My Dharma name is Shaku Myoshin (“Wondrous Faith”). I was born 14th March 1971 in Kettering, Northamptonshire in England.
It wasn’t until I was around 18 years old that I had any interest in spiritual matters. My parents were completely non-religious and were determined that both me and my brother would be able to discover for ourselves what if anything we would believe in. But at the age of 18 an emotional crisis led me into an involvement with the occult and a huge interest in astrology.
Somehow, I went from that to being converted fully to Christianity about a year later. Yep, I went from a stargazing demon worshipper to a full-on Holy Ghost filled, Bible believing, speaking in tongues “Born Again” Christian. At the time I thought this was wonderful. I had some very powerful spiritual experiences over the next few years as a Christian which was a large reason why in spite of some growing questions, I stuck with it for as long as I did.
My introduction to Buddhism of any kind happened during a break I was taking from Christianity. I was living in the USA at the time and a very good friend of mine had some CDs by a lady named Pema Chodron. I don’t actually remember much about what was on the CDs but I do remember that there were some meditation techniques which I tried out and quite enjoyed.
I lived in America from 2001 to late 2009. My brief introduction to Buddhism happened in 2001, for the rest of my time there I returned to Christianity. However, my ever-growing questions, disgust at attitudes towards others including each other and continual quite vicious in fighting between different churches finally led me to completely quit the whole religion once and for all. It was maybe around six months after I had returned to the UK that I made the decision that enough was enough.
Between then until around three years ago could probably best be described as largely wilderness years. As much as I was very glad to be free from Christianity, I was left with a very large inner hole and quite bitter disappointment. I felt very let down. This period of time also coincided with the breakdown of my marriage (the whole reason I had moved to America in the first place was to marry a woman I had met online).
After my now ex-wife had left and moved back to America, I begun looking into things like crystal healing, Wicca, Hinduism, Taoism, shamanism and then finally Buddhism. Out of all them Buddhism was the one that was starting to make more and more sense to me.
2017 was the year that I seriously got into Buddhism. It began with learning as much as I could about the Four Noble Truths which of course included the Noble Eightfold Path. I remember listening to one particular audiobook on different schools of Buddhism and there was a somewhat short chapter on Pure Land Buddhism, and I must confess my immediate reaction to what I was hearing was very dismissive. To my ears at the time, it sounded like some very weird version of Born Again Christianity and not at all like Buddhism. From my perspective having just abandoned one crazy “faith based” corner of religion I certainly was looking to leap into another. And how could this be true Buddhism anyway? Oh, how horribly blind and ignorant I was! And if it hadn’t been for the discovery that karmic merit transference was an actual practice in Theravada Buddhism, I may well have also largely rejected Mahayana Buddhism as well. (This was actually very important a bit later on as I can see now why I needed to understand this in relation to the fact of Amida’s amazing transference of His karmic merit to us)
It took me many weeks to understand things like skilful means which the Lotus Sutra talks about. But it was with the help of a YouTube channel I had found that many of my questions and doubts about various aspects of Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism were finally answered. This YouTube channel was also where I found more than just a short chapter on Pure Land Buddhism. It was in fact my first proper introduction to Jodo Shinshu. I had found this channel as a result of a search for Buddhist mantras and chants. This was also the first time I heard the Nembutsu.
I would listen to the many sections of Master Shinran’s collected works that were on this channel absolutely loving what I was hearing but not really understanding it. It’s a bit hard to explain but there was just something about the way Shinran put things that just drew me more and more to Jodo Shinshu. And then there was the Nembutsu itself. I found some audio recordings of people saying the Nembutsu and just joined in with it. I don’t really have the words to describe what happened when I first started saying the Nembutsu like this but let me just say that from that day onwards I was left in no doubt whatsoever that Amida is a very real, living Buddha. Very real. And to my way of thinking no matter how fantastical the descriptions given in the Larger Pure Land sutra of the Pure Land may have seemed to me at the time, I reasoned that if Amida is a living, real Buddha then so is His Pure Land. I also completely lost any interest I had in any other spirituality and practice. I felt no need for anything else.
However, and strangely enough, I didn’t understand what exactly shinjin was. Oh I knew what the Primal Vow was and what it said. But due to being something of an over thinker I was continually worried whether I was TRULY entrusting myself to Amida. Did I REALLY mean it? And this pretty much dominated my thinking for most of the last three years. No problems at all believing that Amida was a real Buddha, that His Pure Land was a real place….but huge problems on understanding faith. On what it actually meant to simply entrust myself to Amida. And I think it wasn’t until I started listening to Josho Adrian Cirlea’s YouTube channel did the penny slowly begin to drop.
So after many, many months of listening to Josho Adrian Cirlea’s channel and also the amazing and very helpful videos on ShakuJoshin’s YouTube channel (who I am also extremely grateful to for the amazing material he put out there on both his original channel and later one)….the penny has finally dropped. I am also very grateful to Josho Adrian Cirlea Sensei for his incredible patience with me in answering my questions. I am very bombu..lol.
But above all else my gratitude goes to Amida Buddha. There is truly none like Him!
Namo Amida Bu!!