In Chapter 1 of the Sutra, before the vast assembly, having already preached the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings, the Buddha entered deeply into meditative concentration. Then, to prepare the assembly to hear the Buddha preach, various omens suddenly appeared – flowers rained down from the heavens on everyone, the earth trembled and shook, and the Buddha emitted a ray of light from between his eyebrows, lighting up eighteen thousand worlds to the east, so that the whole assembly could see these worlds in great detail, including their heavens and purgatories, all their living beings, and even their past and present buddhas. Surely we are being advised here that we are entering a different world, and a different kind of world, a world that is at once rich in fantasy and at the same time anchored in this world.

Thus the Dharma Flower Sutra opens up and reveals this world as a magical world, a world in which flowers rain down from the heavens, drums sound by themselves, and Shakyamuni Buddha lights up all the worlds with beams of light streaming from between his eyebrows. It is a world in which an illusory castle-city provides a resting place for weary travelers, in which a Stupa emerges from the ground so that an extinct buddha from long ago can praise Shakyamuni for teaching the Dharma Flower Sutra, where the Bodhisattva Wonderful Voice, with his nearly perfect, giant, and radiant body, from another world makes flowers appear on Holy Eagle Peak and then comes through countless millions of worlds with eighty-four thousand other bodhisattvas to visit Shakyamuni Buddha and others, and where the Bodhisattva Universal Sage comes flying through the sky on his white elephant with six tusks to visit and help those in this world.

I call this a world of enchantment. And enchantment, here, means a certain kind of fascination with the ordinary world. It means finding the special, even the supernatural, within the ordinary world of our existence. It means seeing this world itself as different, as special – as important and valuable. And this means that our lives – how we live and what we do – are important, not only for ourselves, but also for the Buddha and for the entire cosmos.