Ordinary Laypeople

This is what makes someone a bodhisattva, this ability to incorporate the Dharma in one's life. It is a great mistake, I think, to understand the Buddhist tradition that we inherit as being nothing but a history of great thinkers and leaders. Saints such as Tao-sheng and Chih-i, Saicho, and Nichiren are extremely important for what they have contributed to the tradition, but we should never forget that the Buddhism we inherit with gratitude is a product as well of countless less well-known and now unknown people who have emerged from everyday life on this earth to become bodhisattva by doing good, by contributing to the welfare of others. Unlike well-known monks and their royal supporters, the vast majority of such bodhisattvas have been ordinary laypeople.

---Gene Reeves, in The Stories of the Lotus Sutra---