Whatever comes to mind. Sometimes a story I read, sometimes something that came to me while holding my mala beads.
Someone asked the Buddha: How can a single drop of water never dry up? Put it in the ocean, he said. Just one sentence. But that afternoon, watching the water stain vanish from my table, I felt there was more to it than that.
This morning, while wiping my mala beads, a phrase suddenly surfaced in my mind. "Who tied you up?" Four words. Strange to say, but they floated up fr
Behind that chubby, big-bellied, grinning Buddha at the temple entrance, there was a real person — a monk who carried a cloth bag and spent his life smiling. This is his story.
In the Lotus Sutra, there was a monk with no special powers who bowed to everyone he met, saying "I would never look down on you. You will all become Buddhas." Mocked and beaten, he never stopped. This story made me sit with something uncomfortable — how often I look down on people without even noticing.
I was reading the Lotus Sutra recently and came across the Parable of the Phantom City. I put the book down and sat by the window for a long time. Not because the story was so dramatic, but because I suddenly felt it was about me.
I read a story from the Lotus Sutra today, and after I finished, I sat there for a long while.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son in the Lotus Sutra tells of a lost child who wandered for fifty years, not knowing his father had been waiting all along. Reading this story, I realized that poor son was me.
The most famous parable from the Lotus Sutra—a burning mansion, children oblivious to danger, and a father who uses skillful means to save them. This 2,500-year-old story reveals the nature of our delusion in the Three Realms and the path toward liberation.