Monthly Archives: August 2020

Daily Dharma

Daily Dharma – Aug. 13, 2020

World-Honored One, do not worry! We will keep, read, recite and expound this sūtra after your extinction. The living beings in the evil world after [your extinction] will have less roots of good, more arrogance, more greed for offerings of worldly things, and more roots of evil. It will be difficult to teach them because they will go away from emancipation. But we will patiently read, recite, keep, expound and copy this sūtra, and make various offerings to it. We will not spare even our lives [in doing all this].

Medicine-King Bodhisattva, his attendants and other Bodhisattvas make this vow to the Buddha in Chapter Thirteen of the Lotus Sūtra. Once we awaken to our Bodhisattva nature and resolve to benefit all beings, we may still hold on to the belief that those beings should gratefully receive the teaching and and keep progressing towards enlightenment. We may even become discouraged in our practice of the Wonderful Dharma when these beings do not live up to our expectations. The vow of these great Bodhisattvas reminds us of how difficult is is for us ordinary beings to keep the Lotus Sūtra, and of the determination it takes to create benefit in the world.

The Daily Dharma is produced by the Lexington Nichiren Buddhist Community. To subscribe to the daily emails, visit zenzaizenzai.com

LS32

Day 11

Day 11 continues Chapter 7, The Parable of the Magic City

Day 11 Text with annotationsPlay MP3
Having last month considered the reaction of the Brahman-heavenly-kings of the five hundred billion worlds in the south, we consider the reaction of the great Brahman-heavenly-kings of the five hundred billion worlds in the zenith and conclude today’s portion of Chapter 7, The Parable of the Magic City.

“The great Brahman-[heavenly-]kings of the five hundred billion worlds in the southwest, west, northwest, north, northeast, and nadir also did the same. The great Brahman-heavenly-kings of the five hundred billion worlds in the zenith, who saw their palaces illumined more brightly than ever, also danced with joy. They wondered why [their palaces were so illumined]. They visited each other and discussed the reason, saying, ‘Why are our palaces illumined so brightly?’ There was a great Brahman­heavenly-king called Sikhin among them. He said to the other Brahmans in gāthās:

Our palaces are adorned
More brightly than ever.
Why are they illumined
By this powerful light?

We have never seen nor heard
Of such a wonderful thing as this before.
Did a god of great virtue or a Buddha appear
Somewhere in the universe?

“Thereupon the Brahman-heavenly-kings of the five hundred billion [worlds] went down, carrying flower-plates filled with heavenly flowers, in order to find [the place from where the light had come]. Their palaces also moved as they went. They [reached the Well-Composed World and] saw that Great-Universal­Wisdom-Excellence Tathāgata was sitting on the lion-like seat under the Bodhi-tree of the place of enlightenment, surrounded respectfully by gods, dragon-kings, gandharvas, kiṃnaras, mahoragas, men and non-human beings. They also saw that the sixteen princes were begging the Buddha to turn the wheel of the Dharma. They worshipped the Buddha with their heads, walked around him a hundred thousand times, and strewed heavenly flowers to him. The strewn flowers were heaped up to the height of Mt. Sumeru. The Brahman-heavenly-kings offered flowers also to the Bodhi-tree of the Buddha. Having offered flowers, they offered their palaces to the Buddha, saying, ‘We offer these palaces to you. Receive them and benefit us out of your compassion towards us!’ In the presence of the Buddha, they simultaneously praised him in gāthās with all their hearts:

How good it is to see a Buddha,
To see the Honorable Saint who saves the world!
He saves all living beings
From the prison of the triple world.

The All-Knower, the Most Honorable One of Gods and Men,
Opens the gate of the teachings as sweet as nectar,
And saves all living beings
Out of his compassion towards them.

There has been no Buddha
For the past innumerable kalpas.
Before you appeared,
The worlds of the ten quarters were dark.

The living beings in the three evil regions
And asuras are increasing.
The living beings in heaven are decreasing.
Many fall into the evil regions after their death.

They do not hear the Dharma from a Buddha
Because they did evils,
Their appearances are getting worse;
And their power and wisdom, decreasing.
Because they did sinful karmas,
They lose pleasures and the memory of pleasures.
They are attached to wrong views.
They do not know how to do good.
They are not taught by a Buddha;
Therefore, they fall into the evil regions.

Now you have appeared for the first time after a long time,
And become the eyes of the world.
You have appeared in this world
Out of your compassion towards all living beings,
And finally attained perfect enlightenment.
We are very glad.
All the others also rejoice at seeing you,
Whom they have never seen before.

Our palaces are beautifully adorned
With your light.
We offer them to you.
Receive them out of your compassion towards us!

May the merits we have accumulated by this offering
Be distributed among all living beings,
And may we and all other living beings
Attain the enlightenment of the Buddha!

See Doing Something for the Good of All

stories, LS32, d11b

Doing Something for the Good of All

At the end of the series of stories of heavenly kings coming to the Buddha, the last group of them says:

May these blessings
Extend to all,
That we with all the living
Together attain the Buddha way.

This is an important expression for Rissho Kosei-kai and for many other Buddhists as well. It is a kind of summary of the heart of Mahayana Buddhist teaching. The expression “with all the living” is a way of reminding ourselves that we are related to all, and that the highest Buddhist practice is doing something for the good of all.

To speak of doing something for the good of all is a way of talking about serving the Buddha. Nothing is good all by itself. Good is always a blessing for somebody. It is relational. Our own personal good is always limited, limited in part by the very limited scope of our experience, our knowledge, and our compassion. The good of our family is larger, less limited, than our individual good, but still very limited. The good of the community is larger than the good of our family. The good of the nation is larger than the good of our community. The good of all people is larger still. But all of these are still limited goods.

The Buddha, who is in all times and places, is not so limited. That is why “serving the Buddha,” “doing the Buddha’s will,” and similar expressions have the meaning of doing something for the good of all, of working for the common good. But doing something for the good of all should not be seen as opposed to doing something for our own good.

The Buddha never asks us to completely give up our own interests, our own good, to be completely selfless, to serve only the good of others. The Buddha does ask us to go beyond our own good, to understand and to feel deeply that we are related to a whole cosmos of living beings, and to know that it is by doing something for the good of all that we ourselves can realize our own highest good – the buddha in us.

The Stories of the Lotus Sutra, p90-91
dhammapada

This Stream of Consciousness

Quote

It is this stream of consciousness that we identify with a self, because its experiences seem to have happened to a particular individual. But according to the Buddha, this self is only imagined, superimposed on momentary, unconnected mental events. If the mind is compared to a movie, vijnana is like the series of clicks of the camera shutter: “This frame (and nothing outside it) is I, this is I, this is I.” The Buddha would ask, “What is I?” What we see is simply not there. We see the images flash by and think we are watching Clark Gable; but in reality, of course, we are watching no one, only a series of stills.

Dhammapada, p86
d26b, WONS

Issaishujōkiken’s Offerings

It is said in the “Medicine King Bodhisattva” chapter that a bodhisattva called Issaishujōkiken (Gladly Seen by All) learned the Lotus Sūtra from the Buddha Sun Moon Brilliance. With deep admiration for his master’s favor and the value of the Lotus Sūtra, he made offerings of thousands of invaluable treasures. Issaishujōkiken felt that this was not enough, however, and proceeded to anoint his own body with oil, set it aflame, and continued to burn it like a lamp wick to venerate the Buddha for twelve hundred years. Thereafter, he burned a light on his elbow for seventy-two thousand years to venerate the Lotus Sūtra. Thus, if a woman venerates the Lotus Sūtra in the fifth 500-year period after the demise of the Buddha, during the Latter Age of Degeneration, the Buddha will bestow upon her all merits of the Lotus Sūtra just as a rich man gives all his wealth to his son.

Nichinyo Gozen Gohenji, Response to My Lady Nichinyo, Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, Faith and Practice, Volume 4, Page 132-133

Daily Dharma

Daily Dharma – Aug. 12, 2020

Medicine-King! An evil man who speaks ill of me in my presence with evil intent for as long as a kalpa is not as sinful as the person who reproaches laymen or monks with even a single word of abuse for their reading and reciting the Sūtra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma.

The Buddha declares this sentence in Chapter Ten of the Lotus Sūtra. Since the Buddha is secure in the enlightenment he enjoys, anyone attacking him either questioning his enlightenment or disparaging his wisdom is only going to make themselves look bad. Attacking someone just starting on the path towards enlightenment could lead them to doubt the value of the Wonderful Dharma. It is beneficial to remember these words, not just for what they mean about how we treat others, but for how we treat ourselves.

The Daily Dharma is produced by the Lexington Nichiren Buddhist Community. To subscribe to the daily emails, visit zenzaizenzai.com

LS32

Day 10

Day 10 concludes Chapter 6, Assurance of Future Buddhahood, and opens Chapter 7, The Parable of a Magic City.

Day 10 Text with annotationsPlay MP3
Having last month heard the prediction for Subhūti, we hear the prediction for Great Kātyāyana.

Thereupon the World-Honored One said to the bhikṣus:

“Now I will tell you. This Great Kātyāyana will make many offerings to eight hundred thousand millions of Buddhas, attend on them, respect them, and honor them in his future life. After the extinction of each of those Buddhas, he will erect a stūpa-mausoleum a thousand yojanas high, and five hundred yojanas wide and deep. He will make it of the seven treasures: gold, silver, lapis lazuli, shell, agate, pearl and ruby. He will offer flowers, necklaces, incense to apply to the skin, incense powder, incense to burn, canopies, banners and streamers to this stūpa-mausoleum. After that he will make the same offerings to two billions of Buddhas. Having made offerings to those Buddhas, he will complete the Way of Bodhisattvas, and become a Buddha called Jambunada-Gold-Light, the Tathāgata, the Deserver of Offerings, the Perfectly Enlightened One, the Man of Wisdom and Practice, the Well-Gone, the Knower of the World, the Unsurpassed Man, the Controller of Men, the Teacher of Gods and Men, the Buddha, the World-Honored One. The ground [of his world] will be even, made of crystal, and adorned with jeweled trees. The roads will be marked off by ropes of gold, and wonderful flowers will cover the ground to purify it. Anyone will rejoice at seeing it. The four evil regions: hell, the region of hungry spirits, that of animals, and that of asuras, will not exist in that world. Many gods and men will live there. Śrāvakas and Bodhisattvas, many billions in number, also will live there to adorn that world. The duration of the life of that Buddha will be twelve small kalpas. His right teachings will be preserved for twenty small kalpas, and the counterfeit of his right teachings also will be preserved for twenty small kalpas.”

Thereupon the World-Honored One, wishing to repeat what he had said, sang in gāthās:

Bhikṣus!
Listen with one mind!
What I say
Is true, not false.

This Kātyāyana
Will make
Wonderful offerings
To the Buddhas.

After the extinction of each of the Buddhas,
He will erect a stūpa of the seven treasures,
And offer flowers and incense to the śarīras
[Of the Buddha enshrined in the stūpa].

On the final stage of his physical existence,
He will obtain the wisdom of the Buddha
And attain perfect enlightenment.
His world will be pure.
He will save many billions of living beings.
All living beings
In the worlds of the ten quarters
Will make offerings to him.

No light will surpass
The light of that Buddha.
The name of that Buddha will be
Jambu [nada]-Gold-Light.

Innumerable Bodhisattvas and Śrāvakas
Will live in his world, and adorn that world.
They will have already eliminated
The bonds of existence.

See Making All People of the World Happy

LS32, d9b, b4today

Making All People of the World Happy

Those who believe sincerely in the Lotus Sutra and practice its spirit faithfully have already received admission to the highest, universal university, that of buddhahood. Knowing this, how proud we feel and how worthwhile our life becomes!

Our natural joy and pride in this fact must never lead to self-satisfaction, however. If we make this feeling our own personal joy alone, it is meaningless. This is the second important point of the Buddha’s prediction.

At the end of the second verse portion of chapter 6, Maudgalyāyana, Subhūti, Kātyāyana, and others spoke in unison as follows:

“Great Hero, World-honored One! /
Thou dost ever desire to pacify the world;
Be pleased to bestow our prediction”

What they are saying is: “The Buddha always desires to make all the people of the world feel at ease. We also desire to become buddhas and to make them live in peace. Please give us your assurance of becoming buddhas.”

They do not mean that they alone be saved and become buddhas, or that they alone become buddhas and attain peace of mind. Their final purpose is to make all the people of the world happy. This is a most important point. We must understand that the real intention of these disciples in earnestly requesting that the Buddha give them his assurance of becoming buddhas lies in the fact that they wanted to obtain such freedom and power as to be capable of making others happy. If we do not realize this, we are likely to receive the mistaken impression that they asked the Buddha for only their own personal enlightenment and mental peace.

Buddhism for Today, p35
Blog

Ryusho Kansho Jeffus Shonin

At 8:27 am today I received word that Rev. Ryusho Shonin had died this morning at the Syracuse VA Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized since July 24, 2020. Anyone who has followed this blog will understand just how important Ryusho Shonin has been in the development of my practice.

Here’s a chronological snapshot of his influence.

Sept. 6, 2015, Service at Myoshoji with Ryusho Jeffus Shonin
Sept. 6, 2015, Service at Myoshoji with Ryusho Jeffus Shonin from Charlotte, North Carolina. My first post with his photo.
Sunday Service with Ryusho Jeffus
Sept. 20, 2015 service from Charlotte, NC. With Ryusho is Bill Buck, a Charlotte musician who is still today a member of Ryusho’s sangha
Oct. 4, 2015, Dharma talk
An Oct. 4, 2015, Dharma talk. His most important lesson for me was the requirement that we put Buddhism into practice in our lives. His talks and books focused on how to do that.
Nov. 1, 2015, Myoshoji Service
A Nov. 1, 2015, service with seven attendees, five of whom are shown at left.
Ryusho Jeffus Shonin 20151115
Ryusho’s Dharma talk on faith and doubt on Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. Happy Buddhism
Nov. 22, 2015, Myoshoji Service discussion
Nov. 22, 2015, Myoshoji Service. These were always intimate affairs.
Ryusho Jeffus leads discussion following online service Sunday, Jan. 10, 2016
Ryusho Jeffus leads discussion following online service Sunday, Jan. 10, 2016. While broadcasting from his home/temple in Charlotte he often had more people IRL than online
Online discussion following the Myoshoji service
The blog post where this photo first appeared explains: “Following the service, Rev. Ryusho Jeffus discussed how each of us can show the Lotus Sutra in our lives, challenging us to write our story in the context of the Lotus Sutra.”
Portion of crowd attending March 13, 2016, Sunday service at Myoshoji in Charlotte, NC


March 21, 2016, Monday night study is an example of Ryusho’s efforts to merge practice and study.


Introduction
I attended Ryusho’s 2015 and 2016 Urban Retreats.


As a former member of Soka Gakkai, Ryusho Jeffus was able to help others understand how Nichiren Shu differed from SGI.

On Nov. 27, 2016, Ryusho created this mandala omamori for me. This and a Kishimojin omamori I purchased from Ryusho became my traveling altar.
Screengrab from first service with Ryusho Shonin from Myosho-ji Temple since the move to Syracuse on Feb. 26, 2017.
Ryusho Shonin broadcasting April 19, 2017, from his new altar space in Syracuse, NY, during an online discussion of the Shutei Nichiren Shu Hoyo Shiki, the manual that priests and those studying to be priests use.
Sunday, March 3, 2019, online service with Rev. Ryusho Jeffus was attended by two couples in France, a young man in England as well as attendees in North Carolina, South Carolina, Iowa and Ohio.
2019-09-15_ryusho_retiring
On Sept. 15, 2019, Ryusho announced his intention to retire. He outlined his retirement plans. His health, already troublesome, wouldn’t improve.
Lunch in Lewiston
My wife, Mary, and I had lunch with Ryusho Jeffus in Syracuse, NY, on Monday, Nov. 4, 2019
Ryusho Jeffus from hospital
A few days after my lunch with Ryusho, he suffered a collapsed lung during a flight from Syracuse to California on his way to visit his brother. The plane made an emergency landing in Arizona. On Nov. 17, 2019, Ryusho hosted an online service from his hospital room.
The last time I saw Ryusho in person (at right in this photo) was at Mark Herrick’s Feb. 16, 2020, Tokudo Jukai-shiki cermony in which he became a shami.
Zoom capture of service
Then the pandemic hit this year and the nation shut down in March and everyone was learning what Ryusho had demonstrated for years: Zoom keeps you connected.
Ryusho was given formal approval by Nichiren Shu headquarters to be the official priest for a group of practitioners in Europe. (Don’t recall exactly when that was. Perhaps in 2019.) He would have his bilingual members translate what he said into French for those who had difficulty with English. This is the crowd from the April 26, 2020, service. Attending are regulars from Portugal, Czech Republic, France, England and the United States.
20200726_Myoshoji_Service_Attendees
Attendees of the Myoshoji online service July 26, 2020, led by Davie Byden-Oakes in England. This was the day Ryusho’s online sangha learned he was in the hospital.
Just a small sample of the artwork Ryusho sent to my wife and me. While he was a strong believer in online technology, he was also old school, mailing his handcrafted cards.

I want to finish this with a quote from Ryusho’s Lecture on the Lotus Sutra:

Perhaps it is the reality of our modern advertisement saturated media that has led many to believe that only after buying and using every product known to man, after every single penny is spent that has ever been earned in the entire history of man- and womankind then and only then will somehow perfection and happiness be possible. Somehow by doing something so unlikely to produce indestructible happiness as buying a product is more realistic than the realization that each one of us is already all we need to be. We are as complete as we need to be in order to become indestructibly happy. All we need to do is simply wake up to this reality in our lives, and the Buddha is telling us that the Lotus Sutra is the most efficacious way of doing this.

dhammapada

The Wrapper of the Spices

Quote

Even in such abstract thinking, the Buddha remains in touch with his audience. Everyone would have been familiar with the village marketplace, where vendors spread their wares on mats for passersby to see. When someone wants spices for that night’s dinner, the spice-seller takes a banana leaf, doles out little heaps of coriander, ginger, and the like, wraps them up in the leaf, and ties the bundle with a banana string. That is how the Buddha describes personality: a blend of five skandhas or “heaps” of ingredients like these piles of spices in their banana-leaf wrapper. These ingredients are rupa, form; vedana, sensation or feeling; samjna, perception; samskara, the forces or impulses of the mind; and vijnana, consciousness. Without reference to an individual self or soul, the Buddha says that birth is the coming together of these aggregates; death is their breaking apart.

“Form” is the body, with which most of us identify ourselves and others. It is the sameness of body from day to day that provides the continuity of who we are. When the body dies, what is left? Even in an afterlife, we can’t really imagine ourselves without form.

For the Buddha, however, this physical identification is as ridiculous as mistaking the dinner spices for the leaf in which they are wrapped. The body is only a wrapper.

Dhammapada, p82-83