If you run away from suffering, it will chase you. But if you faces it, suffering will run away from you .

Exploring Budha's Teaching of "Dependent Origination"

Rev. Dr. Kyohei Mikawa

Minister, Rissho Kosei-kai Buddhist Center of Los Angeles

This weekend in our city of Los Angeles, multiple protests are happening. As Buddha teaches, making our society peaceful can start with creating peace in our heart. And that personal peace will grow into a larger peace.  As Buddhists let us continue our practice firmly and calmly so that we will not sway.

Satsuki, thank you so much for your beautiful offering today. Who enjoyed what she offered? That’s what they are saying.

Welcome and welcome back, my dharma family. Who is here for the first time? Welcome. Let me talk about Buddhism.

Each of these Oni-Demon appears in Japanese Buddhist culture and symbolizes our mind of greed, anger, and ignorance. They are the causes of our suffering.

In Buddhism, suffering is a keyword. Suffering means pain you feel because of the gap between your expectation and the cold reality. We get upset when things go wrong unexpectedly—the gap between expectation and reality. Suffering in this sense is everywhere in our everyday life.

The heart of Buddhist practice is the end of suffering, to end your suffering from emotional pain. And you are the only one who can do this task of ending your suffering for you. Your family or friends can help but cannot do that job for you.

If you hear that the goal is to end your suffering, you may think that the most important thing is how to get to the result immediately, to be immediately free from suffering. But Buddhism teaches that to be free from suffering, you must first see your suffering clearly rather than ignoring or running away from it. That’s not easy. Very uncomfortable. But you can do it. This is how it works:

For me, a big challenge in my life has been how I relate to frustrations and anger when my 6 year old son does not listen to me, especially when it comes to doing his school homework. He starts to play a video game as soon as I sit with him to help his homework. The problem was that my frustrations grew into anger, and that anger starts to be expressed in my shaking voice and atmosphere. It often scared him away. Made him cry. Then he says, “Dad, I don’t like you!” with an angry face. That was happening almost every day over the last two years.

Here is the worst painful part. When that happens, I had a full of regret, hate against myself. That feeling of strong dislike against myself—that was really painful.

This grew into a worsening relationship between him and I. I gradually started to distant myself from him. But I knew I needed to change. I knew I needed to find a way of relating to my frustrations and anger in different ways.

Then I finally made a decision to work on it in October 2025. For 3-4 months, I gradually started to face it by closely watching how my anger arose, and how it exactly manifested and scared away my son. Every time I made him cry, I had to remain in the feeling of self-denial. That was the most difficult part. I wanted to run away, but I firmly remained in that uncomfortable space as my Buddhist practice. One of the most important Buddhist practice is: stop running away from what you have to see when that moment comes to you.

After many times of mistakes, I finally realized something: One day, probably just three months ago, he was practicing his new soccer skill but extremely slowly and carefully. Then I thought:

“He needs to build up very slowly until he starts to do anything with confidence." Then I started to think that the same thing applies to how he does his homework—he probably needs a lot of warmup before actually starting to undertake his homework. To my eyes, he looked like playing or just avoiding his homework, but that’s how he is building up something he needs in a way that it doesn’t look like so to my eyes. That was a big ah-huh moment.

Then an amazing happened. As soon as I started to see that, somehow my fundamental reverence toward his life started to get deepened. That was a moment I started to see him as a human, but no longer as a kid-who-doesn't-listen-to-me. That feeling still does not go away, keeping me from backsliding. Now, 3 months later, I enjoy doing homework with him.

Let me wrap up. More than 700 days of emotional struggles ended 3 months after I finally chose to face it.

The hardest part was to keep going by not running away from my own painful emotion. But I did not run away. How was it possible? What helped me was this dharma family. We have a unique Buddhist practice called “hoza”, that is, a reflective group sharing. That’s where I was able to talk about my own issues, and many other people also talked about their issues in their life.

When I felt I wanted to run away from seeing my pain and why I became angry, I was able to remain in that uncomfortable space because of this practice. In that moment, I recalled something like:

“Kenji shared his fasting, and his day 4 was a nightmare, but he didn’t run away.”

Savannah in South Dakota, Ron in San Diego shared how they raise their kids, inspired me a lot. Mike takes his kids for lessons everyday, and he makes his teaching at work as a Buddhist practice—he doesn’t run away from difficulties. Adachi-san enjoyed raising triplets grand-child and made that her Buddhist practice. How Yari shared with me about respecting her children.

Everyone’s life-power is truly amazing.

*Let's learn Buddha's teaching and how to practice them to enrich your everyday life together through RKLA's online Buddhism class (2-4th Tuesdays, 7-8:10PM, PT) and the upcoming Buddha's Wisdom Retreat on March 8, Sunday, 10AM-4PM.