Butchart Gardens, British Columbia

Inspirations

derived from the Buddha’s ageless teaching

of wisdom, compassion, and liberation

The Threefold Lotus Sutra

  Constant progress is the natural course of living beings. It is the right and true way for us to live. To strive in the midst of suffering humanity for the well being of all, is to live a truly human life, the bodhisattva toil.

  Thus if in life’s journey we strive always after our nature, talent, and occupation to create those things that make for the happiness and well being of others, then that creation and resulting harmony are the ultimate human ideal, a treasure of the highest order.

  We are all one substance with the great, all pervading life-force of the universe. The enlightenment of the Buddha—our own enlightenment—perceives this reality, the way in which always and everywhere the will of this universal energy appears in unlimited operation in both inanimate and living things.

  Shakyamuni Buddha lived in this world, and desired after he had “gone beyond” those still living would make themselves the light, continuing to practice and spread his ageless teachings of compassion and liberation. His “appearance” in future worlds would manifest in teachers who would follow, as indeed many teachers have – “in thousands of countless lands I  will  appear to preach the Law . . .”

  In the Buddha’s teachings there is no “above and below” – universal energy (“Buddha,” to give it a name) which causes us to live, surrounds us, dwells within us. We reach toward enlightenment in this life to enrich every moment of this life, not to find reward after we have gone beyond this life, but here  and now.

  “Further, bodhisattva-mahasattvas (persons of great compassion), contemplate all existences as void—appear­­ances as they reality, duly established as they are in reality, neither upside down, nor moving, nor receding, nor turning, just like space, of the nature of nothing­ness, cut off from the course of all words and expressions, unborn, not coming forth, not arising, nameless, formless, really without existence, unim­peded, infinite, boundless, unrestrained, only existing by causation, and pro­duced through distortion of thought.”–Sutra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Law – A Happy Life