Zen Practice And the Ninth Fetter

The unenlightened mind suffers from agitation. A mind that is not agitated is a mind at rest. Although there are many techniques for quieting the mind, Buddha Name Recitation works for most people. The name Amitabha or Amituo Fo has a certain charm that brings feelings of peace and quiet to those who chant it.

Dharma Master Chin Kung says that hurricanes and tornadoes are caused by ignorance, i.e. sakkaya ditthi, floods are caused by greed, fires by anger and earthquakes by agitation, the ninth fetter. If it is true that our mental states create the world we live in, as the Dharma Masters say, then we would do well to chant Amitabha and reduce the agitation we create.

Perhaps millions of Californians will some day congregate along the extent of the San Andreas fault and chant the name of Amhitabha. But are they the only ones who can sooth the savage fault, created by agitated minds? Why can’t all of us practice Buddha Name Recitation for the benefit of everyone who lives near a fault line, anywhere on this planet and other planets? We can expand our Buddha Name Recitation to benefit sentient beings throughout the universe, and the parallel universes while we are at it.

As our benevolence expands to incorporate all that is, our agitation should diminish accordingly. As our agitation subsides, so will our ignorance, greed and anger. Then we can see the reduction and disappearance of earthquakes, windstorms, floods and fires, respectively.

The Dharma Masters teach that the agitated mind rushes towards every new thing that it encounters; it has the curiosity of a cat. It gets bored easily and then rushes off to see the next new thing. And that process never ends. New age people, ignorant of the Buddhadharma, are into flower essence one day, rainbow power the next, and pyramids after that. They find the never ending parade of new stuff to be fascinating. They never learn that the secret to enlightenment is never found in the external world of objects, health cures, self-help books and gurus. Their continuing interest in such things is nothing but evidence of agitation.

Restlessness is the fourth of the five hindrances and is the opposite of physical sloth and mental torpor which together compose the third hindrance. It is the result of the pendulum swinging too far from sloth and torpor. We can understand The Middle Way a little better by noticing that we have overcome two of the five hindrances if we can find the middle ground between sloth and torpor on one hand and restlessness on the other.

When we learn to stop paying attention to all the silly distractions that come our way, we loosen the ninth fetter. With nine of our fetters loosened, we are in the neighborhood of Nirvana.

It’s interesting that when we look at The Five Hindrances, the hindrance of restlessness seems to be one of the easiest to overcome. So to discover that it’s the second hardest of the ten fetters to overcome, second only to ignorance, is a surprise. So we need to get an early start on learning how to rest. Whenever we find ourselves rushing through a practice, we can recall that learning to slow down, to savor the practice, is an antidote to restlessness.

Finding Our True Home: Living in the Pure Land Here and Now