Here is the heart of the matter: Every day we should live our lives as not just disciples of the Buddha, but as Bodhisattvas from beneath the ground, disciples of the Eternal Buddha. Our actions are the most powerful form of speech.

“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein

So day after day, lifetime after lifetime, and birth after birth, we repeat the cycles of birth, sickness, old age, and death. The four sufferings haunt us, and we try every strategy to eliminate them from our lives. If not our own sufferings we suffer the sickness and death of friends and loved ones. We suffer the attachment to things that are impermanent. We suffer the illusions that we are independent of the things that exist outside ourselves.

I like the phrase, “They are trying to stop suffering by suffering” from Chapter 2 in the Lotus Sutra. How easy it is to keep doing the easy thing, the thing that has not worked well for us in the past?

Buddhism requires us to change, to challenge, to delve deep into our innermost being to try to understand both what is good and beneficial for us and what keeps us from doing that very thing. As long as we keep ignoring the obvious, our suffering, our thinking that there is no other way, we will continue to suffer. Ignorance is one of the three poisons; ignorance traps us in a cycle of ignorance and suffering.

Prior to the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha taught many different teachings for a variety of people, teachings well suited to the capacities and natures of those he taught. With the teaching of the Lotus Sutra, though, we have the advent of the unification of all those individual teachings into one specific complete teaching that goes beyond the ending point of the parts of the whole. Our challenge, as contemporary practitioners of Buddhism, is to learn from the prior teachings, but do so from the point of the unity presented in the Lotus Sutra.

Having good friends in a Sangha and a reliable teacher can help us fact-check our assumptions and conclusions, just as the Sangha at the time of the Buddha went to Manjusri.

Going to some skilled person to see what he has learned and what he has experienced can be a great aid in our practice of Buddhism. Yes, we ultimately have to personally absorb and inculcate into our own lives the truth of the matter, but having a good friend, a Sangha support, a teacher can help us to navigate the storehouse of treasures of Buddhism.

I used to try to make potato chips at home for my partner. Time after time I tried and they just never came out anything like the chips you could get in the bag. The bag chip was his favorite kind, but I tried none-the-less.

At one time I worked right next to a deli and the guy who owned it made his own chips every day. So I asked him what the secret was to making chips. He told me it was the soaking in water. You have to soak them in water to remove all the starch from the slices. Who would have thought? I had tried adjusting the thickness of the slice, the oil, the heat, the pan, all kinds of things I tried. I never knew soaking in water that was the key ingredient. …

Chanting Odaimoku is so simple. It is like soaking the potatoes in water to remove the starch. We need to soak our lives in the Odaimoku of the Lotus Sutra to remove the things that hold us back from enlightenment.

We can be as the Tathagatas and show our friends many examples of how with our Buddhist practice we can repair and become happy in the triple world. Let us renew our efforts to practice with joy, live with joy, and interact with joy. Lets all manifest and bring into reality the Buddha land in our lives.

When we chant the Odaimoku we are on one hand meditatively engaging in the recitation of the Sacred Title of the Lotus Sutra, we are also singing our praise of the teachings of the Buddha, which it contains. The greatest song we can sing is the Odaimoku that comes from joy within our lives. When we can chant with great joy, a joy that wells up from within then our entire life becomes a song. Our life can touch other’s lives through the beautiful music that is our unique life.

Chanting Odaimoku and reciting the Lotus Sutra can bring about the awakening to our true selves. As we practice the eight-fold path and chant Odaimoku we can make the necessary changes in our view and our existence to ensure overcoming any obstacle.

We may have had an experience of building sandcastles while on vacation at some beach. Sandcastles are not very long lasting, usually until the next tide cycle, and then they are gone.

Sandcastles are a fun way to spend some relaxing time. Yet how much of our lives do we spend constructing sandcastles in our everyday lives? We make castles of stuff, basking in our accomplishments. We build mighty fortresses out of our sense of self and rightness. We build walls of superiority and arrogance to ward off the connections of life and the world around us. We go to great lengths doing what seems worthwhile and important, yet in the end it is worthless. And can easily be destroyed by the changes in life, be it job, relationships, income, health, even aging.

The reality of impermanence and the truth of change is relentless at tearing down our sandcastle walls. Only when we awaken to the true nature of reality – the Buddhahood that perfectly exists already in our life – can we experience a life of indestructible happiness.

The Bodhisattvas who arose from beneath the ground are none other than ourselves, if we open ourselves up to realizing it. But the realization is not just a mental acceptance of such information. It is deeper. It occurs on a different plane from intellect. In order to be those Bodhisattvas we need to manifest that condition, draw it out of who and what we are in this life. There are not two separate entities, self and Bodhisattva from beneath the earth, however it is up to us to unify them in body and mind, in action and in word.