Adopting the point of view of the Awakened and of the Teachings.

Claudine Carayol often encourages Reiyukai members to apprehend reality from the point of view of the Teachings and of the world of Enlightenment.What does this concretely mean? In the following article she clarifies the significance of such an attitude.

Reiyukai Buddhism offers to solve the deep causes of our sufferings and to turn our reality and our environment into a world of peace and harmony. Only by endlessly nourishing our spirits with the Teachings will we manage to achieve this extraordinary goal. We will therefore learn to decipher reality from another point of view, the one of an Awakened being who is the only one who can see reality as it is and we will free ourselves from our erroneaous conceptions on reality.

The bases of the Buddha’s teachings, on which the Reiyukai practice relies on, first amount to the essential principles that rule the conditioned world, our world. These are karmic relationships, interrelation, interdependence and causality. The second aspect is the potential of enlightenment of all beings as well as the non-conditioned nature of the spirit of Enlightenment.

But what does this concretely mean?

To put it simply, we belong to the conditioned world. Our mind cuts out, classifies, judges, sorts things out, agrees or not and so on, and does so according to criteria defined by a vision of the world that is not an awakened being’s. Whatever the quality and the performance of our vision, it is the fruit of a limited human consciousness, the result of the great common history of humankind and of all the individual, familial  and ancestral histories belonging to each of us. Granted we accept this description of the limits and obstacles of our vision, we understand there are nothing but relative truths and that each and everyone of us has a different perception of the world. In the end particular conditions and circumstances engender conflicts between people and wars between peoples.

Yet we also belong to the world of enlightenment.

The basic position of Buddhism about human consciousness is that human beings are ignorant and that ignorance is the root of all sufferings and of all conflicts. This only holds provided we consider ignorance from the point of view of the Teachings. On the one hand we are ignorant of the deep causes of all the events that occur in our lives – and on a larger scale of everything that happens in the world – and on the other hand we are not aware of the nature of the spirit of enlightenment, of our Buddha’s nature.

Let us embrace the goal of an essential transformation, towards an enlightened humanity, beyond our “relative” humanity and accept the method and practices expounded by the Buddha in the Lotus Sutra, and more recently by the Reiyukai Founders. Easy to carry out, they both hold an extraordinary power and meaning that manifest themselves in the real world through amazing experiences.

Indeed, the first time we encounter these Teachings and that we associate our ancestors to it, we can observe another “order” of reality taking shape, an order that sweeps our ordinary conceptions on reality away. The power and the generosity of the spiritual world are revealed in this concrete experience, which arouses our curiosity and prepares our hearts and spirits to listen to the Teachings. This confident attitude towards the elders, eager as we are to hear the Teachings engenders a process of consciousness, of action and of transformation amidst our links with others, links that constitute the ground of our practice. We become aware of our limits, of our erroneous conceptions on the world and on others and for example of the negativity they engender. Our being gets purified, our vision of the world changes.

At the same time we develop a strong and lively link with the Teachings, with the world of the Awakened and with the great Bodhisattvas. Little by little, by relying on the fundamental teachings, we get anchored to the spirit of enlightenment, strongly linked to the spiritual world of the Awakened, whatever the difficulties and obstacles we encounter during the process of transformation.

Even if we are still far from being perfect, we most naturally become able to consider in a totally different ways the events and the circumstances that occur, by adopting the point of view of the spiritual world, of the Awakened and of the Teachings. This attitude brings out the resolution of our karmic tendencies and deeply transforms reality.