Third, the Threefold Track corresponds with the Triple Buddha-nature.
The Track of Real Nature is identical to the Buddha-nature as the Fundamental Cause of Buddhahood, which refers to the fact that all beings are endowed with the True Reality, for it is the inherent nature that determines one’s possibility to attain Buddhahood. The Track of the Illumination of Wisdom is identical to the Buddha-nature as the Understanding Cause of Buddhahood, which refers to the inherent potential for wisdom in all living beings, for it is wisdom that illuminates the inherent nature. The Track of Accomplishment is identical to the Buddha-nature as the Conditional Cause of Buddhahood, which refers to the inherent potential and disposition of living beings for Buddhahood that inspire them to carry out religious practices in order to increase their merits and virtues, and these merits and virtues are the conditions to give rise to the Buddha-nature as the Fundamental Cause of Buddhahood, since it is one’s potential that enables one to do wholesome deeds and to generate one’s wisdom. Chih-i claims that the identification of the Threefold Track and the Triple Buddha-nature is based on the principal nature of sentient beings, since they inherently possess such a nature. Nevertheless, this principle of nature is not manifested before practice, and one has to undertake practice to actualize this nature of Buddhahood. Recognizing that everyone possesses the Triple Buddha-nature secures one’s goal of striving for Buddhahood. (Vol. 2, Page 261-262)
All posts by John Hughes
Day 31
Day 31 covers Chapter 27, King Wonderful-Adornment as the Previous Life of a Bodhisattva.
Having last month considered the role of the son’s in the king’s future attainment of enlightenment, we hear King Wonderful-Adornment’s explanation of the merits of the Buddha.
“King Wonderful-Adornment came down from the sky and said to that Buddha [staying in the sky], ‘World-Honored One! You are exceedingly exceptional. You have merits and wisdom. Therefore, the fleshy tuft on your head shines bright. Your eyes are long, wide, and deep blue in color. The curls between your eyebrows are as white as a bright moon. Your teeth are white, regular and bright. Your lips are as red and as beautiful as the fruits of a bimba-tree.’
“Thereupon King Wonderful-Adornment, having praised the Buddha for his many hundreds of thousands of billions of merits including those previously stated, joined his hands together towards the Tathāgata, and with all his heart, said to that Buddha again, ‘World-Honored One! I have never seen anyone like you before. Your teachings have these inconceivable, wonderful merits. The practices performed according to your teachings and precepts are peaceful and pleasant. From today on, I will not act according to my own mind. I will not have wrong views, arrogance, anger or any other evil thought.’ Having aid this, he bowed to that Buddha and retired.”
The Daily Dharma from Aug. 17, 2018, offers this:
World-Honored One! I have never seen anyone like you before. Your teachings have these inconceivable, wonderful merits. The practices performed according to your teachings and precepts are peaceful and pleasant. From today on, I will not act according to my own mind. I will not have wrong views, arrogance, anger or any other evil thought.
King Wonderful-Adornment makes this declaration to Cloud-Thunderpeal-Star-King-Flower-Wisdom Buddha in Chapter Twenty-Seven of the Lotus Sūtra. The king had been led to this Buddha by his sons, who showed him the wonders they learned from their practice of the Buddha Dharma. With his mind purified by hearing the Buddha’s teachings, he makes this aspiration to behave differently. Whether or not he can keep this aspiration, he shows his realization that hearing the teachings is not enough. Practicing them means changing our minds and how we live.
The Daily Dharma is produced by the Lexington Nichiren Buddhist Community. To subscribe to the daily emails, visit zenzaizenzai.com
Daily Dharma – Jan. 10, 2019
Medicine-King! Erect a stūpa of the seven treasures in any place where this sūtra is expounded, read, recited or copied, or in any place where a copy of this sūtra exists! The stūpa should be tall, spacious and adorned. You need not enshrine my śarīras in the stūpa. Why not? It is because it will contain my perfect body.
The Buddha declares these lines to Medicine-King Bodhisattva in Chapter Ten of the Lotus Sūtra. In ancient India, stūpas were tombs built as memorials to those who had enjoyed a superior position in their lives. After the Buddha died, small relics of his body were distributed so that many great stūpas could be built to his memory. Even today all over Asia, stūpas hold the physical remains of the Buddha. In this chapter, the Buddha reminds us that when we have the Lotus Sūtra with us, it is as good as having the Buddha himself.
The Daily Dharma is produced by the Lexington Nichiren Buddhist Community. To subscribe to the daily emails, visit zenzaizenzai.com
The Pentads
A widespread instance of numerical correspondence, rooted in Chinese thought and developed in esoteric Buddhism, involves correlations of fives: the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water) are equated with the five directions (east, south, center, west, and north); the five planets; the five virtues (benevolence, propriety, good faith, righteousness, and wisdom); the five colors; the major five organs of the human body; and so forth. In esoteric Buddhism, these pentads are further equated with the five great elements (earth, water, fire, wind, and space) and the five Buddhas, and in medieval Tendai, they are assimilated to the five tones used in shōmyō chanting or to the five characters myō, hō, ren, ge, and kyō that comprise the tide of the Lotus Sūtra. Such associations reflect underlying assumptions about the oneness of microcosm and macrocosm, and—when assimilated to the episteme informed by esoteric Buddhism—about all phenomena as nondual manifestations of the cosmic Buddha, Mahāvairocana or Dainichi. Such an understanding of the world, assuming an inner unity endlessly refracted in each of its elements, was by no means limited to medieval Japan. A number of scholars have written on the episteme of medieval Europe, in which the world was seen in totalistic fashion as a system of hidden correspondences, upon whose proper recognition and identification rested the practice of such arts as astrology, divination, and magic. (Page 160-161)
Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese BuddhismThe All-Embracing True Reality
By identifying the Threefold Track with the Triple Course of Ignorance, what Chih-i endeavors to express is that True Reality is all-embracing and is typically embodied in the pattern of identifying opposite parties. Thus, he concludes, for example: “Affliction is identical to Bodhi-wisdom,” or “By treading on the heretic path, one arrives at the Buddha-path.” This is evidenced by Chih-i’s direct statement of identifying the Triple Course of Ignorance with the Three Virtues of Buddhahood:
“What is called the course of suffering refers to the consciousness, name-and-form, contact, and sensation. Naming this coursing of suffering as the Buddha-nature is the indication of naming life-death as dharmakāya, which is like referring ice to water. What is called the course of affliction refers to ignorance, desire, and attachment. Naming this course of affliction asprajiā is like referring firewood to fire. What is called the course of karman implies that the volitional activity, existence, and even the five kinds of grave offence that result in falling in uninterrupted hell are nothing else but the indication of liberation. This is to view binding in terms of unbinding.” (Vol. 2, Page
The Profound Meaning of the Lotus Sutra: Tien-tai Philosophy of BuddhismDay 30
Day 30 covers all of Chapter 26, Dhāraṇīs
Having last month received Brave-In-Giving Bodhisattva’s dhārāni spells, we receive Vaiśravaṇa Heavenly-King’s dhārāni spells.
Thereupon Vaiśravaṇa Heavenly-King, the Protector of the World, said to the Buddha, “World-Honored One! I also will utter dhārānis in order to protect this teacher of the Dharma out of my compassion towards all living beings.”
Then he uttered spells, “Ari (1), nari (2), tonari (3), anaro (4), nabi (5), kunabi (6).”
[He said to the Buddha:]
“World-Honored One! I will protect this teacher of the Dharma with these divine spells. I also will protect the person who keeps this sūtra so that he may have no trouble within a hundred yojanas’ distance [from here].”
The significance of Vaiśravaṇa Heavenly-King’s dhārāni spells is outlined in a letter by Nichiren:
It has been 2,200 years or so since the Buddha expounded the Lotus Sūtra. As the life span of human beings is short, there is no one still alive who was able to see the Buddha in person. The length of a day as well as the life span in the realm of heavenly beings, however, are so long that there exist numerous heavenly beings who listened to the Buddha preach the Lotus Sūtra. Fifty years for human beings is equivalent to one day and night for the Four Heavenly Kings. Passing the day and night in this way, with 30 days in a month and 12 months to a year they live altogether 500 years. Accordingly, 2,200 years or so in the human realm is equivalent to 44 days of the Four Heavenly Kings, and it has been only 44 days since the sun and moon and Vaiśravaṇa (Bishamon, one of the Four Heavenly Kings) saw the Buddha enter Nirvana. In other words, it has not been two months yet since the Buddha passed away. To such heavenly beings as Indra and the King of the Brahma Heaven it has been a month or so since the Buddha passed into Nirvana. How can they forget all about the vow they made before the Buddha, the great favor of the sūtra in which they attained Buddhahood, and abandon the practicers of the Lotus Sūtra in such a short span? When we think of things in this way, we are sure we can depend on these heavenly beings.
Kitō Shō, Treatise on Prayers, Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, Faith and Practice, Volume 4, Page 62-63
Precepts Training
The precepts are both spiritual and physical training, a routine designed to build the foundation for the concentration of Buddhist meditation (dhyana; in Chinese, ch’an, in Japanese, zen). The body and mind must be conditioned in order to achieve the concentration of meditation. The physical regimen aims to assure general health and freedom from the pains and discomfort of illness and to ensure that daily requirements of food, exercise, and rest are met.
Basic Buddhist Concepts
The Merit of Those Who Put Faith In Lotus Sūtra
I received your letter, in which you said that you used to chant one chapter of the Lotus Sūtra each day, taking twenty-eight days to finish chanting it once; and that recently, however, you chant only the “Previous Life of the Medicine-King Bodhisattva” chapter each day. Then you asked: “Should I chant each chapter each day as I used to?”
You may chant the whole twenty-eight chapters, one chapter, one paragraph, one sentence or even one character of the Lotus Sūtra a day. Or, you may chant the daimoku, “Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō,” just once in a day or once in your whole life. Even if you may never chant the daimoku yourself, you may rejoice at hearing others chant it just once in your whole life. Or you may rejoice with others who rejoice at hearing a voice chanting the daimoku. The joy of the daimoku chanting transmitted 50 times this way from person to person, will grow weaker steadily until in the last fiftieth person it will be as uncertain as the mind of a two- or three-year-old baby or as unpredictable as a horse or a cow, which cannot tell the difference between head and tail. Nevertheless, the merit of such people is one hundred thousand billion times greater than that of those whose wisdom is as great as Śāriputra, Maudgalyāyana, Mañjuśrī, and Maitreya, but put faith in sūtras other than the Lotus Sūtra and memorize them all.
This is explained in the chapter on the “Merits of a Person Who Rejoices at Hearing This Sūtra” of the Lotus Sūtra as well as in the 60-volume works of Grand Masters T’ien-t’ai and Miao-lê. The Lotus Sūtra states also that even the Buddha cannot measure the merit of those who put faith in even one character or sentence of the Lotus Sūtra. The Buddha has boundless wisdom; He can measure the amount of rain that has continued to fall for one or two weeks in the whole universe. Nevertheless, He cannot measure the merit of those who chant just one character or phrase of the Lotus Sūtra. How can we, sinners and the ignorant, measure this merit?
Regardless, very few people believe in the Lotus Sūtra, which is worthy of such great merit.
Gassui Gasho, A Letter on Menstruation, Nyonin Gosho, Letters Addressed to Female Followers, Page 22-24
Daily Dharma – Jan. 9, 2019
Medicine-King! I will tell you.
The Sūtra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma
Is the most excellent sūtra
That I have ever expounded.
The Buddha sings these verses to Medicine-King Bodhisattva in Chapter Ten of the Lotus Sūtra. Our founder Nichiren explained that the superiority of the Lotus Sūtra lay not in its being more powerful than other Sūtras, but that it leads all beings, without exception, to the Buddha’s own enlightenment. Other teachings distinguish between those who can follow the Buddha Dharma and those who cannot. But this teaching assures everyone who hears it that they will become enlightened.
The Daily Dharma is produced by the Lexington Nichiren Buddhist Community. To subscribe to the daily emails, visit zenzaizenzai.com
Creating Personal Meaning Of Sūtra
[T]he stūpa of the Buddha ManyJewels emerging from beneath the earth and rising into the air indicates breaking through the mind-ground of ignorance to dwell in the emptiness that is the supreme meaning; Śākyamuni’s three acts of purifying myriads of millions of world spheres means that one purifies oneself of the three categories of delusion, and so on. Through this “interpretation from the standpoint of mind-contemplation” (kuan-hsin-shih, kanjin-shaku) the meaning of a text is taken into oneself and personally appropriated. (Page 158)
Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism