Unfettered by Expectation by Tonen O’Connor
from Ryokan Interpreted
As we began working on creating a publication that would feature Okumura Rōshi’s lectures on the Japanese poet Ryōkan, it initially seemed that perhaps we would be a bit short of material. Since I had made plans for a trip to Japan for a purpose that didn’t work out, I suggested that perhaps it would be helpful to instead make an excursion to Ryōkan country, visiting the places that he knew some two hundred years ago. Photos could be taken and perhaps I could write something about my impressions.
Thus Hoko Karnegis, bearing her camera, and I spent three days in Niigata province in May of 2019, hosted by an extraordinarily kind and generous Japanese lover of Ryōkan’s poetry, Motoyasu Kakuyama, whose friend Hiroshi Takahashi’s little white car carried us to the seaside birthplace, to the path to Gogō-an on Mt. Kugami, to museums displaying Ryōkan’s calligraphy and to his grave marker.
Those three days of immersion in the Japanese countryside remain vivid in my memory, but upon my return I was assailed with misgivings about expectations that I would produce a worthy reflection on Ryōkan. I struggled with one approach after another and each one tended to just lie dully on the page. I began to think it would be impossible to transmit what I feel about that trip. Then in the middle of one night I sat up in bed with a line from one of Ryōkan’s poems ringing my head:
However, unless they express what’s in their own minds,
Their poems are good for nothing no matter how many they compose.
That was exactly what I should do. Jettisoning expectations, both my own as well as others’, I would write what was in my mind. And what was in my mind was immense gratitude. What I write here is to express that gratitude.
First of all is my deep gratitude for the poet who reminded us that we can slip loose from the bonds of expectation rather than allowing them to function as causes and conditions of our life. The understanding that all things have impermanent existence as the result of a coming together of causes and conditions, and that things in their turn act as causes and conditions, is at the heart of the Buddhist world view. That we originate dependent upon other things is one of the earliest teachings of the Buddha. In “Shorter Discourse to Sakuludayin,” Sutta 79 of the Majjhima Nikāya, the Buddha says:
I will teach you the Dhamma: When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases.1
When we examine people’s lives, we search for the nature of the formative causes and conditions that were instrumental in forming the person we have come to know.
However, in so doing we must exercise some care, for different causes and conditions have a different weight, so to speak, in a person’s life. We exist within a dynamic web of interaction and our life emerges from a vast panoply of differently weighted causes and conditions.
It is this complexity that suggests that we need to use caution, for sometimes in embracing the truth of dependent origination we can slip into an understanding too close to determinism. Feeling hemmed in by our circumstances, we forget that one of the most powerful determining factors in who we are is our own choices. We are not completely the captives of fate, though deeply affected by the social mores of our environment and the expectations that rise from that environment concerning who we should be.
In choosing how to respond to our situation, we weigh things like age, education, abilities, opportunities, barriers. Unfortunately, we sometimes also weigh what others expect us to do and the kind of person we are expected to be. We then include our own expectations for achieving the expectations of others and too often steer the course of our life along the familiar rails of these expectations.
Yet an expectation is a fabrication of the mind. It is not a cause or condition that has meaning outside of our response to it. When we speak of “what they expect me to do” we are speaking of societal pressure, ideas others have about us. When I graduated from high school, because my mother was a concert singer and I had enthusiastically played the violin in the school orchestra and the bass clarinet in the band, everyone expected that I would become a musician. Instead, I majored in art history, got a master’s in drama and went into the professional theatre. Their expectation was just an idea based on a partial understanding of what might influence the direction of my future.
Family expectations can be hard to resist. I also remember a high school friend who wanted to go to nursing school, but her rather traditional Sicilian-American father insisted that she stay home and help in the family grocery store. His expectation became an obligation she was forced to meet.
And then there are expectations we form about ourselves, ideas by which we define our success or failure. We watch anxiously to see if we are meeting these expectations. Is our salary high enough? Have we advanced far enough in our position?
Despite the fact that expectations do not have objective existence and are merely children of the human mind, they do have impact and very often are allowed to function as the causes and conditions of our lives. It is the rare person who offers us a model for refusing to be bound by expectations. The poet Ryōkan was such a person and for that I am deeply grateful.
The man whose poetry we love was born in the eighteenth century to a family that had for generations carried the double responsibility of nanushi (mayor) and Shinto priest to the community of Izumozaki, a port town on the Japan sea. He was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps as mayor and, as had been expected, even began a kind of apprenticeship to prepare for this role. But this is where the story takes a new turn. Both unsuited for the role and unhappy with the need to mediate the endless commercial squabbles, Ryōkan removed himself from the picture by receiving ordination at Kōshōji, shaving his head and donning robes, a practice he would continue for the rest of his life.
The bright child who loved to read and who had studied Chinese humanities at a private school had become a young man capable of the difficult choice of rejecting family expectations in order to take an utterly different path. As much as he may have run away from a life of commerce, he ran toward a life of studying the teachings of the Buddha.
This choice was fulfilled when he followed a well-respected teacher, Dainin Kokusen, to the monastery of Entsūji. Here, too, expectation lay in wait. Ryōkan studied and worked within the communal life of a monastery, expected to follow the usual path from there to heading a temple and a life imbedded within a system of temples controlled by the government in Edo (Tokyo). Temples served as institutions offering not only the teachings of the Buddha, but also registering families in a form of census, offering prayers for the welfare of the state etc. One could be quite successful in this role and it was what was expected when a young man entered the monastery.
But here again, Ryōkan slipped away from expectations in order to fulfill his personal vow to follow the Buddha Way. After his teacher’s death he disappeared from the record for nearly ten years. He was apparently wandering Japan, not “doing” anything. For me, it is at this time that he began to embody my favorite section of the Heart Sūtra.
The Heart Sūtra, chanted daily in temples and by practitioners in front of home altars all over Japan, offers the core teaching on emptiness. Because things are never independent of causes and conditions, never self-realized, they are empty of fixed, solitary being. As the first lines of the sutra are chanted this is a litany of “no self-existence” that can seem discouraging. But then the Heart Sūtra offers its great paean to freedom from expectation:
No suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path, no knowledge and no attainment.
With nothing to attain a bodhisattva relies on prajñā pāramitā
And thus the mind is without hindrance.
Without hindrance, no fears exist.
If there is no attainment, there can be no lack of attainment. Without success, there is no failure. Setting aside our expectation of attaining something, we are freed from our desperate striving toward accomplishment. We drop off the chains of expectation, no longer living with our eyes fixed on a goal, but clearly aware of the richness of the present moment.
This is what Ryōkan did. But what then? Was he just a footloose wanderer, deliberately avoiding engagement with the world? If expectations were gone, what filled that space in his life?
I think it was vow. Ryōkan lived his entire life as a fulfillment of a vow to follow the Buddha Way in its purest form.
To live by vow is to commit to following a path leading onward toward an unachievable goal, without expectation but with devotion. While expectation is an idea, vow is an action to which we commit without reference to achievement. We may never become Buddha but our vow to do so colors every action of our life.
Ryōkan’s life realized his vow in myriad ways. He deeply studied the teachings and was a lover of Dōgen, inspired by the lectures of his teacher, Dainin Kokusen. At a time when Dōgen’s writings were known primarily to a handful of scholars, Ryōkan studied them intimately and was inspired by Dōgen’s insistence that a monk lead a life of poverty and simplicity, avoiding chasing after fame and gain.
Above all, Ryōkan loved the Lotus Sūtra and it provided the model for the life he was to lead, a life of generosity, respect for all beings, good humor and patience. His vow was to live the life described in the Lotus Sūtra, in which the Buddha says:
I look upon all things,
Without exception, as equal.
I have no interest anywhere in favoring one over another.
Or in cherishing one and hating another.
I have no greed or attachment
And am always impartial.2
--
A child of the Buddha teaching the Dharma
Will always be gentle and patient
And compassionate toward all.
Never become negligent. 3
Living a life of simplicity and gentle good feeling, Ryōkan later in his life forged again a place for himself in his old community, but in a guise other than that of the early expectations for him. He begged for a living, respecting everyone he met, played with the local children with a heart full of joy and became representative of a life of kindness unblemished by expectations. His friendship asked nothing in return. Revered by his friends in the community, it is this image of him that comes down to us as a model for a life gently lived, a model of “the ball-playing monk” that touches hearts today even among those who know little of his poetry.
Ryōkan’s life of vow included an outpouring of the poetry that speaks straight from his heart, careless of formal structure, rejecting precious phrasing and influenced by the simplicity of the poets found in the collection of ancient verse, the Man’yōshū. Impelled to write, he refused to refer to himself as a professional poet, even after his verses began to be published. In one of his most quoted poems he says:
Who says that my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
Aware that my poems are not poems
We can talk poetry together.
To talk poetry, Ryōkan set aside precious phrasing and pretentious language and let what he saw, what he experienced and what he felt speak through him.
I find myself exhilarated by this picture of the gentle hermit scholar living outside of the usual expectations of society, but I must also remind myself that it is hard work to live outside of expectations. Ryōkan’s poems often speak of his deep loneliness. To gain his freedom, he had given up the usual supports of society—family, profession, communal work. Although he remained close to some of his family, particularly his younger brother, Yushi, and although he had friends who were poets or thinkers themselves and understood his work, he was essentially alone, even after his late life friendship with the nun-poet Teishin. Being lonely is hard. Maintaining one’s life of vow is hard. When we withdraw toward freedom we may also be withdrawing from the embrace of “fitting in.”
Ryōkan lived a life of hardship unimaginable to us with our central heating, our air-conditioning and our electronic devices. He lived alone in an open hut that could perhaps be closed with sliding storm shutters in the winter yet offered only space for the smallest of fires and little protection from a climate that knew wind, rain and eight or nine feet of snow in the winter. He walked miles to the village to beg rice for meager rations. It was a life too harsh to be romanticized and a life that speaks of a deep determination to pay the price for solitude to study the Buddha Way and write poems that expressed his understanding of the true Buddha Way and his response to the natural world around him.
The trip to Ryōkan country generated a second realization for which I feel gratitude. As we hiked along the path deep in the forest on our way to Gogō-an it felt somehow familiar. I was of course on a sort of pilgrimage to visit the sites of Ryōkan’s life, but there was something else going on here. It came to me that I had been here before. I had walked a similar path in my mind’s eye as I read Ryōkan’s poems. Not literally, of course, but in that mental space where I received the gift of his words and engaged with them, I had already met Ryōkan.
I gratefully recognized that I was learning the value of the gifts that artists offer to us. It is an opportunity to receive and to engage with their unique vision of the world. Indeed, for the artist’s gift to be realized, it must be engaged with. It must be appreciated. My mind must move toward that of the artist. The poem has been written, the painting painted, in the hope that it will be realized in the appreciation of the reader or the viewer. Otherwise it is just words on paper or paint on canvas.
The pleasure of making the mental effort to reach out and embrace the gift of another’s vision is not greatly valued in today’s world of electronic devices. Very little demands our thoughtful participation or response as we are swept along by a hurricane of electronic data. I don’t need to read someone’s meditation on life at Gogō-an when I can just pull up pix of it on the web. I don’t need to think much about the meaning of something, I just Google it, grab the fact that meshes with my idea and click on to something else.
We use our devices to create an alternate world of our choosing on Facebook, communicating in the fewest possible characters on Twitter, living in the virtual reality of our computer games. In so doing, we are losing our ability to respond to our actual present environment in all its living, breathing beauty. I was struck by the power of place in the forests, rice fields and sea shore of Ryōkan’s country. It enfolded us in a way that elicited a response from all of our senses. This response is aborted if I am staring at my mobile device as I walk blindly through a world of beauty.
I am not speaking here as a Luddite who rejects the usefulness of modern devices. After all, these words are being written on a laptop and I took my photos on an iPhone. But I am grateful that the trip to find Ryōkan reminded me that where I will really find him is in the words of his poetry where my mind can reach out to touch his mind. His life also reminds me of the value of a solitude within which we can be fully present to the reality of this life within which we are immersed.
I have come full circle here as I suggest that we move away from contemporary expectations of a life lived on social media and instead live within the expanded mental space offered us by the gifts of artists and by the gift of present reality.
I am grateful that in traveling to find Ryōkan I found new understanding.
from Ryokan Interpreted
As we began working on creating a publication that would feature Okumura Rōshi’s lectures on the Japanese poet Ryōkan, it initially seemed that perhaps we would be a bit short of material. Since I had made plans for a trip to Japan for a purpose that didn’t work out, I suggested that perhaps it would be helpful to instead make an excursion to Ryōkan country, visiting the places that he knew some two hundred years ago. Photos could be taken and perhaps I could write something about my impressions.
Thus Hoko Karnegis, bearing her camera, and I spent three days in Niigata province in May of 2019, hosted by an extraordinarily kind and generous Japanese lover of Ryōkan’s poetry, Motoyasu Kakuyama, whose friend Hiroshi Takahashi’s little white car carried us to the seaside birthplace, to the path to Gogō-an on Mt. Kugami, to museums displaying Ryōkan’s calligraphy and to his grave marker.
Those three days of immersion in the Japanese countryside remain vivid in my memory, but upon my return I was assailed with misgivings about expectations that I would produce a worthy reflection on Ryōkan. I struggled with one approach after another and each one tended to just lie dully on the page. I began to think it would be impossible to transmit what I feel about that trip. Then in the middle of one night I sat up in bed with a line from one of Ryōkan’s poems ringing my head:
However, unless they express what’s in their own minds,
Their poems are good for nothing no matter how many they compose.
That was exactly what I should do. Jettisoning expectations, both my own as well as others’, I would write what was in my mind. And what was in my mind was immense gratitude. What I write here is to express that gratitude.
First of all is my deep gratitude for the poet who reminded us that we can slip loose from the bonds of expectation rather than allowing them to function as causes and conditions of our life. The understanding that all things have impermanent existence as the result of a coming together of causes and conditions, and that things in their turn act as causes and conditions, is at the heart of the Buddhist world view. That we originate dependent upon other things is one of the earliest teachings of the Buddha. In “Shorter Discourse to Sakuludayin,” Sutta 79 of the Majjhima Nikāya, the Buddha says:
I will teach you the Dhamma: When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases.1
When we examine people’s lives, we search for the nature of the formative causes and conditions that were instrumental in forming the person we have come to know.
However, in so doing we must exercise some care, for different causes and conditions have a different weight, so to speak, in a person’s life. We exist within a dynamic web of interaction and our life emerges from a vast panoply of differently weighted causes and conditions.
It is this complexity that suggests that we need to use caution, for sometimes in embracing the truth of dependent origination we can slip into an understanding too close to determinism. Feeling hemmed in by our circumstances, we forget that one of the most powerful determining factors in who we are is our own choices. We are not completely the captives of fate, though deeply affected by the social mores of our environment and the expectations that rise from that environment concerning who we should be.
In choosing how to respond to our situation, we weigh things like age, education, abilities, opportunities, barriers. Unfortunately, we sometimes also weigh what others expect us to do and the kind of person we are expected to be. We then include our own expectations for achieving the expectations of others and too often steer the course of our life along the familiar rails of these expectations.
Yet an expectation is a fabrication of the mind. It is not a cause or condition that has meaning outside of our response to it. When we speak of “what they expect me to do” we are speaking of societal pressure, ideas others have about us. When I graduated from high school, because my mother was a concert singer and I had enthusiastically played the violin in the school orchestra and the bass clarinet in the band, everyone expected that I would become a musician. Instead, I majored in art history, got a master’s in drama and went into the professional theatre. Their expectation was just an idea based on a partial understanding of what might influence the direction of my future.
Family expectations can be hard to resist. I also remember a high school friend who wanted to go to nursing school, but her rather traditional Sicilian-American father insisted that she stay home and help in the family grocery store. His expectation became an obligation she was forced to meet.
And then there are expectations we form about ourselves, ideas by which we define our success or failure. We watch anxiously to see if we are meeting these expectations. Is our salary high enough? Have we advanced far enough in our position?
Despite the fact that expectations do not have objective existence and are merely children of the human mind, they do have impact and very often are allowed to function as the causes and conditions of our lives. It is the rare person who offers us a model for refusing to be bound by expectations. The poet Ryōkan was such a person and for that I am deeply grateful.
The man whose poetry we love was born in the eighteenth century to a family that had for generations carried the double responsibility of nanushi (mayor) and Shinto priest to the community of Izumozaki, a port town on the Japan sea. He was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps as mayor and, as had been expected, even began a kind of apprenticeship to prepare for this role. But this is where the story takes a new turn. Both unsuited for the role and unhappy with the need to mediate the endless commercial squabbles, Ryōkan removed himself from the picture by receiving ordination at Kōshōji, shaving his head and donning robes, a practice he would continue for the rest of his life.
The bright child who loved to read and who had studied Chinese humanities at a private school had become a young man capable of the difficult choice of rejecting family expectations in order to take an utterly different path. As much as he may have run away from a life of commerce, he ran toward a life of studying the teachings of the Buddha.
This choice was fulfilled when he followed a well-respected teacher, Dainin Kokusen, to the monastery of Entsūji. Here, too, expectation lay in wait. Ryōkan studied and worked within the communal life of a monastery, expected to follow the usual path from there to heading a temple and a life imbedded within a system of temples controlled by the government in Edo (Tokyo). Temples served as institutions offering not only the teachings of the Buddha, but also registering families in a form of census, offering prayers for the welfare of the state etc. One could be quite successful in this role and it was what was expected when a young man entered the monastery.
But here again, Ryōkan slipped away from expectations in order to fulfill his personal vow to follow the Buddha Way. After his teacher’s death he disappeared from the record for nearly ten years. He was apparently wandering Japan, not “doing” anything. For me, it is at this time that he began to embody my favorite section of the Heart Sūtra.
The Heart Sūtra, chanted daily in temples and by practitioners in front of home altars all over Japan, offers the core teaching on emptiness. Because things are never independent of causes and conditions, never self-realized, they are empty of fixed, solitary being. As the first lines of the sutra are chanted this is a litany of “no self-existence” that can seem discouraging. But then the Heart Sūtra offers its great paean to freedom from expectation:
No suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path, no knowledge and no attainment.
With nothing to attain a bodhisattva relies on prajñā pāramitā
And thus the mind is without hindrance.
Without hindrance, no fears exist.
If there is no attainment, there can be no lack of attainment. Without success, there is no failure. Setting aside our expectation of attaining something, we are freed from our desperate striving toward accomplishment. We drop off the chains of expectation, no longer living with our eyes fixed on a goal, but clearly aware of the richness of the present moment.
This is what Ryōkan did. But what then? Was he just a footloose wanderer, deliberately avoiding engagement with the world? If expectations were gone, what filled that space in his life?
I think it was vow. Ryōkan lived his entire life as a fulfillment of a vow to follow the Buddha Way in its purest form.
To live by vow is to commit to following a path leading onward toward an unachievable goal, without expectation but with devotion. While expectation is an idea, vow is an action to which we commit without reference to achievement. We may never become Buddha but our vow to do so colors every action of our life.
Ryōkan’s life realized his vow in myriad ways. He deeply studied the teachings and was a lover of Dōgen, inspired by the lectures of his teacher, Dainin Kokusen. At a time when Dōgen’s writings were known primarily to a handful of scholars, Ryōkan studied them intimately and was inspired by Dōgen’s insistence that a monk lead a life of poverty and simplicity, avoiding chasing after fame and gain.
Above all, Ryōkan loved the Lotus Sūtra and it provided the model for the life he was to lead, a life of generosity, respect for all beings, good humor and patience. His vow was to live the life described in the Lotus Sūtra, in which the Buddha says:
I look upon all things,
Without exception, as equal.
I have no interest anywhere in favoring one over another.
Or in cherishing one and hating another.
I have no greed or attachment
And am always impartial.2
--
A child of the Buddha teaching the Dharma
Will always be gentle and patient
And compassionate toward all.
Never become negligent. 3
Living a life of simplicity and gentle good feeling, Ryōkan later in his life forged again a place for himself in his old community, but in a guise other than that of the early expectations for him. He begged for a living, respecting everyone he met, played with the local children with a heart full of joy and became representative of a life of kindness unblemished by expectations. His friendship asked nothing in return. Revered by his friends in the community, it is this image of him that comes down to us as a model for a life gently lived, a model of “the ball-playing monk” that touches hearts today even among those who know little of his poetry.
Ryōkan’s life of vow included an outpouring of the poetry that speaks straight from his heart, careless of formal structure, rejecting precious phrasing and influenced by the simplicity of the poets found in the collection of ancient verse, the Man’yōshū. Impelled to write, he refused to refer to himself as a professional poet, even after his verses began to be published. In one of his most quoted poems he says:
Who says that my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
Aware that my poems are not poems
We can talk poetry together.
To talk poetry, Ryōkan set aside precious phrasing and pretentious language and let what he saw, what he experienced and what he felt speak through him.
I find myself exhilarated by this picture of the gentle hermit scholar living outside of the usual expectations of society, but I must also remind myself that it is hard work to live outside of expectations. Ryōkan’s poems often speak of his deep loneliness. To gain his freedom, he had given up the usual supports of society—family, profession, communal work. Although he remained close to some of his family, particularly his younger brother, Yushi, and although he had friends who were poets or thinkers themselves and understood his work, he was essentially alone, even after his late life friendship with the nun-poet Teishin. Being lonely is hard. Maintaining one’s life of vow is hard. When we withdraw toward freedom we may also be withdrawing from the embrace of “fitting in.”
Ryōkan lived a life of hardship unimaginable to us with our central heating, our air-conditioning and our electronic devices. He lived alone in an open hut that could perhaps be closed with sliding storm shutters in the winter yet offered only space for the smallest of fires and little protection from a climate that knew wind, rain and eight or nine feet of snow in the winter. He walked miles to the village to beg rice for meager rations. It was a life too harsh to be romanticized and a life that speaks of a deep determination to pay the price for solitude to study the Buddha Way and write poems that expressed his understanding of the true Buddha Way and his response to the natural world around him.
The trip to Ryōkan country generated a second realization for which I feel gratitude. As we hiked along the path deep in the forest on our way to Gogō-an it felt somehow familiar. I was of course on a sort of pilgrimage to visit the sites of Ryōkan’s life, but there was something else going on here. It came to me that I had been here before. I had walked a similar path in my mind’s eye as I read Ryōkan’s poems. Not literally, of course, but in that mental space where I received the gift of his words and engaged with them, I had already met Ryōkan.
I gratefully recognized that I was learning the value of the gifts that artists offer to us. It is an opportunity to receive and to engage with their unique vision of the world. Indeed, for the artist’s gift to be realized, it must be engaged with. It must be appreciated. My mind must move toward that of the artist. The poem has been written, the painting painted, in the hope that it will be realized in the appreciation of the reader or the viewer. Otherwise it is just words on paper or paint on canvas.
The pleasure of making the mental effort to reach out and embrace the gift of another’s vision is not greatly valued in today’s world of electronic devices. Very little demands our thoughtful participation or response as we are swept along by a hurricane of electronic data. I don’t need to read someone’s meditation on life at Gogō-an when I can just pull up pix of it on the web. I don’t need to think much about the meaning of something, I just Google it, grab the fact that meshes with my idea and click on to something else.
We use our devices to create an alternate world of our choosing on Facebook, communicating in the fewest possible characters on Twitter, living in the virtual reality of our computer games. In so doing, we are losing our ability to respond to our actual present environment in all its living, breathing beauty. I was struck by the power of place in the forests, rice fields and sea shore of Ryōkan’s country. It enfolded us in a way that elicited a response from all of our senses. This response is aborted if I am staring at my mobile device as I walk blindly through a world of beauty.
I am not speaking here as a Luddite who rejects the usefulness of modern devices. After all, these words are being written on a laptop and I took my photos on an iPhone. But I am grateful that the trip to find Ryōkan reminded me that where I will really find him is in the words of his poetry where my mind can reach out to touch his mind. His life also reminds me of the value of a solitude within which we can be fully present to the reality of this life within which we are immersed.
I have come full circle here as I suggest that we move away from contemporary expectations of a life lived on social media and instead live within the expanded mental space offered us by the gifts of artists and by the gift of present reality.
I am grateful that in traveling to find Ryōkan I found new understanding.
1 Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A [New] Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2009), p. 655.
2 Gene Reeves, trans., The Lotus Sūtra: A Contemporary Translation of a Buddhist Classic (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2008), p. 164.
3 Reeves, The Lotus Sūtra, p. 270.
2 Gene Reeves, trans., The Lotus Sūtra: A Contemporary Translation of a Buddhist Classic (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2008), p. 164.
3 Reeves, The Lotus Sūtra, p. 270.
