We are each tasked with making friends with our past selves and past experience and past causes. We are not given the job of passing judgment on the actions of our past selves. This is not our Buddhist practice. Judgment is not really compatible with Buddhism. Instead, we are called upon to live life skillfully in the middle way.

Metanoia from the Greek simply means to change one’s mind. It also means a spiritual conversion. While penance is associated with it in its more Christian interpretation, that would not be the case and not possible from a purely Buddhist perspective. In our individual lives we have made causes that we regret. If we are to seek forgiveness, it must come from the person impacted by those causes, and not some deity or force outside ourselves. We may even have cause to regret actions we have made against the environment, but again it is there that we should make efforts of repair. Learning to understand how our causes affect not only ourselves but others is part of taking the good medicine and making meaning.

One understanding of making meaning of such [past] events is the realization that life is more than random events with no connection backward or forward. Our lives – and this is a fundamental teaching of Buddhism – are an endless stream of causes and effects stemming from past causes and effects and moving forward to future causes and effects. Beginning to understand our present, we make choices as to how we proceed into the future.

When some people hear a term such as spiritual awakening they immediately think of some mystical experience, perhaps some brilliant light, or some other physical or emotional experience. Fundamentally, I believe it is an awakening, even if only subtly of an awareness of the ability to participate fully in life, living, and even death and dying.

The Parable of the Skillful Physician and His Sick Children can be understood from the perspective that being born in this Saha world is the act of taking poison. We are born forgetting our eternal connection to the Eternal Buddha. We are unaware of the truth of our Buddhahood potential residing in the core of our lives. As Buddhists, our life is the journey to rediscovery of that truth – the realization of the good medicine.

The medicine the Lotus Sutra offers us from the skilled physician, the Buddha, is that we are not who we seem to be. We truly are Buddhas who have awaken to an understanding that we have always been disciples of the Eternal Buddha and as such possess all the inner potential required to become equal to the Buddha.

As the woman who was dying of cancer became aware, we do need to participate in our dying and equally so in our living. In some ways this in itself is the medicine as much as is the reality of our own Buddha potential. It isn’t enough to simply be aware of or to believe in our Enlightened nature. We must participate in it. We must act upon it.

The Physician’s Cure – the thing that enables us to truly be brought back from death – is the Lotus Sutra. Of course we understand that in the parable the physician is the Buddha, the medicine is the Lotus Sutra, and we are the children who have become ill after taking the poison.

The stupor of delusion caused by the poison not only prevents us from realizing that we can become equal to the Buddha, but also that we have always possessed that equality and that our existence is not simply this single lifetime or even this single moment. The delusion creates the false notion that this life is simply an intellectual exercise, that the reality is literal.

Those who avoid the truth and wisdom of the story and believe the entry into enlightenment lies solely in rationality or intellectual understanding have ignored or failed to take to heart the countless times the Buddha says enlightenment is by faith alone. The stories are the entry way to the heart of the sutra, the heart of the Buddha.

The Six Difficult things are: 1) Expound this Sutra, 2) Copy and keep this Sutra, 3) Read this Sutra, 4) To keep this Sutra and expound to even one person, 5) To hear and receive this Sutra, and 6) Keep this Sutra after the death of the Buddha. In other words it is extremely difficult to keep, read, recite, copy, and teach the Lotus Sutra in this age so far removed from the historical Buddha. These things are more difficult than “putting the great earth on the nail of a toe and go up to the Heaven of Brahman.”