Dharma Day

Jim Tarran

July is the month when Dharma day is celebrated by Buddhists around the world, a day which marks the first teaching to the Buddha’s original five disciples, which is known as ‘The First Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma (Dharmachakra).’ Dharma day is now seen as a chance to express gratitude that the Buddha, and other enlightened teachers, have shared their knowledge with others.

A time of reflection on the teachings that have flowered from the open expansive mind symbolised by the word ‘Buddha’ or awakened. In India, it is the beginning of the rainy season that starts on the eighth Indian calendar month (our seventh) when the monks retreat from the world to deepen their personal understanding of the Dharma (‘the way of things’).

For us in the west it is summer but although this may appear, on the outside, to be very different, on the inside it may not be so. In the east rain is life, rain is joy, rain clouds are sometimes called Indra’s chariots the great thunder god who brings life. It is a time when it does not rain cats and dogs but elephants and buffalos; in other words it rains so heavily it is like the sky were a sheet cut open from which rain does not pour but falls.

This means that work, school even going out, road travel etc become difficult, one retreats. It is therefore a sort of holiday, a time to step off the conveyer-belt of ordinary life habits, rituals, patterns and let all things go, settle, slow down and even stop. When this happens, it is as if a great herd of buffalo had passed, and as the rumble of their hoofs fade, the pandemonium that they stirred up through their activity calms, the dust settles and there is a chance of finding one’s bearings and gaining some perspective.

Maybe things are not so different for us, our version of the ‘rainy season’ is not because of the same type of weather but the same effect from the weather. It is a little drier, and it is our warmest time. Schools and universities break up, many people start to take time off as we approach August, which, on the continent, is pretty much a holiday for all for the whole month. It is our version of the ‘rainy season’ because it can be a time where the dust of life can settle and we can begin to regain our sense of orientation.

In other words, this is a time where for moments perhaps the busyness, the patterns and the associated ‘I ams’, the habits and some of our drives that have developed, run low or out of steam, and the veil of accumulated, associated self view, thins. One might feel a sense of our real selves emerging, calling from the depths like in the Arthurian legend where the deeper self is symbolised by the lady in the lake, and its reaching out from the unconscious to the conscious by the emergence of Excalibur.

This is the self that is not self in the ordinary sense, our conditioned perceptions and responses. Where the Bhagavad Gita and Buddhist philosophy divide in logic and thrust, on a deeper level they also stand united when the Bhagavad Gita says

‘life cannot slay, life is not slain, never was the spirit born, never shall the spirit cease to be.’

If this is understood on the ordinary plain of experience this is likely to cause a sense of irresponsibility and carelessness. But this is poetic and talks not to logic or mundane reason but to the brain that understands the mood of the words and the feeling tones that they evoke.

Quotes

Only the illimitable Permanent
Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still.
Replaces all - what once was I, in It
A silent unnamed emptiness content
Either to fade in the Unknowable
Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.

— Sri Aurobindo