Hi Everybody,
Another brilliantly blue-sky day here this morning. The walk in the park with Sarah and Gatsby was positively spring-like. And I have to say it brought to mind a passage in the book that deals with the sociological research on the effects of gratitude on our lives. Let me just quote a brief paragraph from it. It goes as follows;
' Just going out of our way for example, to express our gratitude to someone has been shown to have a positive effect on our sense of well-being for days after the event itself. But it's important the researchers point out, to recognise that gratitude goes well beyond simply expressing our thanks to someone for help or support. They talk about it as a much broader, whole life attitude to the way we take each day, about having for example a keen and lively sense of appreciation for all the ordinary things of life ( a walk in the park on a blue-sky day!), not taking things for granted, recognising all that we have, as opposed to focusing onn what we don't happen to have. Gratitude if you like as an essential element in the way we experience everything that happens to us. And it's in this sense I would argue that it chimes most closely with the Buddhist description of gratitude, as being absolutely fundamental to a positive life state. A sense of gratitude if you like, literally drives out negative thoughts. You can't be grateful and negative at the same time.'
It just seemed appropriate to mention it today. But today's episode is really concerned with wrapping up the thoughts we started last time on the role and meaning of the Lotus Sutra in Nichiren Buddhism.
' The lotus of the title is seen to be a powerful and many-layered metaphor for many things, but undoubtedly one of the most important, the very heart of the message that it seeks to transmit, is that the lotus is a plant that grows in a muddy swampy environment, and yet produces flowers of extraordinary beauty. It is thus symbolic of the immense potential that can be revealed, created, brought out of, the ordinary, muddled, mundane circumstances of our daily lives, no matter how difficult and challenging the intitial circumstances of that life may be.
Thus in the Lotus Sutra, Shakyamuni essentially turned the religious world on its head. At a time when people saw themselves as being limited and hemmed in by powerful controlling concepts such as destiny and the will of the gods, Shakyamuni taught them that was not the case, that was not an accurate representation of the reality of human life. Everyone, he argued, could come to understand that man carried his own destiny in his own hands. That our lives are our own, to shape and to make. That we have the resources within us, and the freedom, to make our own choices, to take control of our lives and move them in the direction we wish to go. Provided only that we accept full responsibility for the choices that we personally make, and their implications for others around us. That concern for others is the very basis of Buddhist morality, which we look at in greater detail later on.
It was unquestionably a revolutionary teaching then, which is why it spread like a bushfire across south East Asia. But what is also unquestioned, I would suggest, if you give it am oments thought, is that it remains pretty revolutionary today. This accumulated wisdom about learning how to create for oneself a better and a happier life, no matter what our circumstances, no matter what problems or challenges we all encounter every day of our lives, continues to be about the present, and not about the past. It continues to demonstrate its direct immediacy and relevance, despite the vast changes mankind has lived through in every area of lives; immense, immeasurable changes.
But those of course are external changes, whereas our inner humanity remains unchanged. We still find ourselves for example, limited by all kinds of disabling doubts and fears. Fears of so many things, fear of inadequac, fear of rejection, fear of loss, of failure, and much else. We still find ourselves knocked down and disabled by problems and difficulties that sometimes seem so overwhelming that we don't know where to turn. We still find it difficult to acknowledge, let alone to draw on, our inner resources of courage and hope and optimism, to make the very most of our lives. Indeed some of Buddhism's central teachings about how to recognise and draw upon our inner resources, and so overcome many of the negative impulses and responses that we experience, have been taken up and are used on a regular basis by some of today's leading psychologists, in helping people with severe and persistent depression or unhappiness. ( that's a reference to a book called The Mindful Way through Depression by psychologists Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn )
So my key point is that Buddhism continues to touch and change people's inner lives, inn the West now as well as in the East, in increasing numbers, If we ask the question why that is, there are of course many threads to the answer. But undoubtedly one of them will be that there is something immensely powerful, immensely empowering, about this central idea that comes directly from Shakyamuni and Nichiren Daishonin, of taking hold of our lives in a rational and positive way, and moving them in the direction we wish to travel. We all want to know how to do that, and that really bring sus back to this question of faith, which is where we started out in this chapter. So what have we learned on the way about faith in Buddhism.'
That's it for today. Not exactly a cliff-hanger, but a crucial question that we take up and answer, hopefully completely, next time around. My gratitude beyond measure for your reading this far.
Best wishes.,
William Woollard.
The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon
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