Personal Reflections on the Kakisage
The Kakisage is often spoken of as being the tenth Besseki Lecture. After a period of preparation, recipients of the Kakisage, having just been granted the truth of the Sazuke, are advised to read daily and ponder its intended meaning. My own ponderings change day by day, according to the state and truth of my mind at any given time. Upon reflection I find that my thoughts and ponderings change, not only day to day but moment to moment. In that regard I will attempt to be guided in my ponderings on the Kakisage by the two poems from the Ofudesaki appearing below.
From now on I shall speak in the metaphor of water.
Be enlightened by the word clear and muddy.
Ponder this: no matter how clear the water may be,
if you put
mud into it, it will become muddy.
"Now, with human beings: the body is a thing lent by God, a thing borrowed. The mind alone is yours."
This brings to mind my childhood; as a grammar school student we were all taught that our bodies were lent by God and that we were expected to take good care of them, as well as the world, by acting in the role of "good stewards". The definition of "good care" and "good stewards" then was taught as a sincere cultural understanding of moral and ethical ideas; that were at that time characteristic of the society that I was being conditioned to be a member of.
As a child I was also taught the God dwells within me and experiences the joy of living through me. That God lends me a body and that God experiences the joy of life through me are fundamental teachings. They however, only came up once and my education moved on to the more important business of building a mind and a self-centered imagination intended to be conditioned with the correct worldly common truths of self and of the world.
As I matured somewhat and saw more of the world, I saw that interpretation to be an example of what I now understand to be, both self centered and culturally determined sets of sincerely believed ordinary, common truths of the world. Unfortunately, in many ways and places, though many of those truths of self and the world are very useful, some of those truths of self and of the world have led to the experience of human suffering on many levels and at many scales, ranging from individual to mass suffering.
It is those common ordinary self-centered truths that gradually accumulate as what we call mind that holds both the imagined truths of our self (self images) and the temporary truths of our world. The quote " The mind alone is yours" refers to those accumulations. It is because we are, for whatever reason, dissatisfied with our current ideas of our self or our world that we have turned to the grant of the "Sazuke" for help and relief. It might better serve the intention of this quotation to say "you imagine that your imagined self is the total truth of self ", rather than "the mind alone is yours": Indeed there is no self-centered imagination without the instrumentation of a body but when the idea of sole ownership of body and mind is let go of, what remains is the total truth of self.
The sole purpose of the Tenrikyo Teachings is to find ways to provide guidance and hasten the settling of our accumulated truths of self and the world so that we can reveal the true origin and intention in our creation and live the joyous life that is intended, as that original self and intention can be tested an proven in the original "mind like clear water".