Actually I got back from vacation last Monday, but this if the first day I've had something concrete to say that I felt belonged on this blog. I just finally had some time to read what "clown hidden" wrote on my blog. I'm glad he wrote there, but I'm still on vacation on that subject. My mind right now has other things on it than the minutae of what Nichiren did or did not believe. How can I be more right or more wrong than he is? I don't have any way of knowing.
What really piqued my interest was an old subject. One that got my interest even before I got into Buddhism. I've always loved King Arthur, the knights of the Round Table, Robin Hood. At the same time I always loved the Jewish and Hebrew heroes, Solomon and David, Moses and Joseph, etceteras.... Now this movie has come out "The Da Vinci Code." I'm planning to see it. Nichirens teachings about esotericism, plus what I've learned by following up on what he said, puts this material into a whole different mode from the way I used to see it. For one thing my heroes have been turned upside down.
Richard the Lion Hearted, Edward the first, Knights of the Temple? Masonry, well I've been around them all my life. My Grandfather was a Mason, though I was never initiated into what he knew. My Father was a DeMolay. Those stories get put into a whole different perspective in the context of underground paganism and gnosticism, religious intolerance, authoritarianism, and persecution; and the attraction of magic.
I used to think that there were no parrallels between Shingon, for instance, and Christian religion. But then the recent works fairly much show that many of the same ideas thrived in an underground of Christianity and "heresy." No parrallels between Buddhism in general and Judeo-Christian heritage -- but that is not true. Almost everything but the Lotus Sutra has been propagated before as part of the religious underground. Although lacking legal continuity the heritage has mostly been oral in the west, a haunt of rich and powerful people with too much time on their hands, chemists seeking power and magic, and an excuse to form secret clubs with secret handshakes and levels of initiation and sometimes BS. Amazing stuff, but thanks to Nichiren I'm a bit unimpressed. Now I wish I'd known my Grandfather better.
Repression doesn't always mean that ideas are valid. Suppression rarely works in stamping out ideas, it just drives them "underground" where they mix, get lost and confused with other ideas, and often loose their integrity. King Edward expelled Jews from England. A plot accused Jews of using the blood of children to make Matzah and was used to drive observant Jews from England -- as a pretext. And it was illegal to practice Judaism for 300 years afterwards. Years later the Church launched a horrible crusade, first against the Cathars and later against the Knights Templar. Both merely went underground. The Jews mostly left, but a few may have stayed, living underground in London. The inquisition was first directed against the Cathars and then against the Jews.
Why did these things happen? What is the dynamic that drives religious intollerance, murder, and genocide? More importantly, what can we do to keep it from happening again? The massacres of the Jews in England, prefigured worse massacres in the rest of Western Europe and Spain. The crusades against the Cathars prefigured the destruction of the Moorish/Jewish presence in Spain. And all of this seems to have prefigured the horrible wars of the "Reformation" and the early 20th century. The Holocaust of WWII wasn't the first one for Jews. I pray it will have been the last one but the murderous confusion that drove it is still present in this world.
I still think that the message of the Lotus Sutra has the key to ending these cycles. However, not as a seperate religion. The first half of the Lotus Sutra is the "trace teaching" which teaches the integration of the truth; the second is the origin teaching which teaches the origins of all great religion. But Buddhists have rarely been willing or able to practice the Lotus Sutra in a vacume. And what passes for Buddhism in most cultures is neither purely Buddhism nor purely non-buddhism. Tantra predates Buddhism. We find it in underground Christianity/Johanism. "Hinayana" barely seperates itself from the Hindu millieu it draws from. And most "Mahayana" religions are a mix of Bon, Shinto, or other nativist religions and Buddhism. So the Lotus Sutra is the highest teaching, but teaching Buddhism as a seperate religion seems a waste of time. Where is the seperation? I see the path as teaching the lotus Sutra as a paradigm shifting approach to religion. But this is a revolutionary idea needing development. Anyone want to run with it?
I started chanting with the hope that with Daimoku there'd be automatic Kosenrufu. Is Daimoku enough to prevent holocausts from happening again? My arguments with fanatic Nichirenists (starting with me) have taught me that Nichiren might have been right about most everything, but that Nam Myoho Renge Kyo is a tool and no panacea. Daimoku chanting fools helped drive the Japanese Fascists between World War I and World War II. Daimoku chanting fools have proven that the Lotus Sutra is true, but that simply chanting its title without putting the principles of Buddhism to practice is worse than not practicing Buddhism at all. All that Bushido and Shinto syncretism plus neo-Christian, neo-Zen etceteras ideas got in the way of a clear path and a clear teaching for them.
Buddhism is not going to work out following the example of Christianity. Indeed the narrative of Christianity as initially an Western parrallel to Buddhism is more compelling than the counter-narrative as an "egyptian religion". It's neither, but that too is a set of ideas needing development. Anyone else have ideas?
So how do we propagate the message of the Lotus Sutra? I'm asking now. I've got some ideas, they haven't congealed.
Chris
Posted by cholte at May 22, 2006 09:18 PM