Hi Everybody,
Hope all is well with you. We're having the most wonderful autumnal days here in Kew, blue skies, warm sunshine even though the sun is so much lower in the sky, leaves just beginning to darken and fall. Running in the park with my dog Gatsby in the mornings is just a joy. He seems to like it too!! Right moving on, were drawing to the end of this key chapter on the ten worlds or the ten states of life. Last time we talked about the powerfully value-creating life state that Buddhism calls bodhisattva. Today we move on to the life state of buddhahood. Don't worry about the names. Focus on what lies behind them. Just to round off the section on bodhisattva, which is essentially about caring for others, Buddhism in its wisdom warns us against the danger of being self-sacrificial, in the sense of neglecting one's own well-being. The care of others it teaches, is best delivered by someone who remains strongly aware of their own basic needs, and who takes care of their own welfare. In order to give to others most effectively it argues, we have to develop and make sure we maintain our own strong and resilient life state.
That brings us to waht Buddhism describes as the highest life state of which human beings are capable. It is, as we've already discussed, a name or a title that is overlaid in the West by a huge amoun tf misconception and misunderstanding, so that it is very difficult for us to believe that it is a life state that can be attained by ordinary people, like us, going about their ordinary daily lives, which might be called perhaps the What me? syndrome. But we shouldn't allow that little local difficulty tp put us off. The word Buddha by the way comes from a Sanskrit root that means among other things to awaken, or to see deeply, and is used in Buddhsim to describe soemone who is awakened to the ultimate truth of life.
It was Nichiren, through his prolonged study of Buddhist writings and commentaries back through the centuries who brought Buddhism back down to earth so to speak. He made it clear that Shakyamuni was at all times an ordinary man, albeit a man of extraordinary wisdom and insight. Indeed the real significance of his life, Nichiren wrote, lay in his ' behaviour as a human being.' Not notice, as a divine or semi-divine figure, but as an ordinary human being.
Nichiren repeatedly makes clear in his writings that Shakyamuni's awakening to the truth of life was not in any way a superhuman state, in some way elevated above ordinary human life. Nor was it a transcendental state, some place of heavenly peace and tranquillity, cut off from the down-to-earth reality of daily life. This is the key understanding that Nichiren went to great lengths to bring to us, throughout his teaching life. Thus Buddhahood, or the Buddha nature as it is described in Mahayana Buddhism ( which embraces Nichiren Buddhism ) is not presented as an elevation of some kind, a higher plane or level of life onto which we might step, as if we were leaving behind our ordinary lives. It is rather a deeper and richer understanding of the mainstream of our life, as it already is. So that everything we are involved in, the ordinary things, the boring and mundane things, even the suffering and the struggling things, we can learn to experience as part of, our on-going well-being.
And of course, it's not a destination, somewhere we arrive, as if it were a sort of railway station. It is rather a path that we take up and continue to travel along, trying to understand and experience this deeper sense of the wholeness and richness of our lives. Indeed as one Buddhist text puts it, attributed to Shakyamuni himself,
' There is no path to happiness. Happiness is the path.'
Well that's plenty enough for one day I think.
Hope you find it interesting. Its quite difficult creating a synopsis on a subject such as Buddhahood which has been the subject of countless volumes.
Hope to see you next time.
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