Nature’s Grace

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             With Nature’s grace we’ve made a nest
             upon this planet as her guest
             while seizing treasures she conferred
             without a single thought or word
             of gratitude for our bequest.

             Dear Mother Earth has done her best
             to sound alarms through signs expressed
             (though loud as thunder still unheard)
             with Nature’s grace.

             May we come to our senses lest,
             alas, by avarice possessed
             plus egoistic dreams absurd
             and vision blind or madly blurred,
             we humans lose our haven blessed
             with Nature’s grace.


             ~ Harley White



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The poem is a rondeau…

Excerpts from: A Collation of the Layers of the Various Teachings of all the Buddhas of the Past, Present and Future as to Which Specific Doctrines are to be Discarded or Established ~ a writing by Nichiren Daishōnin, translated by Martin Bradley

The ordinary people, who inhabit the nine realms of dharmas, are wholeheartedly immersed in the sleep of the unenlightenment of not wanting to know. They are drowned in the dream of living and dying, as well as having forgotten what the wakefulness of the enlightenment of the original state is all about. They cling at all costs to what is going on in the dream. And they stray from one darkness to the next.

Because the awareness of the original mind lay as a foundation of the teachings for the people within the dream, this meant that the foundation was Myōhō renge kyō and that, beyond the meaningfulness of this concept, there is no existence.

This time you must, by all means, dissipate your illusions about the dream of living and dying and cut away the bonds of successive lives and deaths, by returning to the arousal of the original awakening. From now onwards, you must not get yourself taken in by the gateways to the dharmas within the dream. You must open up an all-pervasive enlightenment, by cultivating yourself in the practice of reciting Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō, with your whole mind in perfect harmony with all the Buddhas of the past, present, and future.

The tenth month of the second year of Kō.an [1279]
Nichiren

Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō means to devote our lives to and found them on (Nam[u]) the Utterness of the Dharma (Myōhō) [entirety of existence, enlightenment and unenlightenment] permeated by the underlying white lotus flower-like mechanism of the interdependence of cause, concomitancy and effect (Renge) in its whereabouts of the ten [psychological] realms of dharmas [which is every possible psychological wavelength] (Kyō).

The reason that we continually recite Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō

Image ~ Milky Way Galaxy Night, from Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository