The human death of Shakyamuni Buddha creates a problem for those who would follow after him – how to keep him alive despite his death, and how to keep his teaching, the Dharma, alive without him to teach it.

Chapter 11 introduces in a special way the idea that the solution to this difficult problem is a matter of embodiment – the Buddha can be kept alive by those who embody him by embracing and following his teachings. And it is precisely because Shakyamuni Buddha was a human being – with a human body and other human limitations – that we human beings can be expected to embody the Dharma, that is, be the Buddha, in our lives, despite our having human bodies and very human limitations. It is through being embodied in very imperfect human beings that the life of the Buddha can become so long that it can even be said to be “eternal.”

[H]aving established through the powerful image of Buddhas coming to this world from all directions that the Buddha is somehow represented throughout the universe, the chapter ends with an appeal to those who can take up the difficult task of teaching the Dharma after the Buddha’s extinction to make a great vow to do so. The difficulty of teaching the Dharma is expressed in what has come to be known as “the nine easy practices and six difficulties.” They dramatically express the difficulty of teaching the Dharma. But this is not done to discourage us. The point, rather, is to have us understand that we too are called, even challenged, not to be teachers of a dead Dharma, of dead doctrine from the distant past, but to be teachers of the Dharma by embodying the very life of the Buddha, which is itself the Dharma, in our whole lives.

Through living the Dharma as much as possible ourselves, the Buddha too continues to live in our world.