Hi Everybody,
On this beautiful spring day. Well it is in southern England. Clear skies. Soft slightly hazy sunshine. Birds everywhere kicking up a spring-type fuss. Beautiful. Runnning in the park with Gatsby early this morning and we even suprised a few spring baby rabbits back into their burrows! We're in the middle of the detailed explanation of the meaning of the mantra Nichiren Buddhists chant morning and evening, nam myoho renge kyo. We've talked about nam at asome length, and myoho at even greater length, and we're into renge, which means essentially cause and effect.
Basically Buddhism argues that every cause we make, good bad or indifferent, plants a balancingeffect in our lives. Thus there is for all of us an on-going chain of causes and effects. That is if you like the fundamental dynamic of our lives. Good causes good effects. Bad causes bad effects.
I think it's pretty easy to see how even a superficial understanding of this principle can have a powerful effect on our behaviour, on our awareness of the kind of causes that we are making. And since that process of linked causes and effects is going on all the time, you can see that where we are now in our lives, who we are now in our lives, is the sum of all the causes we have made in the past, that have planted effects in our lives.
By the same token the causes that we are making now, Buddhism reminds us, contain the seeds of our future. So you might say, the key factor in shaping our on-going lives is how we respond to the situations and events and encounters that face us now, today and tomorrow and the next day.
What that is saying so powerfully is that however much we might feel it to be the case, we are not simply subject to chance and accident and encounter that come at us out of our environment. The decisive factor is how we respond to those situations. The causes that we make and therefore the effects that we plant in our lives.
The basic message is therefore on eof immense hope and optimism. Whateverhas happened in the past good positive causes made now, will plant good positive effects, into our future.
Enough to absorb for one go I think.
Next time we will be looking at kyo.
All my best wishes,
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available as a paper back on Amazon and as a downlaod on Kindle.
The good news is that the Spanish version is about to be launched for all those Spanish speakers in US and South America.
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