This content was created by Satya Robyn. This content was uploaded by Satya Robyn. This is a YouTube talk titled "Turning Mara's arrows into flowers" (uploaded 2016-10-12). The excerpt is a single-speaker Dharma-style reflection (speaker labeled SPEAKER A) describing the Buddha's enlightenment story and using the image of Mara's arrows transforming into flowers as a metaphor for converting greed, hate, and delusion into loving-kindness, compassion, and wisdom. The speaker also references how the natural world and local deities in medieval Japan can serve as wake-up experiences, and frames the teaching as bringing transformed love back into the world.
Chapters
On the night of the Buddha's enlightenment, when Mara's armies sent their arrows to the Buddha, they turned into flowers. That's quite something, isn't it? Flowers. They didn't just disappear. I don't know if they were sunflowers or not. They don't look real, do they? They're sort of perfect. Yeah, so these arrows of greed and hate and delusion that were sent to disrupt the process of enlightenment that was happening to the Buddha, they became transformed into flowers. Flowers are beautiful. Who doesn't love flowers? I don't know anybody that doesn't like flowers. And they're, you know, the flowers represent love, loving kindness, beauty. We're able to love flowers much more easily than we're able to love arrows that are being shot at us. So you could say, that he was something transformed in how he received what he was being sent. He was able to love what was being presented to him, and through the act of being loved, they became something beautiful in and of themselves. Greed, hate, and delusion transformed into loving-kindness, compassion, wisdom. So if you're going to fire arrows anywhere, fire them at the Buddha. I guess that might be one moral of the story. Yeah, make an offering of your greed, hate, and delusion. Take it to the Buddha. It will become something else. And you know, in particularly in medieval Japan, but I guess you sort of see it in other Buddhisms as well, but there's a sense that you can be enlightened by anything in the world, but particularly the natural world was held up as something that could really wake you up. If you encountered the beauty of the natural world. And all of the local deities, the tree deities, the mountain deities, the stream deities, they all became Buddhas as Buddhism entered Japan. So we could say in a way that all of these flowers are also Buddhas because they can wake us up when you encounter one of these flowers. You take something to the Buddha, you— something arrives, something angst, something fraught, something greedy, lustful arrives with the Buddha and becomes transformed into something beautiful. And not just something beautiful, but something that can enlighten others. So here is the Buddha on the night of enlightenment, surrounded by flowers, like the Buddha on the shrine, surrounded by Sunflowers. You can take that flower away from the shrine and somebody can be enlightened wherever the flower is, in the same way that when we bring ourselves here with all of our greed, hate, and delusion, and some of that begins to become flowers, begins to be transformed, we also take that away with us. Even without thinking about it, without doing anything else, we become flowers, we become amida's flowers, out in the world. And the flowers are love. We bring our stuff to the Buddha who loves us and softens us, and we go back out Carrying some of that love into the world. Namaste.
