That Look Inward In August of 1993, Rev. Tsuge visited the Newport Beach Buddhist Temple to be the keynote speaker at one of the Higashi Honganji sect's joint-temple retreats. It is easy to find ourselves preoccupied with trying to provide for our families. We may even feel as though we are controlled by other powers, or by the need to make money.
Life can then quickly begin to seem dark and without meaning.
From this outward-looking stance, we find it quite easy to make judgments about people, and to blame others for our problems. This, said Rev. Tsuge, is both the reason why we suffer in our lives, and why there are so many problems in human relationships in our world today. There is however, an alternative, said Rev. Tsuge. To illustrate the problem with this kind of sentiment, Rev. Tsuge related the well known story of the Four Gates. He passed through a different gate to the royal garden on three occasions and, in the everyday world outside the palace walls, saw for the first time, examples of old age, illness and death.