After reading Gemini Notebook’s “Becoming the Very Manifestation-Body” and “All Within the Five Characters of Myō-Hō-Ren-Ge-Kyō” I’m forced to concede that what I want to see in Nichiren Shu Buddhism, a focus on acting consciously toward being more Buddhalike, radiating the Four Sublime Attitudes or even emulating the Six Perfections, is just not what Nichiren taught in 13th century Japan.

What does it mean to say, “When you chant Namu-Myōhō-Renge-Kyō with sincere faith, your daily conduct becomes the very manifestation-body of the Buddha”? Does it really transform Lovingkindness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy, and Equanimity from abstract ideals into a living, social reality? Or what about “by embracing the Odaimoku, these Four Sublime Attitudes naturally emerge from within your own Buddha-nature and illuminate your daily thoughts, words, and actions”?

I was introduced to the Daimoku through Sōka Gakkai, and I attended meetings and did SGI activities for more than 35 years. In all of that time, I simply do not recall ever being instructed that “the inner transformation achieved through chanting Namu-Myōhō-Renge-Kyō must express itself in tangible daily behavior—fostering community harmony, promoting peace education, and engaging in grassroots volunteerism.”

Need something? Chant. Didn’t get what you want? You didn’t chant enough. That’s what I remember of SGI instruction. I did read a little about Tsunesaburo Makiguchi’s  Value Creation Education Study Association, but I never read any of Daisaku Ikeda’s Human Revolution books. I was simply unable to get past my own dislike for the cult of personality that surrounded everything SGI. My loss apparently.

After completing “Becoming the Very Manifestation-Body” and “All Within the Five Characters of Myō-Hō-Ren-Ge-Kyō” I asked Gemini Notebook to write a simulated debate between a person who relies solely on Nichiren’s writings and another who seeks a more socially engaged Buddhism. I didn’t like the results of either attempt so I took the Gemini Notebook debate drafts and asked Gemini Flash to convert those into a story in the style of Kenji Miyazawa.

Kenji-Miyazawa-cottage

Beyond the edge of the blue-black larch forest, where the autumn wind whistled through the telegraph poles like the reed pipes of an invisible organ, stood an old wooden schoolhouse painted the pale color of mountain mist. Inside, the kerosene lamp cast a warm, round pool of amber across the cedar floorboards.

Three figures sat near the hearth, listening to the crackle of pinecones.

The first was Arata, whose dark robes were brushed clean and whose posture was as upright and unyielding as a basalt pillar. The second was Ren, whose sleeves were rolled high, smelling of river mud and freshly turned field soil, his eyes reflecting the sharp, restless twinkle of the evening stars. Between them sat Sensei, an aged monk with salt and pepper hair, quietly rubbing his tea bowl between his weathered palms.

Upon the table lay an open scroll, where the ink of Nichiren’s letter to the samurai lay bold and clear. Sensei traced the characters with one slender finger, reading aloud the words that burned with ancient urgency: “The true purpose of Śākyamuni Buddha appearing in this world was to teach us how to behave ourselves on a daily basis.”

Arata folded his hands, pressing his palms together in gasshō, his voice ringing like a deep bell in a frosty valley.

“Sensei,” Arata began earnestly, “to know what conduct is required of us, we must look nowhere other than the sacred foundation left by Nichiren Shōnin. The writings of the founder are the controlling standard for daily conduct. Nichiren taught that human life is not an airy, subjective drifting, but an altar. When one kneels before the Gohonzon and chants Namu-Myōhō-Renge-Kyō, the physical body becomes the Dharma-body, the mind becomes the reward-body, and daily behavior becomes the living manifestation-body of the Tathāgata. Therefore, if we ask what Śākyamuni or Nichiren would do each day, it means acting as explicitly commanded in the Lotus Sutra and Nichiren’s Gosho writings. It means submitting every morning and evening to the Three Great Secret Laws, guarding against the eight winds of worldly delusion, and refusing to dilute the diamond chalice precept for modern convenience. Without strict fidelity to the sacred texts, religion dissolves into mere secular humanism and moral laxity. True compassion cannot merely fawn; it must preserve shakubuku, fearlessly rebuking error to protect the Dharma from slander!”

The wind shuddered outside, tossing the dry birch leaves against the paper screens.

Ren leaned forward across the hearth, his breath clouding softly in the cool room. “Arata, my dear friend,” Ren said gently, his fingers still dusted with the loam of the village gardens. “Look out into the street. The world today is not Kamakura, nor are we feudal retainers carrying broadswords for our lords. If you bind the Living Dharma only to the letters of the thirteenth century, you make the Buddha a dusty relic trapped in an ancient cabinet. The spirit of the Lotus Sutra must be liberated from 13th-century feudal norms!”

Ren looked toward the window, where the constellation of the Swan was ascending like a river of silver quartz into the night sky.

“Nichiren himself upheld zuihō ni’ni—the principle that one must adapt to regional customs and changing times so long as the fundamental truth is preserved. Nichiren taught that the time governs propagation. In an era of global division, weapons that can turn cities to ash, and deep ecological tears across our shared earth, how can we reduce conduct to imitating medieval social hierarchies or shouting polemics? When I consider the Buddha’s daily conduct, it means living the practice of Bodhisattva Never-Despising. It is Bodhisattva Sadāparibhūta, who bowed low before every beggar, farmer, and passerby on the dusty road, seeing their luminous Buddha-nature even when they threw stones and sticks at him. Because of eshō funi—the nonduality of living beings and their environment—our daily behavior must step out of the shrine room to heal the world, ending war, feeding the hungry, and respecting every human being as an equal child of the Buddha.”

The hearth was quiet. The shadows of the three men swayed gently against the wall like three traveler pines.

Sensei set his tea bowl down upon the wooden board. A soft smile gathered at the corners of his eyes, warm as an ember beneath the winter ash.

“Listen, Arata. Listen, Ren,” Sensei whispered, gesturing toward the dark night outside. “Above the roof, the great geese are flying south across the Milky Way. Do you see them?”

The two disciples looked up toward the sound of faint, wild cries traveling high through the crystal atmosphere.

“A wild goose cannot cross the frosty mountains without steady mind and a compassionate heart,” Sensei said softly. “These empower the two wings.”

He turned first toward Arata.

“Arata, your devotion is the bird’s mind. It holds steady amidst the roaring whirlpools of worldly vanity and shallow fashion. Without the sacred chant—Namu-Myōhō-Renge-Kyō — without reverence before the Gohonzon and the iron resolve of the founder’s vows, the mind drifts into confusion, mistaking its own fleeting whims for the voice of the Buddha. You remind us that our roots must run deep into the bedrock of faith and correct practice.”

Then Sensei turned to Ren, his eyes shining with profound tenderness.

“And Ren, your compassionate labor is the bird’s heart. You remind us that the seed of Buddhahood was never meant to be locked inside a wooden storehouse, but sown into the muddy furrows of human suffering. Without Bodhisattva Never-Despising’s bow, without standing up against cruelty and working to build a peaceful land—Risshō Ankoku—in the living present, the Dharma becomes an empty shell, oblivious to the tears of our neighbors.”

Sensei reached out, placing one hand over Arata’s folded palms and the other over Ren’s work-worn fingers.

“There is ample room for both tradition and reform in our daily footsteps,” Sensei said. “They are not adversaries; they are the inner breath and the outer deed. When you sit before the Gohonzon, let Arata’s faithful mind secure you in the ancient truth. And when you step out through the wooden gate at sunrise, into the kitchen, the rice field, the school, or the bustling city street, let Ren’s heart guide your hands to revere the Buddha-nature in every soul you meet. When you chant Namu-Myōhō-Renge-Kyō, the mind and the heart become one. That is how ordinary people in this fragile world live out the true purpose of the Buddha’s appearance.”

Outside, the autumn wind blew clear and sweet over the mountain ridge, carrying the fragrance of damp soil and dried silver grass beneath the endless sea of glittering stars. The two disciples bowed their heads together, their breath rising as one gentle mist in the quiet schoolhouse.

sublime_attitudes

I’m convinced there are no coincidences. Just as I was considering What Would A Buddha Do and  Charles Sheldon’s Social Gospel, a book arrived in the mail. I had ordered this book a month before from the Princeton University Press and forgotten about it.

The book is “How to Truly Love: An Ancient Guide to a Life of Kindness.” This is a translation of the 5th century Indian Theravada scholar Buddhaghosa’s ninth chapter of his Path of Purification. Maria Heim offers an introduction followed by a Sanskrit and English bilingual explanation of the Four Sublime Attitudes – Lovingkindness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy and Equanimity.

In her introduction, Heim points out that these attitudes are a vehicle that delivers genuine freedom:

Love, and related experiences like compassion and sympathy, not only benefit others–they also free our own minds from the constrictions and distortions of anger, hatred, envy, discontent, cruelty, and indifference that otherwise enslave us and make us miserable. Love, sympathy, and compassion can cast off these painful shackles and replace them with the freedom to flourish in solidarity with others.

How To Truly Love, Page xiii

The best way to imagine the Four Sublime Attitudes is to consider a mother with four children.

She feels lovingkindness toward the little one, wanting him to flourish; she feels compassion toward the sick child, wanting him to get well; she feels sympathetic joy toward the youth, rejoicing in his beauty and success; and she feels equanimity toward her grown-up son as he manages his own affairs (though she has, of course, never stopped loving him). The challenge is to take these very natural dispositions that we already feel toward our loved ones and extend them further and further out toward mere acquaintances, and then even hostile people, extending them eventually in every direction universally. The more we can do so, the more both we and those we encounter in the world are flooded with these happy and peaceful experiences.

How To Truly Love, Page xv-xvi

It is the expansion of these attitudes beyond immediate family to the entire world that is the challenge. In the context of Nichiren’s teachings, this is what’s meant by concentrating on the 3,000 Existences in a Single Thought Moment.

As we will see with all of the sublime attitudes, the attitude must be directed toward a specific someone, a living flesh-and-blood person toward whom you can get the emotion flowing. There is nothing abstract about this practice: it involves real emotions toward specific beings (“beings” is mentioned advisedly, as it is not just humans toward whom we will want to feel universal friendliness).

You’ll want to start where it is easy and the emotion comes naturally. We will see that Buddhaghosa does not think that you should start with enemies or even neutrals, because feeling lovingkindness toward them is just too hard at first. Instead, you should start by feeling lovingkindness toward yourself since it is very easy to long for your own happiness. The idea is to get kindness flowing, for a mind full of kindness can’t at the same time hold hate or anger. There may also be deeper psychological truth in his insisting, against possible detractors, on starting with loving yourself. He perceives that those who hate themselves can never truly love another. It may be that much hatred, cruelty, and apathy are, at bottom, the result of self-loathing.

How To Truly Love, Page 3-4

It is also very interesting how the concept of Emptiness – no self – is utilized here.

Persons are real up to a point, but on closer analysis they are only a collection of constantly changing momentary events. So the person I am angry with now is not the “same” person who initially caused me distress. Like me, they are changing all the time, and like me, they are conditioned by a complex set of processes that I can disaggregate and analyze. In fact, looking for the stable, unchanging essence of this person on which to target my anger (and anger always wants a target), I find that they dissolve into these changing parts. Toward whom, toward what, am I actually angry?

How To Truly Love, Page 10

Lovingkindness negates anger and compassion seeks to eliminate the suffering of others.

Compassion is wanting that someone suffering will be relieved of it. As with lovingkindness, one works gradually to feel compassion universally toward all beings. But to start, one begins with where it is easiest, and again with a concrete and specific person. Buddhaghosa thinks that even the most hard-hearted among us will be moved when we see a truly wretched person with hands and feet cut off and begging on the street, so we should start here to get the feeling flowing. But failing to find such a person (and we should hope such sights never occur!), we still need an actual being to focus on as the object of our compassion.

Here he takes a perhaps surprising turn: start with a guilty criminal being led to his death. Buddhaghosa thinks that reflecting on this person, who may seem to be happy as he eats the delicacies of his last meal, will be an easy object of compassion. No one will think he is actually happy as he faces his executioner; anyone considering the horror of his impending death will react with dismay. Unlike many Western conceptions of compassion, there is no sense that compassion should be directed only toward innocents, those who do not “deserve” their suffering.

How To Truly Love, Page 126-127

Sympathetic joy is simply sharing with the joys of others, even your enemies.

It is your genuine delight when good things happen to others, even to your enemies. Sympathetic joy is the removal of envy and discontent, both of which can be ubiquitous and often largely unrecognized features of our lives.

Western moral sense theorists also note that we often sympathize with happy others. We can readily shift from a sour mood when arriving at a joyful party or hearing a friend’s good news. Parents enjoy unalloyed happiness at their children’s success. What would life be like if we expanded these feelings, and shared the pleasure of all beings? Buddhaghosa recommends starting with the fun-loving pal whose easy cheerfulness is infectious. Once the feeling flows, we can extend it to others, with each new embrace of joy breaking down the walls of our own narrow self-regard, envy, and discontent.

How To Truly Love, Page 142-143

The final Sublime Attitude is equanimity. This should never be confused with apathy.

Equanimity is to be built on the foundation of the other three – only when one has flooded all beings equally with lovingkindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy should one step back from these warm feelings and aim for a less reactive and more peaceful attention to beings. Since the first three attitudes involve sizing up the experiences of other beings with strong feelings about them, they involve judgments. Such judgments of “resentment and approval” are, Buddhaghosa says, “too close.” In contrast, equanimity involves stepping back and cultivating a feeling of impartiality, equality, and neutrality toward  others. It stays unruffled through the ups and downs of beings’ experience. And it reminds us of the Buddhist aspirations to achieve, perhaps above all, the freedom that comes from a truly peaceful mind.

How To Truly Love, Page 150-151

In Nichiren Buddhism, the ideal way to practice is demonstrated by Never-Despising Bodhisattva. Can we truly see the Buddha nature in all beings without manifesting Lovingkindness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy and Equanimity? Without the Four Sublime Attitudes, are we truly bowing to the inherent Buddha nature in all beings?

bowing

Tomorrow: Becoming the Very Manifestation-Body

steps

This year I’ve been exploring what it means to be a Nichiren Buddhist. I started by asking Google’s Gemini Notebook to help me explain Nichiren Buddhism to my grandchildren. In July I published 100 Reasons to Chant the Daimoku.  In August that list became The Diamond Path of Daimoku. And that Diamond Path spawned the 1 Minute Daimoku project.

That work prompted a visitor to tell me, “I don’t understand how chanting the Odaimoku substitutes for the Eightfold Path.” I answered with my Faith and Practice in Nichiren Buddhism, which included four Gemini Notebook discussions of what Nichiren taught about practice.  The final article included this:

Strict practice is not a works-based means to attain a future Buddhahood, but rather the active, necessary expression of a Buddhahood that is already inherently present within you.

But what constitutes an expression of that inherent Buddhahood? How should my life display this expression of Buddhahood?

For many years I have suggested Nichiren Buddhists should focus on demonstrating the Six Perfections – charity, morality, patience, vigor, meditation and wisdom. But my work in Gemini Notebook convinced me that Nichiren would not have focused there. For the Fall Higan week I explained why followers of Nichiren don’t need to adhere to these provisional teachings. (See “Nichiren Shōnin’s Teachings on the Six Perfections”)

And so I’m still trying to visualize how followers of the Lotus Sutra can express this inherent Buddhahood that is activated by chanting Namu-Myoho-renge-kyo.

This is all a way of introducing why I recently explored the “What Would Jesus Do?” movement. Not the 1990s evangelical fad, but the original Social Gospel movement spawned by Congregationalist minister Charles Sheldon’s 1896 bestselling novel “In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?”

There are many parallels between the end of the 19th century and today.

The visitor to the church who inspired the movement was a homeless man:

“I lost my job ten months ago. I am a printer by trade. The new linotype machines are beautiful specimens of invention, but I know six men who have killed themselves inside of the year just on account of those machines. Of course, I don’t blame the newspapers for getting the machines. Meanwhile, what can a man do? I know I never learned but the one trade, and that’s all I can do. I’ve tramped all over the country trying to find something. There are a good many others like me. I’m not complaining, am I? Just stating facts. But I was wondering, as I sat there under the gallery, if what you call following Jesus is the same thing as what he taught. What did he mean when he said, ‘Follow me?’ The minister said” here the man turned about and looked up at the pulpit “that it was necessary for the disciple of Jesus to follow his steps, and he said the steps were obedience, faith, love and imitation.”

In His Steps, Page 13

Henry Maxwell, the pastor in the novel who starts the “What Would Jesus Do?” crusade, offers this after the movement starts applying Christian ethics directly to social problems like poverty, labor exploitation, and economic inequality, seeking to improve the material conditions of the marginalized:

“What would Jesus do?” Suppose that were the motto, not only of the churches but of the business men, the politicians, the newspapers, the working men, the society people – how long would it take, under such a standard of conduct, to revolutionize the world? What was the trouble with the world? It was suffering from selfishness. No one ever lived who had succeeded in overcoming selfishness like Jesus. If men followed Him, regardless of results, the world would at once begin to enjoy a new life.”

In His Steps, Page 251

As a child in the 1950s and 1960s I attended the Pacoima Congregational Church in Los Angeles. This church still taught Charles Sheldon’s Social Gospel. On one memorable occasion the pastor of the church, Paul Kittlaus, organized a can drive to benefit the Delano Grape Strike workers. I collected cans and traveled with other members of the church to The Forty Acres, the community center headquarters of the 1965 strike in Delano, California. I don’t remember much about this event. I was just 13 years old. Still, it is possible this Social Gospel ideal lingers in me today as I consider how best to express my inherent Buddha nature.

In Sheldon’s book, a wealthy heiress who is considering how she can better direct her legacy to help the poor ponders:

“I think we are beginning to understand,” said Virginia, “the meaning of that command, ‘Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.’ I am sure I do not know all that He would do in detail until I know Him better.”

In His Steps, Page 153

In reading the book, I was struck by the realization that I don’t wonder what a Buddha would do. I mean, that’s what all of that provisional teaching was designed to instill in the Buddha’s followers.  And Henry Maxwell’s suggestion that “No one ever lived who had succeeded in overcoming selfishness like Jesus” overlooks that man who lived 500 years earlier in India, a man whose teachings may have inspired Jesus during the “Lost Years” between ages 12 and 30.

Tomorrow: What Would A Buddha Do? Part 2