Sensei's Daily Encouragement - 13 August 2021 - Year of Hope and Victory

                  

Daily Encouragement by Daisaku Ikeda
August 13, 2021

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."
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From the Writings of Nichiren Daishonin
August 13, 2021

 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
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Wisdom for Modern Life by Daisaku Ikeda
August 13, 2021

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.
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Daisaku Ikeda - A Youthful Diary (01 September 1954) p.199 

An evening lecture in Tsurumi. "On the Buddha's Prophecy." When I have truly prepared myself, my lectures go very well. This is how it should always be. Met with M. at a sushi shop until 11:00. He had visited Miss I. during lunch. Dinner was ready when I returned home. My wife reminded me that when I left for work in the morning I had promised her to be home in time for dinner. No excuse.
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