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