The lotus suttra is freaky shiznit

The Wonderful Flower of the Dharma Suttra is no doubt a lovely and important text to modern Buddhism which I have 'always intended' to read but never gotten around to it due to just being busy, reading a ton of other crap and really not focusing on practice in any form for like 10+ years. So now that I'm getting down to brass tacs I've picked it up.

Now early on when I was looking around and trying to figure out where I wanted to go, did I want to stick with Zen, are there other forms of Buddhism that would be more suited to me, will I even be able to _find_ anyone to study zen with, I encountered the website of the Zendo I now attend. On their site they have a number of their Dharma talks posted. Amoungst them is a copy of a session of Dharma study and in it. Apparently nobody had ever read it and so Peter says "since nobody has read it I'll just start by reading it to you. It's probably better that way anyway because it's very repetitious and esoteric and it would probably confuse you anyway."

Now, no offense to Peter that struck me that while it might be true it seemed a bit egotistical. After all don't they have the right to figure out if it's confusing on their own? Maybe they're smarter than he thinks.

I totally agree now. I do NOT recomend reading the lotus suttra if you're relatively new to Buddhism. This thing is fricking wierd. I have no trouble with a lot of this esoteric stuff, people becoming buddhas, Brahma kings seeing the light of the buddha from ten lands away and coming to see him. Even the concepts of emptyness seems perfectly intuitive to me. I'm not having issues with that.

It's not that there are things in there that are hard to understand. It's that there are things in there that are so obscure that I don't even know if I"m supposed to care! There's pages of pages of the buddha reasuring all these bodhisattvas that they'll become buddhas and what the name of the land they will live in will be called. And the ground will be made of lapis lazuli and the roads oped off with gold ropes etc, etc.

Page after page anfter page.

So I've just decided to power through it and glean what I can then come back for it a couple of times. I'm not looking forward to reading it agian. That's a bigassed book. I'm like 1/2 way throuh and I"ve been going for weeks. I no longer look everything up. I keep a notepad handy for important sounding things but I really just feel I won't get it till I've read it a few times so I'm not going to bother to dig deaply. I'm just watering the houseplant. I'm not reaydy to maintain an httpd.conf file this late.

In fact I believe there's even a section at the beginning where he describes people who shouldn't be taugh the lotus suttra because it would just confuse them and push them away from the Dharma. Because it's fricking WEIRD.

And also totally amazing. There's soo much stuff in there I'm going to have to read it like five times. I'm not going to do that all in a row. After I finish this thing I'm putting it on a shelf. I have like 50 other texts on my list to read and then I'm coming back to it. Plus I have like years of meditation that needs to be done before I can understand other parts of it. Then I'll read it again. Eventually maybe I'll be able to understand like 1/10 of what it has to offer but that's going to take a while and I know that I'm going to have to be patient.