![]() ![]() The individual characters that make up Myoho-renge-kyo express key characteristics of this law. At the same time, it is a vow to help others reveal this law in their own lives and achieve happiness. It is a pledge to oneself to never yield to difficulties and to win over one’s suffering. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is thus a vow, an expression of determination, to embrace and manifest our Buddha nature. Nam comes from the Sanskrit namas, meaning to devote or dedicate oneself. Nichiren designated the title of the sutra as the name of the law and established the practice of reciting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo as a practical way for all people to focus their hearts and minds upon this law and manifest its transformative power in reality. Awakening to the law of life himself, Nichiren was able to discern that this fundamental law is contained within Shakyamuni’s Lotus Sutra and that it is encapsulated and concisely expressed in the sutra’s title-Myoho-renge-kyo. Over a thousand years after Shakyamuni, amidst the turbulence of 13th-century Japan, Nichiren similarly began a quest to recover the essence of Buddhism for the sake of the suffering masses. In Japanese, “Lotus Sutra” is rendered as Myoho-renge-kyo. The culmination of these teachings is the Lotus Sutra. The record of Shakyamuni’s teachings to awaken others was captured for posterity in numerous Buddhist sutras. It is because of this that he is known as Buddha, or “Awakened One.” Discovering that the capacity to transform suffering was innate within his own life, he saw too that it is innate within all beings. Shakyamuni, first awoke to this law out of a compassionate yearning to find the means to enable all people to be free of the inevitable pains of life. ![]() Nichiren, the 13th-century Buddhist monk upon whose teachings the Soka Gakkai is based, awakened to this law, or principle, and named it “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.” Through the Buddhist practice he developed, he provided a way for all people to activate it within their own lives and experience the joy that comes from being able to liberate oneself from suffering at the most fundamental level. Our lives possess this power because they are inseparable from the fundamental law that underlies the workings of all life and the universe. The essence of Buddhism is the conviction that we have within us at each moment the ability to overcome any problem or difficulty that we may encounter in life a capacity to transform any suffering. ![]()
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