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    Our life in the Lotus Sutra
    Our life in the Lotus Sutra
    Our life in the Lotus Sutra
    Ebook64 pages1 hour

    Our life in the Lotus Sutra

    By Massimo Claus

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    About this ebook

    This book does not deal with the Lotus Sutra from a doctrinal point of view. It provides instead a lay interpretation closer to people busy in living their everyday lives. 

    What is the relationship of the Lotus Sutra with our work environment, with our friends or bills to pay? What in the Lotus Sutra can make our lives better, beyond the doctrinal interpretation of the individual chapters? What are the teachings that can improve our relationships with people and with ourselves? 

    These are some of the questions this book tries to answer.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMyo Edizioni
    Release dateJun 28, 2019
    ISBN9788834147191
    Our life in the Lotus Sutra

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      Book preview

      Our life in the Lotus Sutra - Massimo Claus

      OUR LIFE IN

      THE LOTUS SUTRA

      Massimo Claus

      © Massimo Claus 2019

      All right reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted,

      in any form or by any means, without permission.

      English translation: Laura Silvestri

      Translation supervisor: Diana Gorbea

      The Lotus Sutra quotations are from Massimo Claus's translation in current language of the Lotus Sutra.

      Cover image: © Paul Jarvis

      Editor: Laura Silvestri

      For information:

      [email protected] | www.myoedizioni.it

      1. Our life in the Lotus Sutra

      Imagine a wonderful dream that, when you wake up, leaves you a strange feeling of freshness. Think like a child who, finding himself alone in the middle of a crowd, instinctively seeks his mother with his eyes, reaching out his little hand to find the contact with that force, that bravery he feels missing in that moment. To me the Lotus Sutra has been and still is the hand that, always I'm looking for each day of my life, most of the times without even being aware of doing it.

      I don't know when all this began. I mean, of course I remember the day I first met the Lotus Sutra, but I can't remember the day that this Sutra got so deep into my soul, so much that the mere thought of being able to touch it, even with only the force of my memory, leaves me breathless. Who knows how many of you got in my same situation, how many of you have felt and are feeling what I'm trying to express with words. Maybe now a smile on your lips has stolen your usual look. I don't know that, but I do know that we always let ourselves get caught by what we should let go instead, while we repeatedly get absorbed by what leaves inside us nothing good.

      Often, fear, in all its manifestations, takes much part of our hearts, leaving us with no more energy to be dedicated to other things. Yes, fear. I'm not talking of the easily recognizable kind of fear, but of the kind of fear that requires us a long pondering to understand that it constitutes the deepest cause of our actions—and most of the time people don't even try to comprehend it because they are completely unaware of its existence. I have felt that kind of fear many, many times in my life and even now I often feel it biting my throat in the most unexpected moments, because fear acts like that indeed.

      Frequently, people consider the Lotus Sutra only by a doctrinal point of view. This is good, but I would object: if doctrine doesn't help us in living our busy lives, why bother to get absorbed by it? What I would like to debate here doesn't connect much with doctrine as we are inured to understand it, rather it connects with something that goes beyond ceremonies, beyond the incense that smells more like us, beyond the mystic experience of our own lives.

      Certainly the project is serious and very ambitious. Probably this project is presumptuous as well, but, since I'm a human being, I am totally and globally presumptuous, so why bother to limit myself?

      Who knows, I said to myself, maybe it can be of some use to someone. That's my hope for sure, but beyond that the only thing I can do is try to really be in every word you are going to read, in every experience I will tell, because I can only tell and talk about what I directly experienced. I don't know why is that, maybe my memory is not very good and therefore to talk of what I've lived, and keep living on my own skin, is for sure the best way to not being banal. In case I was, who cares, it will be a way to narrate of myself, an attempt to confess to those you do not know and perhaps you not even want to know, because the fear of judgment is always there pointing the finger hoping to see you fall.

      2. Who the Lotus Sutra belongs to?

      I've never understood why relegating the Lotus Sutra to a particular school—most of the times excluding all the others. Actually, the more I get old the less I understand divisions. Maybe energies diminish as one gets older, but I believe that to be open-minded towards various interpretations is a big help in understanding any kind of topic. The same is for Buddha's teaching which, we must not forget, is under many aspects very far from our common way of thinking and seeing things. I haven't always felt that way. I have to confess you that over the course of my path in Dharma I had often been very integralist: my harshness in expounding Dharma, I realized it later, it was just to please the school I had the fortune—or misfortune—to represent. There was

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