The 5-fold 10-fold comparison - Day 6

Day 6: It's amazing about life that when you get what you desire and it doesn't fulfill you the way you thought it would, your perspective on happiness truly changes and deepens. We saw how 4 different philosophical systems made people's lives progressively better than the previous one and arrived at the very one that seems as though, in providing for almost every need and want, should have closed the book on which philosophy is the best. Yet few today, despite all this, would agree, if any at all would, that we have arrived at the pinnacle of human existence. The suicides I mentioned are perhaps a reflection of this. It seems as if there is really no answer and that we've just been deluding ourselves all along. Maybe the ancient Greeks were right after all. No matter how fast or hard we run from pain and toward pleasure, it's all in vain. We're going to go through what we're going to go through and that's the end of it. I remember the words of my step-mother's mother, whose parents, very good people and observant Jews, died in the Holocaust, saying something that many people said after that horrendous and bloody war that caused so much horror in the lives of so many people. She said she couldn't believe in a God anymore if this is what He could allow. My wife's father felt the same way about the Buddhist temples in China after the horrors he witnessed at the hands of the Japanese in his village. They seemed to be useless money-making devices. And what does it say of science that we have been able to find a way now to eliminate all life yet we still are unable or unwilling to protect it?

Yet we've shown even in the examples I've quoted in this series, the amazing human ability to stretch ourselves beyond the limits we had previously kept ourselves entrapped within. Where does this ability come from? In 1253, a young man in Japan, who had taken to studying Buddhism at the seminary in order to understand why people were suffering and how this teaching could help end their suffering, declared that the truth hidden in only the Lotus Sutra of all the Buddha's teachings lay in chanting the phrase Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, which literally means dedication to the title of the Lotus Sutra, the mystic law lotus flower sutra. He declared that this could dispel the sufferings of all people. In doing so, he took the name Nichiren, Sun Lotus. As he felt, the sun had at last begun to rise on the long night of human history. People, upon hearing this, thought he was absolutely crazy and they became enraged when he continually declared that all the major Buddhist schools of Japan at that time were practicing erroneous teachings not in accord with what the Buddha had taught and that therefore the people were undergoing much suffering. As he continued to teach this, however, it caught on with some people, and, although they underwent much hardship as a result, those who held onto this teaching became very happy, so much so that they were even willing to risk their life to stick to it, as did 3 farmers who were beheaded in Atsuhara in 1279 for refusing to give up this faith. Nichiren himself, though many attempted to kill him several times, and though he was exiled to a very cold island in the northern sea at the worst time of year where no one was known to return from alive, from 1271 to 1274, managed to live—and not only live but live happily—for many years afterward until he died of natural causes in 1283. The high government officials and wealthy priests who were behind his persecutions, on the other hand, all died miserable deaths at the end of their lives, the ruling family being beset by internal killing.

In 1928, a Japanese educator named Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, who had developed the theory of value creation (known in Japanese as soka), a secular humanist of the highest order, encountered Nichiren's teaching of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. The following is what he himself said of his experience with this practice: “When I eventually made the firm determination to adopt this faith, I was able to affirm, in the actualities of daily life, the truth of the words of Nichiren Daishonin: 'When the skies are clear, the ground is illuminated...' (The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, vol. 1, p. 376) And with a joy that is beyond the power of words to express, I completely renewed the basis of the life I had led for almost 60 years. The sense of unease, groping my way in the dark, was entirely dissipated; my lifelong tendency to withdraw into thought disappeared; my sense of purpose in life steadily expanded in scope and ambition, and I was freed from all fears; I became possessed with the irresistible and bold desire to effect the reform of national education with as much haste as was humanly possible” (The World Tribune, Nov. 18, 2010, p.2 or www.tmakiguchi.org). Today, the Soka school system exists in quite a few countries and many educators around the world are studying Makiguchi's theory and implementing them in their teaching methods, thus enabling children to grow not merely into effective specialists in one thing, cogs in the wheel of a vast economic system that seems to dictate more to people than it does provide them with a true sense of meaning, fulfillment and happiness in life, and, instead, to contribute to significant and meaningful improvements in the lot of humanity.

In 1978, I first heard the words Nam-myoho-renge-kyo when a fellow student at Bard College would bravely chant them in his dorm room every morning. I myself was inspired to take up this faith and practice in 1988 when I was told by an SGI member at an SGI discussion meeting that no prayer to the Gohonzon (the object Nichiren first inscribed containing personages from the Lotus Sutra representing the myriad phenomena of life with Nam-myoho-renge-kyo written down the center in bold lettering, which, when chanted with focus on it, enables one to tap into one's greatest inner potential for good, happiness and value creation in the world) goes unanswered and that there are no rules other than the one rule to embrace the Gohonzon and never to slander it (which I came to learn actually means never to slander life, one's own or that of others, by any form of disparagement). In the 22 years since then, I have encountered much hardship and struggle, but guess what—much growth. I have tapped into a self that I somehow always knew I had but never had an ounce of the courage needed to manifest it. My relationship with my parents, deeply strained for many years, has undergone light years of improvement. While some may attribute this to coincidence, I can unequivocally say that if this were a coincidence, then so is the fact that my stopping at a red light while there is traffic whizzing by and my survival to get through the intersection only after the light turns green would have to also be a coincidence.

But I think the greatest actual proof of how this practice, like the sun, outshines the earlier life philosophies mentioned, which are at best like bright stars and the moon, is my own observation of what I see when practitioners of this philosophy, the members of the SGI (Soka Gakkai International), today's organization which President Makiguchi founded with the publication of his book, The System of Value Creating Pedagogy in 1930, coming together. For it is then that I can appreciate the vast difference between the attitude, life condition and feeling of these people and places and those among people who live based on one or more of the earlier philosophies. For, whereas, mostly in the world today, there is a focus on who's to blame, in the SGI, the focus is on how can we all come together to solve the problem(s) and advance together. Whereas fear, factionalism and cliques prevail in society, in the SGI, people from backgrounds as diverse as you can imagine, come together and put aside their differences. All the assumptions and stereotypes I had grown up hearing about particular groups of people, are completely refuted not merely in words but in the behavior of people from those groups of people when they participate in SGI meetings. People like myself who never smile, actually leave meetings beaming.

What is irrefutable as proof and utterly striking is the degree to which SGI members, without pause, break or discouragement when initial efforts fail, continue to go out of their way to encourage other people, to comfort them, to work tirelessly for their happiness. For years, I couldn't believe myself and challenged this behavior in SGI members as fake. It just seemed to good to be true. But gradually, as chanting softened the hard inner wall I had put up to protect myself from what seemed like a very cold, or at best, untrustworthy world I lived in, I came to understand that these oases of peace and joy that beam at SGI meetings, community and culture centers are far from fake. After attending a 4-day conference at the SGI Florida Nature and Culture Center, I was impressed that world peace is indeed very possible if such a wonderful experience could be created. And it wasn't merely the place but what the coming together of all those people in that one place devoted to actively making peace happen that convinced me that all the things most people have written off as utterly impossible, a vain pipe dream, are very real so long as we are willing to make it happen. But the key ingredient is me. You. I'll go into this next time.