Life Is Bigger Than Your Intellect

A Buddha can put the whole universe into one sentence.

What is this sentence, and how does it work?

That kind of wisdom is challenging to fathom. Read this article, and you will have a better idea about it.

After some forty years of travelling around India teaching his followers, the former prince of Shakya Clan, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as Shakyamuni Buddha, changed his approach profoundly. Instead of teaching tactics of life and meritorious deeds to accumulate a good fortune to be born in some distant future as a Buddha, he revealed that we don’t need to wait lifetime after lifetime to become enlightened. That happened some 3000 years ago.

The Lotus Sutra

The teaching Shakyamuni started to preach is now known as The Lotus Sutra. It is a compilation of the teachings of the last eight years of his life. In the Lotus Sutra, Shakyamuni hinted that, in essence, Buddha is not one manifestation and enlightened being but life itself. But like life, also Buddha is too much for an ordinary person to understand.

Does that make your head hurt? “The wisdom of the Buddhas is infinitely profound and immeasurable. The door to this wisdom is difficult to understand and difficult to enter”, warns Shakyamuni at the beginning of the second chapter, Expedient Means, of the Lotus Sutra.

After explaining to one of the disciples how he has been teaching and practising this doctrine more than can be counted, he bluntly said that the true entity of life could be understood only by Buddhas leaving this poor disciple sucking his thumb.

Then Shakyamuni continues revealing in one sentence what is this universal principle that only the Buddhas can share and understand. He calls it the true entity of all phenomena. And so it goes: “This reality consists of the appearance, nature, entity, power, influence, inherent cause, relation, latent effect, manifest effect, and their consistency from beginning to end”.

Why is this important and revolutionary?

A Buddhist scholar and monk, Chih-i (538–597), who classified Shakyamuni’s teachings during the 6th century in China, could show that the essence of the theoretical teachings of Buddhism is in that sentence. It is the epitome of Buddhist philosophy because it explains how the universe is going through a consistent transformation but following a clear principle called the Mystic Law in Buddhism.

It explains in one sentence how our life works.

It is not a small feat. It would have remained just a theoretical doctrine. However, later in Japan, a Buddhist monk Nichiren Daishonin (1222–1282), used it as the foundation of a practice that made Buddhism accessible to ordinary people. He opened the door for us to enlightenment. But that’s another story. Let’s now focus on this one theoretical sentence a bit more.

Chih-i called this sentence and its content The Ten Factors that define how our existence works.

We all have an appearance. Everything has some form that separates it from others. That appearance has an inner nature, a set of tendencies or attributes that the appearance carries to manifest itself. Both appearance and nature then form the recognisable entity. This entity is us or any form of life. Within the entity, there is power, i.e. energy, that keeps the entity going.

The entity has an influence on everything it comes in contact with using its power. This influence triggers an inherent cause, i.e. potential, that forces the entity to act in a certain way in relation to the external reality. That process, in turn, activates the latent effect, i.e. the potential consequence causing a manifest effect to appear. It completes the cycle of cause and effect, and these factors are consistent from beginning to end.

Quite a mouthful. What I love in this simple but infinitely profound sentence is the idea of consistency. It gives me hope because I can change how I respond; I can change the inherent harmful causes and latent effects and manifest effects by choosing to take a different road. Because these factors are consistent, changing one negative thing can help me change a vast chain of causalities from a destructive vicious cycle to a virtuous cycle.

The sentence we just explored is from the theoretical part of the Lotus Sutra, summarising its philosophy.

Nichiren Daishonin combined theoretical teachings and essential teaching as a practice that can help us transform our lives based on the true aspect of phenomena. The essential teaching of the Lotus Sutra then gives us hope that every one of us can and is a Buddha, enlightened if we so want.

Chih-i’s great insight was to distil from the vast Buddhist literature (sutras) the philosophical structure without which Daishonin would not have been able to reveal what is the practice that makes this work for all.

3000 possibilities in every moment

The Ten Factors described in the sentence we have been talking about are part of the construct that gives us the tool to understand life as a whole and a beautiful caleidoscope of infinite potential. Chih-i called this structure 3000 Possibilities in One Moment of Life.

The theory of 3000 Possibilities in One Moment of Life consists of the ten life-states we experience in any given moment in the three realms we live in. These three realms are the realm of self, society, and the physical realm of our existence. The ten worlds that occupy these three realms are Hell, Hunger, Animality, Anger, Tranquility, Rapture, Learning, Realisation, Partial Enlightenment and Enlightenment.

In each of the ten worlds, there exist ten potential manifestations, resulting in a total of one hundred possible life-states. These one hundred life-states cany the Ten Factors, generating one thousand unique ways in which they can function. Additionally, these one thousand possibilities can be multiplied by three realms, culminating in a grand total of 3000 potential life scenarios in any given moment.

It all means that we have every moment an infinite number of potential directions we can aim for in our life. It is mind-blowing and gives one’s headache.

However, because Buddhism is reason, also theoretical frameworks need to land on a practical application. Daishonin constructed the practice that makes the theory work without us needing to understand every single moment and every aspect of reality but focus on living in it to the fullest.

I understood from this profound sentence that life is bigger than intellect.

The theory we looked at in this article gives us a hint of why that’s the case. I’ll write next time more about the ten worlds and the practice Daishoning constructed.

The quotes are from the Lotus Sutra translated by Burton Watson, ISBN 0–231–08160-X