Cultivate Your Heart, Unearth Your Buddha Nature

Shakyamuni’s Dialogue with the Brahman

In 1998, the year Rissho Kosei-kai marked its sixtieth anniversary, I wrote the following in the magazine Yakushin (Kosei Publishing):

When I was a boy, I helped plow the fields. There is a difference between soil that has been tilled and soil that has not. Untilled soil is hard and will not accept anything, but well-plowed soil is soft and absorbs a lot of water and fertilizer. Similarly, a well-cultivated mind is flexible, free of attachments, and can absorb anything honestly, just the way it is.

This is how I explained the importance of every one of us “cultivating our Buddhist hearts,” and this is, as I have already said many times before, based on Shakyamuni’s anecdotes and verses from the Sutta Nipata.

Here, let me reintroduce you to its contents.

A brahman, a great landholder, had finished preparing his fields for plowing and was starting to distribute food to the farmhands, when he saw Shakyamuni coming for alms. The brahman asked him, in a stern tone, “Why don’t you also cultivate fields, sow seeds, and then reap some food from your efforts?” Shakyamuni calmly replied to him, “I also cultivate fields and sow seeds.” But the brahman was still skeptical, so Shakyamuni spoke to him in verse:

The seeds I sow are faith, and self-discipline is the rain.

Wisdom is my plow, and humility is my plow’s shafts.

The mind is the harness, and reflection is the plowshare and the pitchfork.

Exercise restraint in body and speech, be moderate in your diet, and do not overeat.

Upholding the truth is mowing a field of grass.

Flexibility is removing the yoke from the ox.

Diligence is a load-bearing ox that transports you to a state of tranquility.

Advancing without retreating, you will reach a place without fear and anxiety.

Cultivation, done this way, yields the reward of immortality.

This kind of cultivation frees you from every kind of suffering.

The background of this section of verse is the method of cultivation, in places like India, during Shakyamuni’s lifetime. In Japan as well, the plow used to be the primary means of cultivation. Livestock was made to pull a plow to loosen the soil in the fields. Shakyamuni is comparing the plow that breaks apart and loosens the soil in the fields (our hearts and minds) to wisdom, but for the pulling force of the ox, or horse, to be transmitted to the plow and the plow (wisdom) to work sufficiently, the plow must be controlled by the shafts that attach the plow to the ox. According to these verses, “humility is [the] plow’s shafts,” so your humility allows the plowshare of reflection to reach your mind, and when you forget to reflect upon yourself, you can use the pitchfork to remove clumps of dirt stuck to the plowshare so that wisdom (the plow) will work to its fullest and your heart (the field) will be well cultivated.

This Is Buddhism in Its Entirety

Shakyamuni adeptly employed skillful means to teach people, in terms easily understandable to them, who were about to start cultivating their fields, that sowing and nurturing the seeds of faith in their minds, and attaining the reward, is just as important as cultivating the earth. The Buddhist scholar Fumio Masutani (1902–87) praised these verses as a wonderful Dharma dialogue, saying that here, Shakyamuni is showing us “the whole picture and essence of Buddhism in a detailed, concrete manner.” If the seeds of faith fall into the soil of our minds, we will reach a state of tranquility, without fear and anxiety, and also “be freed from every kind of suffering.” Moreover, the wishes of all people who seek such peace of mind, as well as the method for attaining it, are compressed into these short lines of verse, and we can imagine that the many people who received this teaching must have gained the hope to live and the strength to move forward.

If you were to ask, though, whether trying once to cultivate your mind would free you from suffering, I would say I do not think that is the case. I believe it is important to repeatedly cultivate your mind and—time after time—unearth your own buddha nature, which leads directly to peace of mind. And in that vein, in the next issue, we will ponder in greater depth what it means to realize our buddha nature.