Roshi continued with our discussion of the Lotus Sutra.

By Chapter 15, so many incredible things have happened, and all of the gathered emanations say to Shakyamuni: we love this, want to protect the Lotus Sutra and make it the law of the land. 

Shakyamuni says, that’s okay, you don’t need to do that.

They are perplexed. Why wouldn’t you want to share this and propagate it?

At which point, the ground opens up yet again. And from the ground emerges hundreds of giant, golden Bodhisattvas, each of them one or two stories tall. Everyone is shocked. Where did these Bodhisattvas come from?

Shakyamuni replies that this is a side project he’s been working on for a while. He keeps the Bodhisattvas underground so they are not corrupted by the day-to-day reality of the life we all live in.

Shakyamuni then tells a parable about a doctor. The doctor has children, and he goes away on a trip. While he is away, the children break into his medicine cabinet and take the medicine. Unfortunately, the medicine is actually poison, and when the doctor returns, he finds the children poisoned to varying degrees. Some of the children are going to make it, some are barely going to make, and some, it looks like, are not going to make it.

The doctor quickly works to create an antidote, which he gives to the children. Then, he tells them he has to leave to attend to another patient, and goes away. While he is gone, he sends word through an assistant that he has died.

He then returns in person, telling the children that he is dead. Of course, the children are grief-stricken. And the children who were out of their minds from the poison snap out of it. They are finally ready to deal with life. And that’s the end of the parable.

Roshi shared the perspective of Thich Nhat Hanh, who said that the whole Lotus Sutra is really a long essay, which examines the difference between the historic Buddha and the ultimate reality Buddha. That’s why you have the two Buddhas sitting next to each other: Prabhutaratna is this cosmic Buddha, this ultimate reality Buddha; and next to him is Shakyamuni, who is a real historic figure who lived, ate, taught, got married, died, and got buried.

Thich Nhat Hanh said the whole of the Lotus Sutra is about examining these two things next to each other — the relationship between history, the real things in our day to day life, with this other huge, philosophical, cosmological, theological aspect.

One of the reasons the stupa couldn’t be opened until all of the emanations had gathered, is that it is important to understand the true nature of the Buddha before going on to examine the other aspects of the Buddha. If you thought the Buddha was just a historic figure and didn’t see these emanations, you wouldn’t be prepared for what’s to come. The revelations come in steps.

Roshi noted that most of us who practice do so because of the historic Buddha, not the cosmic Buddha. We are reality-based. We may know of the scientific benefits of practice, of the improvements to neuroplasticity, neurogenesis, hormone balance, and so on. We may be tired of being tired, of living with grief and pain and suffering, and we know the practical aspects of practice help to alleviate these things.

This is an important part of Buddhist practice, but it’s not the whole thing. There’s this other side.

But how do we apply this other side, this cosmic side? It’s so unfathomable, and it’s not going to help pay our bills or deal with our kids. But the point of the Lotus Sutra is: you can’t separate them.

They’re not two sides of the same coin, either. They are two things that are the same at the same time.

The point of all the extreme measurements in the Lotus Sutra — all of these incredible lengths and heights — is not that they are literal. They are conceptual.

Roshi talked about how scientists have a good understanding of where life originated, but the chemical origins of many of life’s building blocks remain a mystery. He observed that when we visit the doctor, the tools the doctor uses to examine us — sphygmomanometers, stethoscopes, etc. — are relatively primitive.

We don’t really have a clue about ourselves. And we are not ready for the next level of understanding.

When springtime comes, and daffodils and tulips jump out of the ground, we have a theoretical understanding of how this works. But we don’t really know. There’s so much we don’t understand about how this earth works, that we’re walking on.

The Lotus Sutra is, on the one hand, a handbook for the best way to deal with your life and make your life happy and healthy. But this other thing exists at the same time, and the Lotus Sutra is continually going back and forth between the two to see the bigger picture.

In the Bible, God is revealed to Moses as a burning bush, because the actual face of God would have given him a heart attack. There’s no way he could have comprehended the enormity of the creator of the universe. The burning bush is the medium to communicate to us.

Similarly the Lotus Sutra gives us concepts and things that guide us towards the message.

Shariputra says to Shakyamuni: you’re getting us into a lot of trouble here. People are going to wonder how you planted millions of Buddhas in the earth in the short 30 years you have been teaching so far. No one will want anything to do with this faith.

Shakyamuni replies: to be honest, though I am the historic Buddha now, I have been planting these Buddhas from the beginning of time. I am only a historic Buddha now as a pathway to the people who need to practice.

If people knew that I had been around since the beginning of time, it would seem too fantastical. The fact is, I’m a human being, I was born, I’m living like everyone else. And so I can be a partner everyone needs in their pathway. 

Shakyamuni concluded: It’s important that I die at some point. Because death creates grief, and grief is the trigger for our process.

Looking at many of the parables in the Lotus Sutra, they often follow a similar pattern. There is a parent, and a child, and tragedy that creates grief. And the grief builds up to a threshold. Once the threshold is surpassed, everything opens up.

The pathway is different for everyone, it may be long or short, but the grief is the key. In the parables it is so often parent and child because that relationship made all of us, and it is the source of the deepest pain and suffering we will experience. That relationship is the barometer of our spiritual and emotional evolution.

Everyone, as a child, is dispappointed in their parents, whether they admit it or not. Some people go their entire lives cursing their parents, and they die with this grief. Others get to the point where they move beyond the grief and realize my parents were people. Realizing this is entering the Buddha way.

We can’t become bodhisattvas until we realize this. Some realize it early, some in mid-life, some never. But we cannot serve others until we resolve this fundamental relationship that formed us. Once you resolve the relationship with your parents, you can move on to the other difficult relationships in your life.

That’s why all those parables exist the way they do. And that’s why Shakyamuni had to to enter the world as the historic Buddha: to create the grief necessary to move beyond it, and start to heal.

Actually Buddhas have always existed as long as human beings have needed a Buddha.

Today we are living through historic times. Things are changing at a rapid pace and, for a lot of people, that’s part of their anxiety. Their grief is being in the middle of this.

Thats why Shakyamuni appeared as the historic Buddha. He shows us that yes, we exist in the here and now, but that’s not our only existence. We exist at the exact same time in a larger sphere, a larger perspective. 

It’s just as the Diamond Sutra says: life and death don’t exist. And they do exist, at the same time.

We can get get upset at the state of things, but the truth is, there’s so much we don’t understand. There is a larger perspective.

Just as there are the two versions of the Buddha, there is the you that is sitting on the cushion right now, and there’s the cosmic version of you, and they are the same.

When the doctor listens to your heart with a stethoscope, then decides to order a CAT scan — the CAT scan is not an incremental improvement over the stethoscope, it’s a massive improvement. And in your practice, when you decide to sit, and not be attached, it’s not an incremental improvement in your life, it’s a massive improvement.

No one wants to go back to a life of anger and frustration after practicing. 

And the Lotus Sutra says: keep going, there’s more. There’s a cosmic side to this.