Reciting the Sutra

Thanks to the Founder’s research, Reiyukai members can get a link to the Buddha’s teachings, by reciting the blue sutra daily, if such is their wish. This recitation incites them to educate their minds by listening, with curiosity, to a teaching unknown to them before. It often surprises their ordinary conceptions of reality. Hearing this teaching is essential, yet, its deep essence is only revealed when accomplishing the practice of bodhisattva as proposed by Reiyukai.

The Blue Sutra: the core of the teachings

In order to enable Reiyukai members to recite the sutra daily, Kakutaro Kubo and Kimi Kotani selected eleven key parts extracted from the Threefold Lotus Sutra to compose the main body of the Blue Sutra. Even if members can, if they wish, recite the whole of the Threefold Lotus Sutra, the daily practice is that of the recitation of the Blue Sutra. These extracts, chosen by the two founders, constitute the core of the teachings. They indicate the methods to follow as well as the practices to accomplish so as to transform yourself. They present the models of the great bodhisattvas and detail the actions that helped them progress on the path.

An active meditation

Reciting the Sutra enables Reiyukai members to speak out loud the conviction that they are responsible for their own future and for the improvement of the world around them. It reinforces their trust in this teaching: it is not thanks to their ordinary conception of reality but thanks to the wisdom the sutra contains that the path will open up for them and for all those who accompany them. Since, if this recitation, following the example of a meditation, helps the heart to reach a feeling of deep calm and to engender an active use of subconscious, it also enhances the assimilation and the learning of the subtle and deep wisdom of the text.

Precious links

Reiyukai members dedicate this reading to their ancestors and to the members of their families and associate them to their wish of improvement. Yet, their wish to reach enlightenment is not limited to themselves, their ancestors and the members of their families but it grows little by little so as to include everyone, and in particular those led by circumstances to become their practice companions.

The Blue Sutra begins with an invocation of all the Buddhas and great bodhisattvas. It is therefore a privileged opportunity to learn to establish a vital link with the beings who have already completed the path to Buddhahood and who protect and watch over this teaching.

When reading the sutra far from the hustle and bustle of the world, Reiyukai members express their gratitude to all these precious relationships. They reaffirm their wish to learn and to open up their spirits and their hearts to the Buddha’s path and promise to transform themselves according to the Teaching until everyone’s reality is transformed too.

That is why reciting the Sutra is the first essential step to take if we want to pass on the Teaching to others. This transmission, which is made possible thanks to the link of spiritual friendship established with the elders, is achieved among all the karmic relationships of any existence. Thanks to this action Reiyukai members give life to the wish that is expressed at the end of the Sutra:

“May we and all living beings attain the Enlightenment of the Buddha!”

The dynamic effect of the reading

Each reading increases perceptiveness, it guides and inspires. Linked to the world of the Enlightened, members deal with the reality of their life circumstances in an unprecedented way. They are often led to acting in a different way. As a consequence, each time people recite the Sutra again, they do it with more confidence and with a greater conscience of the power it has to influence their actions. That is how the wish to make this teaching available to others and the desire they might experiment -in their turn- the power of the meaning it holds are born. It is because the readers’ understandings evolves and make them act that we say the effect of this sutra is dynamic.