The Light Is Always Here

What the Lotus Sutra assures us about Practice, Presence, and the Relief of Suffering

People think mental wellness is a given, and it costs them more than they realize. Something you either have, or you don't. Some lucky people are born calm and resilient, and the rest of us are stuck with whatever wiring we got. My own wiring tends to get hot and fritzy with anxiety under stress. This way of thinking has created the widespread stigma about mental illness that causes so many to avoid the very things that would make them feel better, for fear of labeling themselves ill.

Mental wellness is not a trait. It is cultivated, the same way physical wellness is cultivated. It’s a given these days that to be physically healthy you need to eat, sleep, move, see the doctor. We all pretty much agree that physical health requires effort. Our minds are no different. Mindfulness, meditation, chanting, contemplative reading, sitting quietly with the breath are real, powerful and effective methods to stay balanced and at ease when everything around us is pushing on us. They aren’t just for people “who need them.”

You can read everything ever written about swimming and still drown. At some point you have to get in the water. I remember my high school soccer coach telling us that innate talent was a myth and that mastery came down to touches on the ball. You just don’t get good at anything without doing it, over and over again.

My previous essays in this series attempted to explain what consciousness and sentience are from a Buddhist point of view. But being able to read a map is not the same as actually navigating the road. A regular mindfulness practice is the road trip. A regular practice gives us the mental hygiene skills that relieve suffering in the here and now, no matter what situation you find yourself in.

I wanted to write about what practice actually does, why it works, and why it is available to you in this moment regardless of where you are starting from. The Lotus Sutra's Chapter Sixteen offers us comfort and assurance that these practices work.

Imagine an oil lamp. The flame burns inside a glass chimney which becomes smudged with years of accumulated soot. The light is still there, burning as brightly as ever. Yet, less of the light reaches the room because the filter between them has become occluded.

The Lotus Sutra’s Chapter Sixteen offers us a profoundly moving verse that explains the persistent, unborn and undying quality of this light (buddhahood):

Both I am extinguished and that I am not.

The lamp and light are not separate things. The lamp is a whole system providing light in this specific configuration of conditions. The only thing distorting the illumination is a failure to clean the soot. We tend to blame the dim light when what wants attention is the glass. This is what practice is doing. Not seeking to acquire a newer, brighter lamp. Not searching for light in other places. Cleaning the chimney. Loosening the accumulated grime. Allowing what is already present to fully function.

You can feel the effects of mental hygiene - cleaning the soot - in your own life. A moment of recognition when you stepped out of a difficult conversation and your shoulders dropped half an inch all on their own. The morning you sat quietly and noticed, without quite knowing how, that some pressure you had been carrying for a week was no longer there. Those moments are not flukes. They are the glass chimney clearing. The light has not changed. You’ve just been cleaning your lamp’s glass.

That is what practice develops, and these small moments of clarity and calm happen more often, last a little longer, and stop feeling random.

The Lotus Sutra offers us a useful teaching called the mutual possession of the ten realms (Jikkai Gogu). The ten realms are not actually cosmological places; they are states of being that we all experience. The six lower states of hell, hunger, animality, anger, humanity, heaven, and the four wisdom states of learning, absorption, bodhisattva and buddhahood. Some have considered them as a hierarchy you climb. The mutual possession tells us something much more useful: every world contains every other world, fully, with nothing left out.

Why this is so important and reassuring to us is that the hell realm contains buddhahood. Right now, even in our most contracted state of suffering, buddhahood is present. Even with the lamp’s near total occlusion of soot, the light is present burning brightly. Not as a distant promise. Not as something you might eventually access if you suffer well enough. Already. Here. Now.

Consider this lovely verse from Chapter Sixteen:

If there are living beings in other lands who are reverent and sincere in their faith, then among them as well I will teach the unexcelled Dharma.

Traditional readings of the sutra consider this cosmology. Other lands, even other planets in the far-flung universe. Other beings being taught elsewhere. I’ve never related to what I considered, frankly, a science fiction reading. Instead, I like to read these verses as the profound teaching of the mutual possession of the ten realms. These other lands are the realms we experience in our daily lives. Buddhahood is present (teaching) in every realm, in every moment. Buddhahood is there in your hell realm. The teaching has not been withheld from any realm, it is not contingent on anything else. When we are sincere and open ourselves – clean the glass – the light shines through.

A few verses later, the sutra describes who can perceive this and who cannot:

Those errant living beings, because of their bad karma, never hear of the names of the Three Treasures throughout immeasurable kalpas. But those who perform virtuous deeds and are gentle and upright of nature will all see me here, teaching the Dharma.

These verses describe the consequences of old habit patterns (bad karma) as being unable to hear. The good medicine is not mastery of doctrine or philosophy. It is being gentle and upright, an orientation of sincere, heartfelt engagement with the practice.

That is the door. Not achievement. Orientation.

Hold this with another verse from the same chapter:

Such is the power of my wisdom

That its light shines infinitely.

My life span is of countless kalpas,

Attained through long cultivation of practice.

This might at first appear to be a contradiction. The light shines infinitely. And the lifespan attained through long cultivation of practice. If the light was always there, what is practice cultivating? It isn’t the light, which has no beginning and no end. It takes practice for the light to shine through clearly.

Each sitting is a soft cloth’s pass over the smudged glass. Each return to breath and sound when the mind has wandered is the practice. The light does not get brighter as you do this; you begin to have confidence and trust that the light will reach the room as long as the glass is clean.

So, why does any of this matter? It matters in so many ways, personally, familiarly, and societally. It’s about being well, happy, at ease and peaceful. When we allow our lamps to become coated so thoroughly in soot that we can’t see things as they are and are driven by greed, hatred and ignorance we all suffer. Living a good life takes effort. Both physically and mentally. And life isn’t coin-operated. It isn’t transactional. Life is a continuous cycle of things happening, much of which is outside of any of our control. Our only control is how we register what is happening and how we choose to respond to it. Through fear — the occluded, soot-covered lamp. Or through love — the pure, clean light.

The Buddha gave many teachings over forty-five years, but two stand at opposite ends of the arc and frame everything in between. His first sermon, given shortly after his awakening, was the Four Noble Truths. Suffering is real. Suffering has a cause. Suffering can end. There is a path. The Buddha called himself the great physician, and this is the diagnosis: he names the illness, identifies the cause, gives us the prognosis that healing is possible, and prescribes the treatment.

The Lotus Sutra is the other bookend. Considered the highest and most complete teaching, it is where the Buddha shows what the medicine actually does. Chapter Sixteen contains the parable of the skilled physician whose children have poisoned themselves and refuse the cure he has prepared. He leaves and sends word that he has died. Only then, shaken by loss, do the children finally take the medicine. They recover. The medicine had been available the entire time. What was missing was their willingness to take it.

The two teachings are not in tension. The Four Noble Truths tell us that the illness has a cure. The Lotus Sutra tells us the cure has been in our hands the whole time, waiting for us to be ready to take it. The Buddha as physician at the beginning, the Buddha as physician at the end, with everything else in between.

Buddhism considers suffering (dukkha) as a specific diagnosis of illness. It is not a punishment, nor the cosmic price of being alive. Many misunderstand the idea that “life is suffering.” That isn’t it at all. It means suffering happens when we misunderstand how life actually works. By thinking the lamp is broken when the light can’t shine through the accumulated crust of soot. And our insistence on chasing after all manner of bright shiny things. That is where the pain of suffering lives, in the compulsive grasping and fighting. The relief is not pushing any of this away. It is simply in the everyday act of practice. In the loosening, however partial, however temporary.

Every time you sit and your shoulders drop, that is real. Every time you chant and the static in your head quiets for half a verse, that is real. Every time you notice the contracted state without identifying with it quite as completely as you did a minute ago, that is real. These moments are not previews of something better coming. They are the relief itself, partially recognized.

At the very end of his life, as he lay dying among his disciples, the Buddha gave one final teaching. All conditioned things are impermanent. Strive on with diligence. The first sermon named the illness. The highest teaching showed the medicine had always been in our hands. The last breath confirmed that the work is never finished, and that this is not a failure but the nature of the path. Strive on.

These verses from the Lotus Sutra assure us that the pure land is not a destination after death. It is what our lives have been all along, the miracle we can experience when the lamp is clean enough for the light to shine through.

Our mental hygiene practice isn’t another self-improvement project. It is not something we do well or badly, succeed at or fail at. It is how we tend to our body and mind, because this is where we live, and we deserve to be treated with love and kindness.

Chanting the Daimoku is a touch on the ball. Sitting with our breath is getting in the water. Wherever you are in the ten worlds, the light is there. Your buddhahood is already in you however you feel, ready and waiting to give you strength, courage, solace.

The pure land is never destroyed. The fires of life burn, you don’t have to add to them. Your inner land is tranquil and calm. Not somewhere else. Here.

This morning. This breath. Clean your lamp every day.