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In order to savor our karmic encounters, we have to let go of preferential judgments of good and bad, take with equal gratitude that which is pleasant and that which is painful, as equal parts of reality, that is, as Buddha Dharma, and then no experience, no encounter will be for naught.
The Buddha is hidden behind people who grind you with angry faces and nasty remarks, because such people refine you like a whetstone sharpens a knife.
—Nikkyo Niwano, founder, Rissho Kosei-kai
Mixing Oil and Water
People who study Buddhism will often come across the enigmatic phrase “Samsara is in itself nirvana” (Skt., saṃsāra eva nirvâṇam). This assertion appears in a number of well-known Buddhist texts, including Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka-kārikā.
Samsara, often translated into Chinese as “birth and death,” is the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth that living beings have repeated since the beginningless past. The basic Buddhist view of this cycle is, on the face of it, pessimistic: Samsara is synonymous with suffering. Life begins with the trauma of birth, and while we experience much joy in our lives, we are also visited by sickness, the unavoidable decline of aging, the certainty of death, and all manner of suffering. Samsara can also refer to how our hearts and minds ceaselessly wander through a range of emotional states rooted in various degrees of greed, anger, and ignorance.
Nirvana, on the other hand, means the extinguishment of the ignorance and desire that cause us to suffer through the cycles of birth and death in both senses mentioned above. Living beings who attain nirvana are no longer driven through rounds of birth and death because of ignorant delusions and desires, and in the phenomenal sense, they no longer wander through unstable, unwholesome states of consciousness, because their hearts and minds are tranquil and at ease. Nirvana is the end of suffering because one is no longer captive to the changing circumstances of one’s life.
“Samsara is in itself nirvana” would seem a contradiction in terms, then, because it identifies two things that appear, by definition, to be polar opposites. In order to obtain nirvana, shouldn’t we be escaping samsara? How could these two be concurrent and concomitant? Metaphorically speaking, wouldn’t this be like mixing oil and water?
When forms of Mahayana Buddhism make this perplexing declaration that “samsara is in itself nirvana,” it means that ultimately samsara and nirvana are not two different places or planes of existence but different ways of experiencing and acting in the world. The Buddha Shakyamuni did not promise to magically reverse aging, nor forestall sickness and death. If, as Buddhism teaches, sentient beings come into existence through causes and conditions and are therefore destined to age, become sick, and die, as well as meet with all manner of suffering, then nirvana cannot be the avoidance of suffering but instead its transformation.
From this perspective, the practice of Buddhism is about confronting our sufferings and learning to understand them in the light of the Buddha’s teachings, in order to grasp them differently. Much of our suffering is subjective, stemming from the fact that things do not go as we wish. Arguably more objective experiences of suffering, such as sickness and death, moreover, while obviously not pleasant, do not have to be accompanied by fear, anger, or loneliness if we comprehend them through the light of the Buddha’s teachings of impermanence and interdependence and the conviction that while life is transient, the progression of existence itself, like a river, is immutable.
The Place of Attaining the Way Is Ordinary Life
This means that we don’t have to forsake our ordinary lives for some isolated existence in order to achieve the cessation of suffering. The place where we attain the serenity and peace of mind of nirvana is daily life. Cutting ourselves off from the world could even be counterproductive, because instead of facing the truth of suffering, we could be only running away from it, and in the end this would solve nothing. And if we think about this the other way around, it is precisely the difficult, unpleasant experiences in life that provide us opportunities for enlightenment. Even if we could escape to some idyllic place, not only would we become bored out of our wits in no time whatsoever, we would also lack opportunities for growth. We achieve enlightenment in the events and circumstances of ordinary life.
If this is so, then it stands to reason that the circumstances of our daily lives, the people we meet and even the troubles we face, are not different from Buddha Dharma but part and parcel of it. It is here that we arrive at the radically world-affirming teaching of the Lotus Sutra. The sixteenth chapter of the sutra reveals the Buddha to be omnipresent and indicates that this world is his pure land. We come into contact with the Buddha—wisdom and compassionate action—through all manner of situations, phenomena, and people. The Buddha teaches this in chapter 16 when he explains: “Sometimes I appear as myself, sometimes as someone else; sometimes I appear in my own actions, sometimes in the actions of others; but all that I say is true and not empty.”
Putting Principle into Practice
The “good news” of the Lotus Sutra is that we are living in the realm of the Buddha. But how do we put such a lofty principle into practice? In Rissho Kosei-kai Buddhism, one important way to experience our daily lives as Buddhist practice is to make the most of our encounters with others, literally to savor our karmic encounters. The Japanese word for association, contact, or encounter, is en, a translation of the Buddhist term pratyaya. Encounters are opportunities or conditions for various people and situations to come into contact, which then become causes for subsequent phenomena. All of our interactions with others are gifts, valuable opportunities to discover the Buddha’s immanent wisdom and compassion in our lives. This is why “savoring” our encounters by appreciating them, contemplating them, and making the most of them is critical to our growth as people and as practitioners of the bodhisattva Way.
Of course, not all of our encounters are pleasant, but the unpleasant encounters are the ones that hold the most profound consequences for us. The founder of Rissho Kosei-kai, Rev. Nikkyo Niwano, emphasized that we should treasure the difficult people we encounter in life, because they provide us occasions to perfect ourselves. Without these people who “grind us with angry faces,” how would we develop the bodhisattva’s forbearance and deepen our compassion? It is through our relationships with these people that our faith becomes more than lip service to lofty principles. In Rev. Niwano’s words, they “refine us like a whetstone sharpens a knife.” Our encounters with them are “teaching moments,” and when we realize this, we can appreciate them just as they are, as precious encounters rather than simply difficulties. In the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha teaches this when he refers to Devadatta, the archrival who once attempted to kill him, as someone who served as a great teacher. Shakyamuni explains that because of his encounter with Devadatta, he was “able to become fully developed in the six transcendental practices,” and that the reason he could attain full awakening and go on to liberate many people was his “good friend Devadatta.”
In order to savor our karmic encounters, we have to let go of preferential judgments of good and bad, take with equal gratitude that which is pleasant and that which is painful, as equal parts of reality, that is, as Buddha Dharma, and then no experience, no encounter will be for naught. This is what the Lotus Sutra’s attitude toward a person like Devadatta teaches us. A practical method for learning to see the world in this light is to savor our karmic encounters by thinking of them as arrangements of the Buddha. To some this might sound like overly anthropomorphizing the Buddha, or a kind of fatalism. However, as Rev. Nichiko Niwano, the current leader of Rissho Kosei-kai, writes, taking things as the arrangements of the Buddha “switches off the selfish mind, and by doing so, we can follow the Dharma and pursue a life of moderation and ease.” That is to say, this blocks the kind of imputation that in Buddhist parlance is called discrimination in order to view things “through the eyes of the Buddha.” Learning valuable lessons by understanding our encounters through the perspective of the Buddha’s teachings is a way of receiving a “message from the Buddha” via our relationships with others. It is the Buddha appearing to us through the actions of others.
Living with Joy
We all know someone who always has a smile for us, a person who can find the silver lining in almost any cloud. These bright and cheerful people do not deny the realities of the world, but they always try to make the best of every situation. They seem to know instinctively that when we face every encounter positively, trying to make it a happy one, our lives are filled with joy. A smile begets a smile, and happiness and joy are also contagious. Savoring our encounters in this way allows us to live with a sense of joy and bring this joy to others. The Lotus Sutra describes the first inklings of the Buddha’s omnipresence, a glimpse of the Buddha Dharma in all things, as an experience of joy. Through approaching every encounter warmly and positively, we actualize this joy, gradually opening our eyes to the Buddha Dharma in all things while also doing the bodhisattva work of bringing peace and harmony to those around us.
Encounters Past and Present
“Savoring our karmic encounters” means to approach every encounter joyously, taking both pleasant and difficult interactions with others as precious gifts that are the arrangements of the Buddha. In this way, no experience is for naught, and the people in our lives become “good friends” whose actions are the means through which we receive the message of the Buddha. Savoring our karmic encounters is a powerful and effective practical method for realizing the Mahayana Buddhist principle that “samsara is in itself nirvana,” and for learning to see the Buddha Dharma in all things, thus making everyday life the place of practice and enlightenment.
The term karmic encounter can also refer to how our recent encounters are dependent on those we had in the past. We are who we are today because of a series of causes and conditions, that is to say, earlier encounters with situations and people that have shaped us tremendously, such as our ancestors and parents, who literally gave us life. There is a trend in Western Buddhism to deemphasize the doctrines of karma and rebirth (see Dharma World, July–September 2016 issue), but in much of the Buddhist world there remains a belief, also found in the Lotus Sutra, that this web of interdependence with others can span multiple lifetimes, and that many of the encounters we have in this life occur because we have formed a connection to these people in past lives. Consequently, our encounters in this life can be thought of as unfinished business or continuing projects, a notion that makes our interactions with others especially meaningful. In the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha explains to his disciples that he had actually taught them over the span of many lifetimes, and for this reason they were fully prepared to hear his exposition of the Supreme Dharma and to eventually become buddhas themselves.
In Buddhism, birth as a human being is said to be exceedingly rare, as unlikely an occurrence as the actions of a blind turtle, who when surfacing for a breath once a century, inadvertently pokes his head through a small hole in a single piece of driftwood that is floating on the surface of the ocean. Most of the matter in our world is inanimate, and human beings comprise only a small portion of the life on this planet. If we think of our existence in this way, we are sure to savor our encounter with this human life by treating our own life and the lives of others as priceless treasures.
