just the word 'beginningless' to work with.
Not sure what it was 'thinking', but it's pretty enough!)
