FOR THE MULTIFAITH EQUINOX PRAYERS AT NOBBY'S UPON THE DAWN OF SATURDAY, 22 MARCH 2003 by Gregg Heathcote, Jodo Shin Buddhist.
Greetings friends of various faiths in good faith gathered here to offer common prayers for peace at this significant time and place.
Let us together celebrate, for we meet in a location touched by great natural beauty, before a landmark which is a distinctive and meaningful emblem of our home city. Let us see and share in the light of Nobby's here, once a steep offshore island, but now a long-standing causeway crowned by a lighthouse guiding and guarding vessels arriving in our harbour city from all over the world. Into the peace of such a port may the many vessels of our faiths likewise safely sail.
Nobby's shelters the river's mouth. May we listen deeply and gratefully to what the ancient river has to say. The body of water known firstly to the local Aboriginal people as the Coquun, and then as the Hunter, has flowed through and sustained countless generations living in its great valley, of whom we are but the latest. After its long overland journey the river water here merges with the incomprehensibly vast waters of the Pacific Ocean, an immense expanse whose name literally means the 'Ocean of Peace'. There is a wonderful, tangible sense that this is indeed a place where our everyday world and a wider world intimately meet.
We meet under a lighthouse at a time when so much of our world seems to be foundering in shadows. We are all currently embroiled in one of those recurrent periods of major crisis in international affairs, with all the anxieties, animosities and bitter suffering that that entails. In the midst of such a monumental battle for heart and minds it is wise to remember that this is also a profound turning point in the natural world, and a powerful time of spiritual opportunity, for now dawns a day of equinox.
There are two annual equinoxes when the orbitting earth's axis of rotation forms a right angle to the sun's rays. Sunlight then evenly illuminates the planet's surface and all over the world day and night are of equal length. In spiritual terms you might say that at these special times all beings are quite manifestly equal under the sun. The equinoxes everywhere denote comfortably temperate conditions, natural beauty and balance in the trusty turning of the seasons. As such they are celebrated in many traditions. In the Japanese Buddhist tradition, the source of my own faith, the significance of the equinoxes goes deeper still.
The Japanese Buddhist festival of the equinox is known as Higan, a name meaning the "other shore". Higan is thus a synonym for nirvana and for the Amida Buddha's Pure Land of infinitely enlightening compassion. Our world of ignorance and suffering is shigan, conversely meaning "this shore". Symbolically the "other shore" is located to the west while "this shore" lies in the east. On a day of equinox like today the sun rises exactly at the eastern point of the horizon and sets due west. The arc of the sun's transit therefore forms a bridge of light between the 'shores' of east and west, directly spanning the sky and the earth beneath. The opportunity is there then for people to reflect upon where they stand on that bridge of light, to rediscover the plain continuity of the ostensibly two worlds, and to refresh wholesome relationships that help all on their way across.
The attentive observance of Higan is above all the soaring sense of a time when evenly irradiant light presents itself most vividly in our world and when real peace is consequently most possible.
It is this sense that I pray now will lend wings to all our faithful prayers for peace, returning to roost everywhere on this auspicious day of equinox.
Namo Amida Butsu
Gregg Heathcote, Jodo Shin Buddhist
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