2025 September Monthly Service Sermon

by Yukihito Takeuchi (Chairman of the Europe Young Men’s Association)

The metaphor of the dust conveys that it we need to make an effort to maintain the purity of the mind, but at the same time expresses that there is no such thing as unredeemable evil, and presents the hope of restoring any mind to its pure state.

All that said, I had an issue with this teaching. I could understand that the dust is a metaphor for the mistaken use of our minds, but where does it come from if the human mind is fundamentally pure? In the real world, dust comes mainly from dead skin cells and fibres produced from natural and artificial processes. Is it possible to explain how the dusts of the mind arises?

I found a part of the answer to my question written in the followers’ handbook “Shinja no shiori”. There is also a chapter on the dusts of the mind, but it is written in the section after that, titled True Sincerity.

It includes a series of advices regarding each dust – not only how we avoid accumulating it on our mind, but also how we could prevent others from accumulating that dust. For example, it is pointed out that whatever we find desirable could be desirable to others as well. So, to prevent others from accumulating the dust of miserliness, we should share with others what we own. If we love ourselves and our children, we should care for others and their children. If we have hatred against wrong doings, we should find ways to prevent others and ourselves from committing misdeeds. If we know that bearing a grudge is dust, then we should not act in such a way that others bear a grudge against us, and since anger is dust, we should refrain from saying things that make others lose their temper.

On the surface it may seem like simple advices to treat others the way you want to be treated. However, I think there is more to it than that. The key to avoid the accumulation of the dust is to widen our field of vision from the narrow, self-centred perspective. In other words, the mental dusts are manifestations of our short-sightedness. My workplace gave presented me with the opportunity to see this idea in action.

I am a software developer and my job is to design and write computer programmes. I typically work in organisations with hundreds of developers that write thousands of lines of code between ourselves. In some ways it’s like editing a book with hundreds of writers, and in other ways it’s like constructing a building that is constantly expanding and shifting. We do our best to coordinate with each other, and plan ahead as much as we can, but there is a limit to how much we can stay on top of what other teams are doing, and it is easy to become out of step with each other.

Unlike real construction sites, sometimes we have the need to build the upper floor before we have even built the lower floor, or attach a door where we don’t have a wall. To get around this we put in place temporary structures and progress the work based on estimates. We call this technical debt since it buys us time but we need to pay it back eventually. Small amounts of these technical debts are harmless, but if we let them accumulate and they can get in the way of productivity, and could even end up introducing bugs.

The thing to note here is that nobody intends to introduce faults into the computer programme. These issues arise even if everyone had good intentions and did the best they can with the given information and resources.

I believe the dust of the mind is similar to technical debts. Since our minds are imperfect, we are limited in our capacity to be considerate of others and that restricts our abilities to make the best choices. So even though we do not intend to cause harm, our decisions and actions can still lead to less than ideal outcomes.

I found this comparison of the mental dust to technical debt quite satisfying, as I felt that I was able to address a longstanding issue with the metaphor of dust. It seems to give an explanation of how negative things could arise even if humans were created as good-natured beings. With the metaphor of the dusts you just have to accept that they appear as if out of nowhere, but with the metaphor of technical debt I could see how unideal results can naturally arise from our narrow perspective and lack of foresight.

The imperfect nature of human beings is described in number 31 of the “Anecdotes of Oyasama”:

Even the things that are considered to be straight by all the people of the world are warped when they are placed against the measure of heaven

This idea that we are limited in our capacity has another important implication. Metaphors are just tools that we use to create a mental model of something which is otherwise hard to comprehend. Just because we understood the model, we should not think that we have understood the truth. With our mental capacity, we will never truly understand the whole truth.

I just mentioned that I found a satisfying explanation for what mental dusts are. That is exactly how I felt, but at the same time I realised that I should be careful.

When I was a student at the Tenri Graduate Seminary, one of my teachers the late Rev Mikio Yasui taught me something that left a big impression on me. One day in class he asked us to explain what virtue is. I tried to explain it using a famous analogy where virtue is compared to a vessel in our heart. If we think of God’s blessing like a rain that falls evenly across the land, the amount of the amount of rain water that you can collect depends on the capacity of the vessel. Having more virtue is like having a large capacity to receive the blessing from God. However, Rev Yasui pointed out that there is a problem with that way of thinking. If we are not careful, it may lead us to think that we can control how much blessing we can receive from God. We could even fall into the trap of thinking that we deserve a certain amount of blessings based on our efforts.

Thinking of virtue as our spiritual capacity is probably a valid way to understand what it is. But Rev. Yasui was warning against fixating on that analogy and losing sight of the fundamental way that we should view God’s blessings.

Metaphors are very powerful, so much so that Oyasama employed many of them to convey the important aspects of the teachings. However, whilst they are easy to grasp, they do not capture the whole picture.

We must remember that the Truth of Heaven will always remain elusive and we should settle in our hearts that there are aspects beyond our full comprehension as human beings.

Thank you for your kind attention.