All Buddhist teachings are for the purpose of helping us, but if we cling to them as though they themselves are the goal, they can become more of a hindrance than a help to continuing on the path. We should welcome the Buddha’s teachings with joy and make use of them in our lives, but we should not cling to them as though the teachings themselves are the goal.

The Dharma Flower Sutra provides assurance that everyone has buddha-nature, that everyone is endowed from birth with a potential to be a buddha. It teaches that all will follow the bodhisattva way to some degree, however minimal. But it does not say that this way will be easy, or that it will make our lives easy. It promises a happy life, but not a life of comfort and ease. Especially when compared with remaining in a fantastic castle-city, continuing on the long, steep, and arduous road is difficult, and even fraught with danger.

Both patient endurance of hardship and perseverance are required, two of the six transcendental practices of bodhisattvas. In Buddhism this world is known as the “saha world,” that is, the world in which suffering both has to be and can be endured. Nichiren, the thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist monk and patriarch of many groups devoted to the Lotus Sutra, understood this all too well. And because the Lotus Sutra taught him to anticipate persecution and suffering, he was able to endure much suffering and cope with the problems that confronted him.

Leaving a resting place or giving up some comfort does not, of course, mean that we should feel miserable all the time. The point is that by resting you gain both strength and joy for pursuing a path that is both arduous and joyful.