In the Gosho ‘Reply to the Lay Priest Soya’, Nichiren Daishonin encourages the recipient to ‘...become the master of one’s mind rather than let one’s mind master oneself.’ (WND, 390) Barbara Cahill looks at what this means.

Self mastery is big business these days. It seems that everyone wants to know how to master themselves. Whether the goal is a happier relationship, better health, higher earnings, or improved self-esteem, a visit to any bookshop will confirm that self-mastery is essential, and there is no shortage of books, cassettes, or websites that are prepared to teach us how to achieve it, often in record time. But what does it really mean to achieve self-mastery?

Certainly many people feel they are at the mercy of thoughts and emotions that they are powerless to control. When something ‘bad’ happens to us or ‘goes wrong’ we may react always in the same way, knowing we may not be acting in the best way, but feeling helpless to know what else we should do. How then can we move from just reacting to events in our lives to being able to influence them, from being at the mercy of our emotions to mastering them?

The answer, according to Nichiren Daishonin, lies in our ability to become the master of our minds. But the word for ‘mind’ in Japanese implies one’s whole life rather than just the brainpower or mind that we think of as being in our head. Therefore the phrase ‘become the master of your mind’ really means ‘become the master of your life’.

Many times we find that we have made the wrong decisions or gone in a fruitless direction. Being indecisive or being unable to make a wise decision causes us incredible anxiety. None of us can know the future, yet we try in many desperate ways to know it. We do this even after beginning our practice of Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism. We try to know the future as if the future is out of our hands and already decided for us. However nothing could be further from the truth.

Once we realise that we ourselves decide, and have always decided, the future for ourselves, we can begin through our strong Buddhist practice, to guide the future of our own lives. But before we are able to do this we need to realise that our life is there to be guided and moulded by us.

The past shapes our lives. But the objective of our Buddhist practice is that we get out from under the direction that the past gives us and we begin to decide a much wiser and more fulfilling life for ourselves. We come to understand that we alone can decide our future and we begin to see our life as something that we are in charge of, we begin to master our life. This is the way President Ikeda describes this mastery:

“The Kegon Sutra says, ‘The heart is like a skilled painter.’ Like a great painter the heart freely creates representations of all things. One’s heart is the designer, the painter, the sculptor and the architect of his or her being... It is our spirit, our life-moment that counts. Our spirit is our hopes, our prayers. And it can also be identified with the subconscious.
‘What kind of future do I envisage?’ we may ask ourselves. ‘What kind of self am I trying to develop? What do I want to accomplish in my life?’ We should paint this vision of our lives in our hearts as specifically as possible. This ‘painting’ becomes the design for our future. The power of the heart enables us to actually execute a wonderful masterpiece in accordance with that design”.(Daisaku Ikeda, Learning from the Gosho: The Eternal Teachings of Nichiren Daishonin [SGI-USA, 1997}, pp 128-9)

This idea of seeing ourselves as ‘skilled painters’ is quite different from the way most of us have been brought up. So many aspects of our past, even the past of our parents and grand parents, impinge on the way we see ourselves and the way we think we have to live. In this way the past is master of our life until such time as we decide to be masters ourselves.
Perhaps we have made unwise decisions in the past, or perhaps, without deciding anything, we have just drifted in a direction that turns out to be unfortunate. This need not continue, however, once we begin to see our lives as being responsive to our daimoku and the direction we set for ourselves.

By urging ourselves to trust the Gohonzon (this means trusting our Buddhahood) especially in the most difficult of circumstances, where our rational mind just does not seem capable of finding a clear direction, we are able to enter the spiritual realm of our life. This realm is a vast realm of our own wisdom. It is not limited by our fear or our habitual ways of reacting with cynicism or anger or doubt or self-criticism or many more negative reactions. Learning to trust the Gohonzon is one very effective way of opening our lives to the Buddhahood which permeates every living cell in the universe. We cannot really think our way into Buddhahood. It comes through learning to trust.

Also in the Gosho ‘Letter to Gijo-bo’ Nichiren Daishonin gives us another way to find the wisdom of our Buddhahood. He says: The verse section of the chapter states, ‘...singlemindedly desiring to see the Buddha, not hesitating even if it costs them their lives.’ As a result of this passage I have revealed the Buddhahood in my own life.’ (WND, 389)

The phrase that Nichiren Daishonin uses from the Lotus Sutra ‘single-mindedly desiring to see the Buddha, not hesitating even if it costs them their lives’, — this is the teaching that allowed Nichiren Daishonin to reveal his own Buddhahood. Here Nichiren Daishonin describes his own search to actualise his Buddhahood. His ‘single-minded desire’ is the key to his success. When we set a personal goal for ourselves, especially when we do this with the intensity and commitment which we find in Nichiren Daishonin’s statement, this can be the beginning of our own self-mastery.

We find another excellent example of ‘single-mindedly desiring to see the Buddha’ when we look at second Soka Gakkai president Josei Toda’s experience while he was imprisoned during the Second World War. He came to a passage in his reading of the Lotus Sutra which he could not understand. It was a description of ‘his body neither existing nor not existing’ using thirty-four negations. Mr Toda determined that he would not leave this passage until he understood it. He challenged himself to chant plentiful daimoku until he could grasp the meaning. This took him more than two months. He finally realised that the passage was describing Buddhahood and that Buddhahood is life itself. This realisation was Mr Toda’s enlightenment and together with his awakening to his mission to spread Buddhism in this age, became not only the backbone for his own life but it enabled him to establish the Soka Gakkai organisation which nourishes us today. As President Ikeda said about this profound understanding, ‘That was the moment when Buddhism was revived in the twentieth century.’ (Conversations and Lectures on the Lotus Sutra, Volume One, (SGI-UK, 1995) p. 28)

Mr Toda gave his life to understanding what Buddhahood could be. That dedication is what enabled him to transform his life. He became the master of his life. Even though he was in prison and he was quite weak physically, his transformed life was not limited by those constraints. This is how our lives can be. The circumstances we find ourselves in, the past that can be so influential, none of this need direct our lives once we have mastered our life. The seemingly impossible goals that we set for ourselves cannot be any more daunting than Mr Toda’s accomplishment of establishing a strong, flourishing organisation of 750,000 families which could survive and thrive after his death. Conceiving of this and the accomplishment of it was possible only because he had become the master of his mind.
It is also true to say that Mr Toda was finally able to maintain self-mastery only because he was determined to share his enlightenment with others. This ‘sharing’ was not a calm, easy-going thing. He often had to struggle against illness and physical weakness. But he nevertheless spared no effort to reach the thousands of people who wanted to practise Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism.

Becoming the master of your life is vital if you want to move beyond the confines of narrow self-interest that plague most of us. At the same time, by setting a goal which is beyond narrow self-interest and then striving to accomplish it, we can gain self-mastery. It was Mr Toda’s determination to understand the Lotus Sutra that led to his enlightenment. He could have sat in his prison cell bemoaning his fate, feeling sorry for himself. But none of this would have led him to reveal his highest state.

We need not think that Mr Toda was a special person or that his enlightenment was an extraordinary event that we ourselves could never experience. Each of us comes to our own awakening in the way most suited to our own life. But the effort and commitment in Toda’s life and in Nichiren Daishonin’s life, described earlier, is the same effort and commitment that grows within our own lives through Buddhist practice and that we are required to make in order to master our lives.

What is the effect of becoming the master of your own life? This description by Mr Toda will help us understand:

It is only natural that we should want to make a lot of money, live in a fine house and be healthy. And it is a true religion that enables us to realise these wishes... The difference is that in our case, even though we may desire the same things, in the future we will be able to attain a state of life of absolute happiness... Absolute happiness is a state such that whatever your situation, you feel an immense sense of worth and satisfaction; and wherever you are, to be alive is itself a joy… even when we encounter situations that make us angry, we become angry joyfully, when we establish such a state of life, our life is one of boundless joy.’ (UK Express, June 1998, p.31)

The prerequisite to the great, fulfilled and happy life that we yearn for is that we learn to master our lives. There must be a dedication to this undertaking and a willingness to give up our tiny, selfish, ego-centred life for the great life of Buddhahood. Become the skilled painter, or architect or sculptor of your own life. Go for something really big. President Ikeda often tells us that our lives are equal to the universe. To master our minds would be to expand to universe size.

The Buddha from time without beginning or kuon ganjo, the Buddha existing eternally without beginning or end, is the life of the universe itself... In fact that Buddha and we ourselves are one... When our viewpoint expands from present to the entirety of the external universe, we awaken to our life’s profound mission. Similarly, Shakyamuni realised that he was in fact one with the eternal Buddha, and he described this self as ‘undying’. He said ‘It is better to live a single day aware of the undying self than to live a hundred years ignorant of the undying self. (UK Express, May 1998, p. 14)

Each of us has a realisation to make. Whether we describe its effects as absolute happiness or ‘Buddha existing eternally’ we owe it to ourselves to master our lives; master the habits and inclinations we have that keep us unaware of the wonderful life which has always existed within us. By mastering your mind you become aware of that wonderful life and you use it.

This page was last modified on Sunday, August 20, 2006.