Living with 84,000 delusions
Posted: February 28, 2008 | Author: Doug | Filed under: Buddhism, Jodo Shinshu, Religion | 1 Comment »The famous Jodo Shinshu poet/writer/sandal maker named Asahara Saichi (浅原才市) once wrote a tiny, cryptic poem:
84,000 delusions
84,000 lights
84,000 joys abounding
Speaking from experience, it’s hard sometimes to practice Buddhism without a nagging sense of guilt. We read all the time in various texts about 108 defilements or klésas, that suffering is caused by desire, the illusion of the self and so on. But Saichi expresses this in a different light.
Imagine two people, one with 10 delusions, and the other with 100. If the person with 10 delusions awakened and became Enlightened, he would be pretty happy. But if the person with 100 delusions became awakened and Enlightened, how much more happy he would be. Also, think of how much more his accomplishment would be praiseworthy.
Here, when Saichi talks about 84,000 delusions, he’s using an old Buddhist cliché for “vast or many”. So Saichi is saying that his vastly deluded mind is cause for great joy because of the great potential for transformation. The 84,000 lights here refers to the Light of Amida Buddha, which of course means both wisdom (which sheds light on delusion) and compassion (which is accepting and uplifting).
Namuamidabu
Hello, this blog is about my life as a father, Buddhist and Japanophile. Any useful information I can pass along will hopefully make the 
You know, I appreciate the clarifying, and recasting of this older Zen language into modern idiom. Brad Warner does some of that in Sit Down and Shut Up, and you do it here with 84,000 things.
Sometimes a koan or story remains mystifying because the context of the language is removed. The words remain, but the meaning is lost. So it’s amusing here to see that what we would read as a ‘fixed amount’ actually means ‘a whole lot of’.