This is another in a series of articles discussing the book, Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo.

Sometime in 1936 John Provoo’s search for someone who could teach him about the Lotus Sutra led him to Bishop Ishida Nitten, who helped found the Nichiren Hokke Buddhist Church at 2016 Pine Street in San Francisco.

Bishop Ishida spoke very little English, and in the style typical of teacher-student relations in the East, he would put me off, saying, “Go away,” or “I am much too busy,” or “Come back another time.” A prospective disciple is tested and prepared in this way. I kept going back. Finally the Bishop gave me a collection of letters that he had laboriously translated from the Chinese into English. I had been accepted and instruction had begun, but slowly.

But Provoo had the good fortune to find another Nichiren teacher.

A traditional saying in the East is “when the disciple is ready, the master will appear.” I came across another smaller temple in a two-story house with the garage underneath made into an orthodox Nichiren temple. The priest was a cheerful round-faced man with glasses named Aoiyagi Shoho, who later became Bishop Nippo. He was from a priestly family whose ancestral home is at Ichinose, not far from one of the major temples of the Nichiren sect. This time my reception was entirely different. On my first visit the priest welcomed me warmly. “Please come, come in,” which was practically the extent of his English. It was a relationship that seemed to be fully developed at the first meeting, although neither of us could speak the other’s language, and the relationship would last with the same strength for our lifetimes. We taught each other our respective languages, and night after night we studied the Lotus Sutra, often until after midnight. My understanding of this highest teaching was intertwined with the learning of the Japanese language and most of the realizations came to me without first being translated into English. I had quickly reached the stage where I could think in Japanese. I could think and express my deepest thoughts in Japanese. At times I felt that East and West were unified within me, but in the external world events were pulling East and West apart. The Lotus seemed the only thing that resolved all contradictions. I memorized the 16th chapter in Japanese, and often chanted it from that day forward. In it, Buddha says to his audience:

Beneath the dark surface of this crumbling illusion,
My perfect world shimmers with light.
Though this illusion seems burning,
And these suffering beings lie broken and bleeding,
My perfect world is here,
And these beings are whole and filled with light.
I have revealed the fate of the world:
That all beings shall be illumined.”

Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo, p28-30

At this point I need to renege on my promise to set aside my journalist’s skepticism.

I’m puzzled by Provoo’s quote from the gāthās of Chapter 16. There are verses similar, for example Senchu Murano’s translation offers:

The [perverted] people think:
“This world is in a great fire.
The end of the kalpa [of destruction] is coming.”
In reality this world of mine is peaceful.
It is filled with gods and men.
The gardens, forests and stately buildings
Are adorned with various treasures;
The jeweled trees have many flowers and fruits;
The living beings are enjoying themselves;
And the gods are beating heavenly drums,
Making various kinds of music,
And raining mandārava-flowers on the great multitude and me.

[This] pure world of mine is indestructible.
But the [perverted] people think:
“It is full of sorrow, fear, and other sufferings.
It will soon burn away.”

Because of their evil karmas,
These sinful people will not be able
To hear even the names of the Three Treasures
During asaṃkhya kalpas.

None of the English translations of the Lotus Sutra has verses similar to those Provoo offers referencing the light of the Buddha in Chapter 16. Is this because he is translating the Japanese into English rather than translating Kumārajīva’s fifth-century Chinese translation into English? I like the sentiment expressed in Provoo’s verses, but I’m too much of a literalist to allow this discrepancy to stand without comment.

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This is another in a series of articles discussing the book, Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo.

John David Provoo grew up in San Francisco’s Richmond district to the north of Golden Gate Park. He often played in the park’s Tea Garden and regularly visited San Francisco’s Japan Town. As a child he was a fan of all things Japanese and that, as a result, led him to Buddhism.

Buddhism rang a bell for me at a very early age. The very first time I heard the chant of a Buddhist priest, though I could not translate a single word into English, I had the distinct feeling that I understood exactly what was being said.

The chant meant that there was another reality within the common one, obscured from awareness. Just as the words of what I was hearing were in my ears but not understood; a greater reality was all around us, within our ordinary perceptions, but unintelligible. I felt that the chant called out to learn the secrets.

As a priest, Nichijo would later understand that what he felt as a child was the meaning he would learn from Chapter 16 of the Lotus Sutra – this world is the Buddha’s Pure Land.

Without anyone to lead him, the young Provoo made up his own Buddhism.

In 1926, my family moved twenty miles south to Burlingame. I couldn’t visit the park as often and made efforts to recreate the experience. I made a shrine in my room, and bought little Buddha incense burners at Woolworth’s. I clipped from the pages of National Geographic whatever pictures of Buddhist statues and temples I could find and displayed them on my altar. I would stand before this array, light incense, bow and chant my made-up chants.

In his childish way, he sought the Buddha’s path:

One day when I was eleven, I used scissors to cut off all my hair, as short as I could, wrapped myself in an orange bedspread, and with a small bowl, walked into the hills. I was trying it on, play-acting how it was to be the young prince embarking upon a spiritual path. I sat down beneath an oak tree to meditate. By dinnertime I returned. A little too young to depart for Asia, but that was my childhood dream. The path would be ready for me, when I was ready for it.

By the time he reached high school, Provoo could imagine himself studying in Asia. After his family moved back to San Francisco, Provoo began exploring the city’s existing Buddhist temples.

I learned about the Triple Jewel: The Buddha, the Dharma (the Teachings) and the Sangha (the Community). You do not find enlightenment on your own. I had realized that I needed to find genuine instruction in order to progress. I finally met Bishop Masuyama Kenju at the Hongwanji temple in San Francisco and under him took the next step to become formally accepted as a novice priest.

Eventually Provoo was elevated to a full priest of the Jodo Shinshu, but he found himself lured away from his priestly life.

I continued with my Buddhist studies but two parts of my nature were developing, at odds with each other. Just when I had taken vows accepting poverty, I had been steered into San Francisco’s fast lane. I was the sincere, searching, scholarly mystic …a Buddhist Priest; and I was the flamboyant and theatrical prodigy of materialistic America. I was becoming a man with two heads, irreconcilable heads.

In the midst of this conflict between Provoo’s two natures, he approached his Jodo Shinshu mentor, Bishop Masuyama:

My horizons were expanding. I explained to Bishop Masuyama that I wished to go to Japan and pursue further studies in the Shin school of which the Bishop was a part. The Bishop explained that his position in the Shinshu was a hereditary one and that in his own mind he felt that I was beyond that teaching already and that I was ready for the Lotus Sutra, the highest teaching, which the Buddha had taught during the last eight years of his life.

This all sounds apocryphal to my trained journalistic ear, but I’m setting aside those misgivings to celebrate the conversion of Provoo.

For a short time, I took up the study of Zen under the great Zen Master, Nyogen Senzaki, mentor to the “Beat” generation a decade later, but then I became aware of the Lotus Sutra.

Sometime in 1936, I received a copy of the latest translation into English of the Lotus Sutra, by H. Kerns. It came as a complete revelation to me. It was one of those experiences in which someone else had verbalized my innermost thoughts and put them into print. There are hundreds of schools of Buddhist teaching, each one emphasizing a certain sutra in a certain way. I discovered my own innate concurrence with the Lotus Sutra, it became clear that I should focus my studies through the Nichiren School, which is based in Japan and formulated almost entirely around the Lotus teaching. The Lotus Sutra is the final teaching of the historic Buddha, transmitted to a multitude of followers on Vulture Peak. It proclaims the Buddha to be the embodiment of eternal enlightenment; the realization that this is the perfect world: and that Nirvana and the everyday world are one in the same. The Nichiren School was established to reaffirm this as the ultimate doctrine.

“Namu myoho-renge-kyo”, literally, “Adoration to the Lotus Sutra.”

Or, as I say after my years sculpting my understanding of this sutra, I ‘ve come to think of it this way:

“Adoration to the Lotus Sutra, Adoration to the mysterious perfection of everything,
just as it is.”

That chant, with that meaning, is as deeply ingrained in me as breathing, and it has been a vision that comforted me through years of the most terrifying events in the most horrible circumstances.

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