The Power to Live

by Nichiko Niwano

When our stomachs are empty, food always seems more appetizing and especially delicious, and we can digest it thoroughly. When our bodies feel tired from the day's activities, nothing is so good as a sound night's sleep, which leads to a revival of our energy. While these are the natural functions of the life we have been given and we take them for granted, at the same time we have to recognize something more important about our daily lives.

The Zen priest Dogen said, "This life and death of ours is actually the venerable life of the Buddha." The phrase "this life and death" refers to the lives of delusion that we lead, and here Dogen teaches us directly that our lives are a manifestation of the venerable life of the Buddha. In other words, we are granted life by the life of the Buddha, the great life-force, so we have already been given the great power to live.

Incidentally, because we delude ourselves that we are living under our own power, it is usually the case that we become conceited or else demean ourselves and lose confidence.

With the understanding that we are granted life by the life of the Buddha, we cannot help but feel moved and joyful at each of the teachings, such as "Sentient beings and the Buddha are not two." We are then overwhelmed by the desire to live each day thankful for the life we have been given and have been allowed to live.

It is a fact that we human beings have many wishes and desires, such as wanting to lead happy lives and wanting to be accepted by others. These, too, are manifestations of the life of the Buddha: precisely because we have desires and delusions, we also wish to transcend them and this wish awakens in us the aspiration to buddhahood. In this sense, even delusions are a part of the life of the Buddha, since they can be said to have the mysterious power to lead us to enlightenment.

Placing Ourselves in the Realm of Death

Through the teaching of impermanence that "all things are always changing" we know that our lifetimes are limited and become aware of the fact that in this world, no one lives forever. Religion teaches us how to wisely acknowledge the certainty of death, so that when we face the issue of death squarely, we are also recognizing that our own deaths are inevitable.

A saying attributed to the late Edo-period lord of the Nagaoka domain, Kawai Tsugunosuke (1827-68), goes: "Human beings are creatures who end up in coffins, on which the lids are closed and nailed shut, and then are buried in the ground--and unless they keep that always in mind, their lives are utterly wasted."

We could say that the real meaning of Kawai's words is that we should place ourselves in the realm of death, do away with ego, savor the mystery and gratitude of being granted life in the here and now, and above all else correct our way of living.

In November we celebrate the anniversary of the founder's birth. Let us learn from the lifetime he spent in walking the way of disseminating the Dharma. We should not let our focus shift to the superficial details on all sides of us and always keep our eyes fixed on the Buddha as the source of life, exercising the power to live that we have been given and working to achieve lives that demonstrate a genuine reason for existence.