Today at the temple we commemorated the death of our founder Nichiren Shonin. At the time of Nichiren’s death is it said that the cherry trees bloomed out of season. Nichiren died at Ikegami Japan on October 13, 1282. He had been ill for a while previous at Mount Minobu where his retirement hermitage was located. On the advice of Shijo Kingo, Nichiren’s faithful samurai follower who also advised Nichiren as his physician, Nichiren traveled…
The recording is in French and English. Today we discussed how to have gratitude and appreciation for unpleasant events in our past. In particular how do we have gratitude to parents who may have treated us in unskillful ways, or who harmed us when we were children. The issue is complicated, and not to be over simplified, and certainly we should not read general guidance written for someone else or written for a general audience…
Ohigan and Equinox Well, here we are approaching the autumn equinox. Twice a year on our planet we have an equinox, a period of equal light and equal dark. Twice a year we take time during the equinox season to pay particular attention to observing the Six Paramitas. We find reference to Higan, which means crossing to the other shore, in the Lotus Sutra Chapter 1. “They had already trained themselves out of their compassion…
Mystical Buddha The Lotus Sutra is a unity, it is as Nichiren teaches a collection of individual characters each of which is a Buddha. When all these individual characters are strung together in unity it becomes the Lotus Sutra, it also becomes the name of the Eternal Buddha, or the mystical name of Buddha. The characters are finite and infinite at the same time. There are a definite required number of characters, not one less…
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