Sensei's Daily Encouragement - 13 August 2012 - The Year of Developing a Youthful SGI

Daily Encouragement by Daisaku Ikeda Monday, August 13, 2012   An important thing is that you concentrate on developing yourself. Whatever others may say or do, those who have established their own solid sense of identity will triumph in the end. The great Japanese author Eiji Yoshikawa (1892-1962) wrote in his novel Miyamoto Musashi [an account of the seventeenth-century master swordsman of the same name]: "Rather than worrying about your future, thinking ' Perhaps I should become this or perhaps I should become that,'  first be still and build a self that is as solid and unmoving as Mount Fuji."     From the Writings of Nichiren Daishonin Monday, August 13, 2012   Could "enjoy themselves at ease" mean anything but that both our bodies and minds, lives and environments, are entities of three thousand realms in a single moment of life and Buddhas of limitless joy? There is no true happiness other than upholding faith in the Lotus Sutra. This is what is meant by "peace and security in their present existence and good circumstances in future existences."   The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, page 681 Happiness in This World Written to Shijo Kingo on June 27, 1276     Wisdom for Modern Life by Daisaku Ikeda Monday, August 13, 2012   Buddhism teaches that human life is endowed simultaneously with both good and evil. The human mind is interpreted as partaking of ten different conditions, or states, including, at one end of the scale, hell, which is filled with suffering; hunger, dominated by greed; and animality, characterized by fear of the strong and contempt for the weak. At the other end are the Bodhisattva and Buddha conditions - states of mind in which people strive to help others by eliminating suffering and imparting happiness. Buddhism further teaches that the nature of life is for good and evil to be essentially inseparable.     Daisaku Ikeda - A Youthful Diary (1957) p.341   The moon was full tonight.  When I think about the satellite flying through space, what a profoundly poetic evening it was.  With my tired body, it reminded me of listening to an exquisite, mysterious melody.  The joy of living.  Let it always be so.   Read the Gosho "encouragement to a Sick Person".  Ultimately, the spirit of propagation, a life of propagation, is the source of the greatest, most powerful life force and vitality. * 8 October: news report that the Soviet Union has successfully launched a human-made satellite.