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

Having last month concluded Chapter 6, Assurance of Future Buddhahood, we begin Chapter 7, The Parable of a Magic City, and consider a Buddha called Great-Universal-Wisdom-Excellence

The Buddha said to the Bhikṣus:

“A countless, limitless, inconceivable, asaṃkhya number of kalpas ago, there lived a Buddha called Great-Universal-Wisdom-Excellence, 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. His world was called Well-Composed; and the kalpa in which he became that Buddha, Great-Form.

“Bhikṣus! It is a very long time since that Buddha passed away. Suppose someone smashed all the earth-particles of one thousand million Sumeru-worlds into ink-powder. Then he went to the east[, carrying the ink-powder with him]. He inked a dot as large as a particle of dust [with that ink-powder] on the world at a distance of one thousand worlds from his world. Then he went again and repeated the inking of a dot on the world at every distance of one thousand worlds until the ink-powder was exhausted. What do you think of this? Do you think that any mathematician or any disciple of a mathematician could count the number of the worlds [he went through]?”

“No, we do not, World-Honored One!”

“Bhikṣus! Now all the worlds he went through, whether they were inked or not, were smashed into dust. The number of the kalpas which have elapsed since that Buddha passed away is many hundreds of thousands of billions of asaṃkhyas larger than the number of the particles of the dust thus produced. Yet I remember [the extinction of] that Buddha by my power of insight as vividly as if he had passed away today.”

The Daily Dharma offers this:

Bhikṣus! It is a very long time since that Buddha passed away. Suppose someone smashed all the earth-particles of one thousand million Sumeru-worlds into ink-powder. Then he went to the east[, carrying the ink-powder with him]. He inked a dot as large as a particle of dust [with that ink-powder] on the world at a distance of one thousand worlds from his world. Then he went again and repeated the inking of a dot on the world at every distance of one thousand worlds until the ink-powder was exhausted. What do you think of this? Do you think that any mathematician or any disciple of a mathematician could count the number of the worlds [he went through]?

The Buddha gives this explanation in Chapter Seven of the Lotus Sūtra. Our concept of time can be limited to what happens in the brief existence we enjoy in this world. We often feel we have no time for what is necessary, much less what we enjoy. With this limited viewpoint, we can find it hard to believe that we have enough time to become enlightened. The Buddha reminds us that there is no shortage of time, and that in all of our existence, we will have opportunities to increase our capacity to benefit others.

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