She continued further, “ Coming back to your query about your elder son’s case of drug abuse. First prepare yourself that it’s not going to be an easy task for you. You have to Prepare very well yourself before proceeding further just like the hammer needs to be stronger than the stone which it is going to break. You need to make yourself very strong to help him come out from this abyss for achieving this successfully. You have to strengthen your own inner self by regularly chanting the Daimoku of lotus sutra and in a short span of time you will start to have the very clear vision as to how to proceed further. You will be equipped with a new perseverance which is the key element to convert your karma into a mission and even your chanting is going to positively impact your child’s behaviour too.
In the second phase try to include all your children in this practice and as they also start chanting, the transformation is going to be very fast. All you need is hope and courage. So first of all start chanting with strong determination that you will overcome this situation and you have to become a saviour of your children and will gradually see things falling in place. Come what may, you have to rescue them. I’m going to teach you the lotus sutra and its basic nuances after our discussion.
Believe strongly that you are the reflection of your environment around you and vice versa. Your sincere effort will ultimately transform into an enhanced sincerity in your children in their tasks. At this point you may not be able to understand the logic behind this but the things will unfold as you go with your Buddhist studies. This is going to help you overcome the problem of all your children.
An old man from the public got up and asked, “Why do we need another religion when we already have one and it is completely self sustained?”
The king replied, “I was waiting for this question to come much before you asked it. It is a probable question for a beginner to think that he’s being asked to convert his religion from his current religion to other. I would like to very clearly state that Nichiren Buddhism isn’t a religion but a life philosophy which acts like a guiding star for the people unable to find solutions to their suffering and agony despite having strong faith in their respective religion. It empowers and enables us to do our human revolution and awakens our dormant positivity and trustworthiness which lies within ourselves without our knowledge about how to achieve and harness it. It encourages us to believe that there is only power and it lies within ourselves and within our reach.
If we look at the humans’ ancient past we will see that the prayer became a part of our live mainly because of our fearfulness of the immense destructive powers of the Mother Nature and the supposed grandeur of the heavens. A prayer was a symbol of man feeling powerless in front of an unseen super power and his surrender in front of it due to his inability to find a solution himself. Thus prayer was a natural expression of his will and desire. It was not born of religion. In fact it’s just the contrary. Religion was born out of it. In today’s world if we study all the religions though there may be different ways and interpretations of prayer but we’ll find one thing common that the man only limits himself to only identifying the problem and the salvation relies mainly upon his dependence on some external power.
Nichiren Buddhism, however, emphasises that a prayer evokes power from both from within ourselves and at the same time from the external environment around us. This way it enables us to alter and steer the course of our lives ourselves. Our mentor says in his scriptures that the best results of prayer can be easily achieved with a dynamic fusion of balancing of internal and external forces. According to him the Mystic law of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is coherent within ourselves and at the same time outside us in the entire universe around us. He explains the whole situation in a very comprehensible metaphor. He says, “ When a caged bird sings, it summons the flying free birds in the sky and when it sees the other birds gathering around, it strives to come out and demand to be freed. The encaged bird is symbolic of the Buddha nature of ordinary people existent in all of us while the cage represents the shackles of ignorance and earthly desires. The caged bird singing is indicative of people chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo while the birds flying in the sky represent the Buddha nature that exists in all living beings. The powerful vibes produced by our strong chanting of the Lotus Sutra not only awakens the Buddha nature within us but it also calls the Buddha nature of all the beings of the universe.
This way, it makes a strong communion of the two to help us break the shackles of ignorance and darkness and liberate itself to soar high in the open sky freely. Based on these teachings we can assure ourselves that by regularly chanting the Lotus Sutra one can resolve and liberate himself of the biggest challenges and deepest sufferings which one has previously been just praying to get rid but wasn’t able to, due to dependence on the unknown external factors. This could be more clearly understood by another practical life example. As you believe, the universe has been designed in such a way that all the processes required to govern its smooth operations are already present in it. The wind blows by itself when required, the rains start pouring without call when there’s a drought, our wounds heal by themselves. Apparently all this seems to be happening by itself but the truth is that all this happens due to the law of Cause and Effect.
The same powers have been given to the Mother nature around us. It never discriminates between its children, that’s us, and makes available all its assets to all of us equally without any partiality. For instance, it has provided its available supply of air to all of us equally so that we can respire efficiently but despite this, a patient suffering from a respiratory disorder would still find it difficult to breathe as there’s a problem with his own body that it is not able to utilise the available air efficiently and hence he feels totally suffocated as he would die. Whereas the same gust of air makes the normal healthy people rejuvenated and afresh. Whatever has happened with this ailing person who is not able to breathe properly is an outcome of some cause that was created in past either by him or due ot some inherited disease. The conclusion is that in order to get relieved of this ailment the patient has to be get cured rather than cursing his environment and circumstances.
Similarly according to the laws of Buddhism, we have an already installed capacity to recognise our hidden Buddha nature but we may still struggle and strive to achieve what we want and keep doing this throughout our lives without any success if we’re not able to harness that potential due to lack of knowledge of the proper method to do so. The Lotus Sutra exactly acts as a key to open that seemingly impossible lock and help us unearth that immense treasure with enough supply to not just help yourself but also other people. All this truth can never be acknowledged by just discussions and arguments but one needs to start practising and observe the transformation himself.
To be continued....