Well, last night I showed up at the new Burbank SGI-USA Activity Center for the annual Learning Review. For those of you who may not be familiar with Nichiren Buddhism, the pillars of this practice are faith, practice and study. The "study" part is tough for a lot of people - not for me - hell, I went to law school for sport. But there are those who are averse or allergic to studying, and that creates a real challenge. I mean, it really is a lot of fun to study and to learn, but how do you get people past the horrible spectre of a spectacled fourth-grade teacher, droning on about good penmanship? How do you get people through the door of learning so that they will want to keep coming back for more?
Anyway, the SGI has, I believe, a rather noble history of Buddhist study. The organization was founded by an educational reformer, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, and the Gakkai has founded a number of educational institutions, including Soka University.
For many years the SGI-USA (then called NSA) had "levels" in its study department, from entry level to post-graduate level. In order to pass from one level to another, members had to take sit-down exams, with proctors and monitors and exam books and all that high-stress stuff that people hate to subject themselves to. Me, I don't mind that stuff, but that's me. Over the past few years, the SGI-USA has moved into a rhythm of holding a"Learning Review" (dumping that terrifying word, "exam") every October. This is the actvity which I attended last night.
Last night was a "make-up" for those people who weren't able to take the Learning Review at their district level meetings. The activity was sort of hosted by one of my area leaders, who is also staff at SGI-USA Plaza. After gongyo (evening prayers), she cheerfully announced that she was giving us all "full points" just for showing up. Geez, I wish my undergrad professors had done that....
It took about half an hour for everyone to answer the multiple choice and short-essay questions in the review booklet. After this was over, we went over our answers and talked about the questions. Nobody had to hand their work in, and we all graded our own papers. All in all, a relaxed and fun study experience. I certainly enjoyed it. Did anyone else here participate in the learning Review? If so, what was your reaction?
Byrd in LA
I did it on Saturday. I thought it was pretty easy. We didn't go over the whole thing together, we just self graded. Certain questions were suggested for discussion and we had a good discussion. Only one thing stood out for me, and that was probably from reading your blog. There was a question about following the true teaching causing obstacles to arise. I said that obstacles are always there no matter what you do and that having obstacles arise was no show of truth. I said, "If I tried to get you all to worship an invisible man on the moon, there would be a lot of objections and obstacles to my preaching, but that wouldn't mean there really is an invisible man on the moon that we should all worship." Everyone agreed that there were obstacles no matter what you tried to do. And they agreed that obstacles didn't mean a teaching was true. Yet they adamantly maintained that within the realm of Nichiren's buddhism this was true. At that point who could be bothered trying to argue. That was probably my last meeting anyway.
Posted by: clown hidden at November 2, 2007 03:09 PM