Charging energetically ahead in our study of virya paramita -- the second aspect of the perfection of energy is spiritual training. This includes things like becoming familiar with rituals to studying doctrines and sutras.
Let's talk a bit about rituals. "Ritual" can mean a lot of things; I use the word here to be roughly synonymous with "ceremony." It can also refer to the many protocols for things like bowing and offering incense.
I wrote an article about Buddhist rituals awhile back, in which I said,
"Through the experience of Buddhist practice you come to appreciate why it is the way it is, including the rituals. The power of the rituals manifests when you engage in them fully and give yourself to them completely, with your entire heart and mind. When you are fully mindful of a ritual, the 'I' and 'other' disappear and the heart-mind opens.
"But if you hold back, judging what you like and don't like about the ritual, there's no power. There's just you, cut off, closed up."
It occurs to me that resisting takes a lot of energy. Further, if you're going through spiritual training by sorting everything into the stuff you like and the stuff you don't think you should have to do, basically what you're doing is building a protective wall around your ego. This is not exactly the effect we're going for.
There's nothing magic about rituals. I don't think they are absolutely necessary. But like many other aspects of Buddhist traditions, they've proved to be useful. Properly engaged in, they can be powerful upaya, or skillful means, to realization. They can also help us train in mindfulness and in feeling spiritually connected to those in practice with us, which is very important.
So I think of ceremonies and rituals and incense lighting and chanting and bowing and all of that stuff as parts of a well-balanced practice.
If taking part in ceremonies genuinely gives you the willies, it would be very useful to work on why that might be true. It's almost certainly the case that what you dislike is not inherent in the ceremonies themselves, but is something you are projecting onto them. And whatever that something is, it is sapping your energy and holding you back.
This ties into the practice of equanimity. We're told over and over again to be careful about attraction and aversion. Clinging to what we like and running away from what we don't like is the self-defeating pattern that keeps us bound to dukkha. Rituals -- as long as no one is asking you to walk on hot coals or dance around with sharp swords or something -- can create a safe space for working on aversion issues.
Of course, it's sometimes the case that people can get too attached to ceremonies and getting all the moves just right. So don't do that, either. It's good to be mindful about whether your attitude toward whatever you are doing is reinforcing your ego, or softening it.
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