Unborn by Bankei

Author:Bankei
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The twenty-sixth day of the eighth month—the morning sermon

All of the people here want to become Buddhas. That’s what brought you to this hall so early in the morning. It’s a good thing you have come, because if you fail to become Buddhas now, you won’t have another chance for thousands upon thousands of ages. You were born into the human world for one reason—so you could become Buddhas. If you miss this chance and fall into hell, much greater suffering awaits you, as you transmigrate endlessly, being born and dying over and over again, through many lives, in many different worlds. Now, no one wants that to happen to them, so you’d better be sure you understand what I say very, very well.

You may have encountered men who, in their ill-used worldly wisdom, say that people are taught that they will be born into heaven or hell after they die simply to intimidate them. Anyone who would say something so thoughtless obviously hasn’t a shred of understanding about what the real Buddha Way is like. Now, if someone did come along whose teaching somehow compared with Shakamuni’s, and he denied the existence of hell and paradise, we might give some weight to what he said. But from the mouth of a man whose wisdom doesn’t extend beyond the tip of his glib tongue, how can such words help being woefully mistaken?

In the first place, Shakamuni possessed all six supernatural powers. He could employ skillful means at will.54 He knew all about both hell and paradise without having to move from where he sat. He traveled to many places to preach his Dharma. It spread over India, passed into China, and from there came to Japan. We now find it recorded in a great many sutras. Along comes a man who hasn’t the faintest notion about any of this to declare that the Buddhas, their teaching, the Buddhist Dharma itself, none of it exists. He’s like a summer insect that never lives to see the winter and imagines that the world is always hot.

Shakamuni is a Buddha whose name has been known to all the generations that came after him—in China, India, and Japan. Would such a man have preached that hell and paradise exist if they didn’t? What would have been gained by that? Now, if the worldly-wise want to believe that paradise and hell don’t exist, that’s their business. The least they can do is keep their ideas to themselves. It’s intolerable to have them arrogantly spreading such groundless nonsense to others.

Now, I’m sure you’ve all seen it happen—when everyone praises a person who has some exceptional skill in an art or trade, there will always be some self-important fellow who will try to deny the general opinion and belittle that person’s skill. What words can describe such petty meanness? If someone they themselves take a fancy to has some trifling talent not even worth mentioning, these same fellows will invariably praise him to the skies. There are a great many such people around.

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