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.