I’ve mentioned in this writing that I wanted to discuss a mystical approach to being in and with the Lotus Sutra. I realize that this may seem controversial to some people, and I am comfortable with their controversy. I firmly believe that our practice, religious and spiritual is an individual experience and no one can, should, or needs to define someone else experiences. I am fully aware that there may be some who think this is nonsense or e even wrong. I am comfortable with my practice and find it irrelevant what others think. If however someone does find their experience and practice to be of a mythical nature then perhaps my writing will give them comfort, knowing they are not the only ones.
I don’t know what is available in other languages except for the recent availability of Chih-I’s writings in the Maka Shikan. As I read through it there is a much different way of practicing and living the Lotus Sutra from what we generally have available to us in English.
When I first joined, when I first encountered the Lotus Sutra, it was on a cold winter evening in Memphis Tennessee. I’ve written about this previously, about the situation in my life at the time and also about the physical experience of attending that first sangha meeting. It was a particularly dark time in my life, I was at the lowest point in my life I had ever been. It was a time in which I felt there was no hope, no future. The experience of the sangha meeting was one of high energy and which had an immediate impact of connectedness. I felt as if I had come home to a place I had been looking for my whole life.
That is all pretty interesting. But there was something else that occurred. As I was walking back to the barracks it was as if I was in a new and different universe. My circumstance was the same, I was still in the Marine Corps yet it was also completely different. I felt as if my life had expanded to encompass the entire universe. When I looked up at the sky, and this I vividly still recall, the stars were almost within reach, there was no space between them and myself. There was a clarity without any effort or even need for clarification.
I’ve often thought of this, the memory comes back to me constantly. The power of the joy and hope that I felt in those quiet moments walking back to base have never left me. Even still I feel it bubbling up within me as I write this. Yet writing this seems somehow to diminish the experience.
What was it in that moment? What did I experience? I personally believed then and continue to believe now that it was a mystical experience. I had no words for it other than to describe the feelings and the seeing, that occurred. It was more than all of those things.
That was my first mystical experience. Over time I had others, situations where my life seemed expansive without bound. I’ve talked about how over time my chanting changed from being done in desperation to being done with confidence and certainty. That may simply be an increase in the amount of confidence I had in the positive affect, in the efficacy of the cause of Odaimoku. Yet, even that is a sort of mystical experience.
To be confident, certain that the chanting of Namu Myoho Renge Kyo would be the perfect cause to be made to affect situations in my life is something that defies logic as we commonly understand. There is little mathematical or scientific rational way to come to the conclusion that Odaimoku is the most effect cause to be made in any situation.
Many have been the times when I have been walking down the street chanting in my head and felt as if my life we intimately connected with people I walked past or along side of. Perhaps this is merely egoistical delusion of self-importance. Yet in those moments I have had an unexplainable sensation that my chanting in those moments was critical to not myself but the people I saw. I have no proof of any affect and only my personal experience and sensations.
When I was at Shingyo Dojo, the monastery portion of training to be a priest, I recall one evening when I had an experience of vision. It was the evening after we had all finished writing out Chapter XVI and mounted them in scrolls. Every priest writes out Chapter XVI in its entirety and mounts in a scroll as part of the Shingyo Dojo experience. That evening all of the 83 scrolls of the Lotus Sutra were placed on the main altar in the Dojo and we performed the eye-opening, the consecration of the scrolls, ceremony. As we were chanting the Odaimoku portion of the ceremony I witnessed the hems of grey robes and pairs of feet walking all around the assembled priests, myself included. It was as if all the spirits of previous priests training at Shingyo Dojo were walking in our midsts.
I was not the only one who experienced such a mysterious phenomena. Some of the other priests felt as if someone were tapping them on their shoulders. Some priests witnessed spirits at the front of the altar. Not everyone experienced something, though many of us did.
There have been many times when reading and studying the Lotus Sutra, it is as if something emerges from that which is greater than or beyond the Sutra text itself.
Perhaps even you have experienced such things as these. If you are like me you may have noticed that no one speaks about such things much if at all. Sometimes you may hear things, mostly though it is not spoken of in great detail.
What I am trying to do with this writing is both celebrate those experience we may have and to also present some of my approach to increasing and deepening my mystical experiences. It is merely another approach to entering into the Lotus Sutra. There is the doctrinal door, there is the door to the heart and joy of the Lotus Sutra, and there is another door to the spirit or soul of the Lotus Sutra.
This is a text that spans infinity in any way you can describe it. Within infinity are an infinite number of ways of experiencing the Lotus Sutra, of living with and in this truly mystical teaching.
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