A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
Shinshu Roberts examines the suffering inherent in the bodhisattva
path, what Dogen referred to as being “the blue lotus in the flame.”
From the Spring 2020 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly.
In 1243, Eihei Dogen, the thirteenth-century founder of Soto Zen in Japan, wrote in his evocative Kuge
(“Flowers of Emptiness”) that “the time and place that the blue lotus
flowers open and spread are in the midst of fire and in the time of
fire” (Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross, Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo).
Dogen lived in a time of political uncertainty, violent weather, and cultural change. Perhaps these difficulties inspired Dogen to take up
the poetic image of a blue lotus—associated with
practice–realization—blooming within the fire of samsara.
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