*This is an excerpt from my new book out now, All In This Together: Stories and Teachings for Loving Each Other and Our World
Dear ones,
There’s a story in an ancient Mahayana Buddhist text, The Vimalakirti Sutra, that I’ve loved for many years. It begins with a magical gathering of thousands of monks, nuns, and great bodhisattvas sitting at the feet of the Buddha.
Among them was a young devotee named Ratnakara, who approached the Buddha carrying a jeweled parasol. He laid it at the Buddha’s feet—and in an instant, the parasol transformed into a single, luminous canopy that stretched across a billion galaxies. In its mirrored surface, the assembly could see the entire cosmos reflected: suns, moons, stars, all shining together in one vast, harmonious field.
When Ratnakara asked what this vision meant, the Buddha said, “The world is pure when the mind is pure. This very world is as glorious as any Buddha world—it is only our delusion that prevents us from seeing it as such.”
Nearby, the layman Vimalakirti was listening. Though not a monk, he was revered for his deep realization. He lived in the marketplace, raising a family, walking among gamblers and politicians, meeting each person with compassion. He taught not by retreating from life, but by loving it completely. “He sits on the seat of love,” the Buddha said of him, “and everything he touches becomes a field of blessing.”
Vimalakirti’s illness later called the monks and bodhisattvas to his bedside, where they found his room impossibly vast—filled with radiant light, with thrones large enough for celestial beings, with the scent of lotus and sandalwood in the air. Through his presence, he reminded them that the mind itself creates heaven or hell.
He asked, “Am I this sick body? Are you your body? Who are we, truly?” And in silence, the monks understood. They saw that within each of us lives a vast awareness—limitless, luminous, untouched.
This story, with all its magic, is a mirror for our own practice. The jeweled canopy is still here; the Buddha field has never disappeared. The only question is whether we can see it.
To walk in this world with an open heart is to live as Vimalakirti did—to bring the sacred into the marketplace, into our homes, into our smallest gestures. It’s to bow to the ordinary and recognize it as holy.
When the mind quiets, the leaves of the trees become pages in the Holy Books. The world is not waiting to be sanctified—it already shines.
Metta,
Jack
