Saturday, June 20, 2009

This Tathagata's True Meaning

Hakuin,in the Orategama, reads the Lotus Sutra differently than I've been reading it. He defines the "message" the thing that is propagated, as not the literal Lotus Sutra text itself, but rather the Awakened One's Meaning behind the Lotus Sutra. That's what will give the Multiverse ecstatic joy.

But Hakuin warns that "this meaning" is our meaning, as in Case 39 of the Mumonkan, as in what caused ancestors to lose limbs, to be threatened by wolves, and to be otherwise consensually posited on the knife's edge between life and death, as a "middle way" that might be middling enough for many people, but when it's your life it's YOUR life you're leading and with which you are resolving the Great Matter.

As they say in one of the standards bodies I've attended: "Document noted."

Which means: pay deep attention.

Which also means: the "conflict of interest" I wrote of earlier doesn't really enter.

It's not about the writer(s) of the Lotus Sutra.

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