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

Having last month concluded today’s portion of Chapter 7, we begin again with what occurred when Great-Universal-Wisdom-Excellence Buddha finally attained Anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi.

The Buddha said to the bhikṣus:

“When Great-Universal-Wisdom-Excellence Buddha attained Anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi, five hundred billion Buddha-worlds in each of the ten quarters quaked in the six ways, and all those worlds, including those intercepted from the brilliant rays of light of the sun and the moon by the neighboring worlds, were illumined [by great rays of light], and the living beings of those worlds were able to see each other for the first time. They said to each other, ‘How did you appear so suddenly?’ The palaces of the gods of those worlds, including the palace of Brahmans, also quaked in the six ways. The great rays of light which illumined all those worlds were brighter than the rays of light emitted by those gods.

At this point in the sutra back on March 21, 2017, I offered this note:

It is this light that we celebrate, for without the Buddha’s presence it would be very dark.

Lotus Path: Practicing the Lotus Sutra Volume 1 offers this:

With the Lotus Sutra and our Buddhist practice we can even illuminate the sufferings we are experiencing as well as those we have experienced and with the wisdom learned we can forge a future with different outcomes. No matter how dark or how long darkness has existed in our lives, just as a light illuminates a cave that has been dark for hundreds of years, the Lotus Sutra can bring light and enlightenment to our lives.