Kempon Hokke

Taking Responsibility and Actual Proof or the SGI, Kempon Hokke, Bruce Maltz, ARBN and Breaking the Harmonious Unity of Believers (part 1 revised and final)

Buddhsm is about taking responsibility for everything that happens within us and to us, both good and bad, and without a single exception. This is the difference between the modern Kempon Hokke and the SGI. We don't just pay lip service to this phenomenological reality taught in the Lotus Sutra, we live and breath this reality with awareness and comprehension. How are we able to accomplish this profound realization of Buddhist truth? Only by means of a correct faith and practice in the Lotus Sutra, the teachings of Nichiren Daishonin and staunch unity.

Let me first give you my experience unretouched by an SGI or Kempon Hokke leader or priest. I have been chanting the Daimoku off and on [mostly on] variously with faith in the Gohonzon, the SGI, Daisaku Ikeda, Nittatsu Shonin Nichiren Shoshu, the Dai-Gohonzon, Nichiren as True Buddha, Shakyamuni as Original and Eternal Buddha, the Lotus Sutra, the Kempon Hokke and Bruce Maltz for 34 years. The time spent is not as important as the sequence of events or the utterness of the reality (Myoho renge kyo).

I left the SGI in 1997 to join what I thought was the Kempon Hokke but was really the Sangha of Bruce Maltz. I began to post on ARBN under the tutelage of Bruce Maltz. At the time my life, my families life, and our circumstances were as much a mixed bag as my beliefs. I had begun to earn a very good living, lived in a big house but had a headstrong disobedient daughter and son. My wife's mental and physical health was a mess.

On ARBN, I attacked everyone in sight like a rabid dog, along with my mentor Bruce Maltz: The SGI; the Nichiren Shoshu; the Nichiren Shu; the Honmon Butsuryu Shu; and various Kempon Hokke adherents who either opposed Bruce Maltz such as Graham Lamont or those who weren't in total accord with Bruce's doctrines, such as Steve Polito. We schemed and plotted. My life became evermore chaotic and filled with actual proof of the negative variety. My son who never studied but got a 1400 on his SAT's hooked up with a young girl orphan we brought into our house and dropped out of high school. My daughter hooked up with some very bad and dangerous men, although she was only 12 years old. My salary was halved in one year. No matter what we did to the garden and the beautiful flower trees nothing would grow and the beautiful flower trees failed to blossom and bear fruit and just died. This despite chanting three hours a day of daimoku for two months and two hours a day of daimoku for three months. My wife's health continued to deteriorate, my mother broke her femur, the dog went crazy but yet, I only had a vague awareness that I might be doing something wrong and continued attacking, kamikaze like whatever and whomever Bruce didn't like. And since Bruce didn't like them, even if I didn'e see them as a threat or even if I liked them, I attacked them mercilesslessly.

Things got worse. Some people actually fell for Bruce [like me] and to a lesser extent, for his vision of the "Kempon Hokke" and Buddhism, in general. I received several Nichiren Shoshu and SGI Gohonzons and burned them. Bruce began to teach that the Opening of the Eyes Ceremony for Gohonzon was nothing other than the invention of priests to accrue more power over the people. He began to download, copy, and laminate the Prayer Gohonzon and he sent me one of them which I didn't enshrine because I loved the Nichiren Nissho Gohonzon I received from Rev. Kubota. I eventually gave the Prayer Gohonzon to a new believer. My wife Nancy bought a statue of Shakyamuni Buddha in Chinatown and I still embraced the SGI teachings that statues of Shakyamuni were evil. I tried to take the statue away from my wife but she held onto it like a baby, carried it around wherever she went, and I had to relent. Thankfully, we still have this statue centered in front of the Gohonzon.

Soon, my salary agian dropped by a third, we could no longer afford the big house, my wife continued to drink and failed to watch her diet, my cats were getting killed left and right and my daughter began going out with a Blood. Nonetheless, then, I didn't even have a vague feeling that what I was doing might be wrong and I continued to attack and attempt to destroy the faith of anyone we deemed not a true believer [in retrospect, in Bruce and Stephanie Maltz]. ARBN became even more ugly and I liked it that way, more people would become disenchanted with the SGI and the Nichiren Shoshu and would join us. I thought I was practicing the Lotus Sutra and the teachings of Nichiren Daishonin, yet had this fear, real fear that Bruce would reject me if I didn't tow the line and then I would have no where to go.

Things got worse, much worse.

Posted by markrogow at May 13, 2008 01:17 PM