Knowing Ourselves
Rev. Nichiko Niwano
President of Rissho Kosei-kai

Knowing That You Are Important

Happy are those people who gratefully accept their encounters with others and events that occur in their daily live as opportunities to cultivate their hearts and minds. If we can do that, then we can begin to know ourselves well, and react with gratitude not only to joy and pleasures but also to pain and sorrow, and even to those, with who we may be in disagreement.

Each of us is born, age, and dies as a manifestation of the Eternal Lives that is presented by the Dharma of Impermanence. Each and everyone of us is little more than a being experiencing a brief moment of life amidst the endlessly evolving changes and connections of Eternal Life, so it is impossible for us to fully grasp and understand everything in the world.

Shakyamuni is said to have realized that human beings need to spend their entire lives in learning. T'anluan (467-542), a ranking priest of the Chinese Pure Land Sect, tells us that "true knowledge has not knowing" (that is, the Buddha's wisdom can never be completely known because the world is unlimited.)

Knowing ourselves means awakening to our ignorance, to our inability to ever completely know the entire world. Through this awareness, we can crush our egos, recognize our debt of gratitude to the many invisible forces that support our existence and cause us to live, and find true happiness following the way of living in harmony with others and helping and supporting each other.

One's Self and the Self of Others

The Zen priest Dogen describes the other person as the "other self," in contrast to one's own self and thus indicating that the other is also one's self so that the two are really one and the same.

Dogen meant that while one's own existence is uniquely individual, at the same time it is a part of a whole. When we human beings who lead brief lives come into contract with the Eternal Life represented by the Dharma of Impermanence and have our eyes opened to the fact that we are caused to live, we can become one with others for the first time by transcending the framework of self and others.

When we become one with others, we can think with compassion of those we meet who have experienced disasters or accidents, or who suffer from misfortune or poverty, as if they are ourselves.

When we see someone else's shortcomings or mistakes, we have the chance to see our own shortcomings or mistakes, we have the chance to see our own shortcoming and reflect upon ourselves and the fact that we have the potential to make the same mistakes.

The birthday of Shakyamuni is observed on April 8. After his birth he said, "I alone am revered in the realm of the heavens and below the heavens," by which he did not mean that Shakyamuni is the only person worthy of respect but that every living being has an individual life that is precious.

When we realize that each of us is caused to live, then we can say that we truly know ourselves.

Kaicho Howa April 2005

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