Mr. Altig’s Overview of the Wonderful Dharma of the Lotus Sutra

They said the old saint lit himself on fire,
Twelve hundred years of light, arms ablaze,
And I thought: how can I match that pyre
With my small hands and ordinary days?

The Sutra promises we all can wake
Right here, right now, in skin and bone,
But if the price is everything I break—
How do the broken find their way back home?

The teacher said: you misunderstand the flame.

See, the body is the treasure tower,
Not the kindling for some ancient rite,
And persecution is the purifying power
When you stand for truth in the evil night.

Not just any suffering counts—
Only what you bear for the Law,
Not the emperor’s fall, the lost accounts,
But the slander faced with an unbroken jaw.

The perfect gift is not the spectacular death,
It’s the dailiness of getting up again,
It’s chanting the mystic truth with every breath,
It’s making ordinary life a sacred pen

That writes the sutra on your actual skin
Through endurance, not annihilation,
Through the long defeat that somehow wins,
Through gratitude, not immolation.

In Mappō, the fire is what they do to you—
And you keep walking anyway.

So the offering shifts from then to now,
From supernatural to the simple vow:
I dedicate this job, this grief, this bread,
This rising when I’d rather stay in bed,

This helping when I’m barely standing tall,
This faith when everything seems lost—
The mystic law transforms it all
Into the flame, without the cost

Of leaving nothing left to burn.
The light that saves the world, I learn,
Comes from a life that will not break,
From hands that give for giving’s sake,

From the heart that makes its stand
In an ordinary, unspectacular land,
Where Buddhahood blooms in mortal clay—
The only body is the one that stays.