Mary –
I have read your letter and my heart aches at the thought of the suffering you have endured in this lifetime.
While a good minister would attempt to arouse feelings of warmth, sympathy and support, in essence it is like taking a narcotic painkiller for an illness. It changes nothing.
I would like to offering to following;
The phenomenon of life remains unchanged regardless of what we believe. What is certainly verifiable through Buddhist practice is the law of cause and effect. We can change many things in our lives with Daimoku and faith in the Lotus Sutra. However the basic laws, old age, sickness, birth and death, remain an unchangeable constant.
Often times I feel that religion offers the illusion that somehow we can change the rules for ourselves in the larger scheme of our lives. Often people even behave this way. Religions that teach an enlightened afterlife at the expense of this life, I have noticed, seem to lead believers to behave dishonestly, or greedily towards each other. These kinds of behaviors are validated by the religion itself which may teach that only faith is needed to enter the afterlife, even if said faith is proclaimed in the crucial final moment. In essence no religion or religious philosophy goes un-abused. Genuine faith does not exist as an escape hatch from our bad behavior throughout our lives, no matter how much money we drop on the plate.
As a species, we all seem to be distracted with searching for easy ways out, ways in which we can circumvent the basic workings of life.
The question is not “why am I experiencing all this suffering?” rather "why is there so much human suffering in the world?" The answer is not simple, nor is it easy to face.
Why do you suffer? Simply because it’s a dirty job and someone has to do it. Suffering and pleasure, happiness and sadness, are integral aspects of the expression of human life. All life throughout the universe is expressed in varying degrees of yin and yang, ura and omote, dark and light. Without the dark life simply would be pointless.
Consider that if it is your karma from the remote past to be the holder of suffering in this life, then how you face your karma and how you transform your suffering could in fact have an effect on further suffering in all life.
This is totally theoretical, and I’m certain isn’t making you feel much better, but it is food for thought.
Chant Nam myoho renge kyo. Challenge your karma that is your karma created from throughout your existence. In doing so, perhaps you will serve as an active architect in the fate of mankind.
All my best wishes and sympathy for your loss,
Rev. Greg Dilley, Shidoshi
As I walked into the surf yesterday, under ominously grey skies, the first thing I noticed was that the water was cold. Monterey bay is always cold, but it seemed colder today. An upwelling of cold sea water from the Monterey canyon perhaps? The canyon, only a few mile off-shore from Moss Landing, drops to over 3 miles deep.
In waist-high water I turned and calmly kicked out away from shore. My goal was to simply freedive. No scuba tanks, no spear gun, just I, my lungs and my air.
Consecutive dives reached deeper and deeper, at first to 10 feet then 12, but it was not long before I realized there was a plankton bloom, the flourishing of puffy pillowing little clouds of green phytoplankton – everywhere. Visibility dropped quickly to 2 or 3 feet, and obscured even at that. Shapes and strange movement played tricks on my vision. My dive quicly deteriorated.
Had I been scuba diving I could have dropped below the bloom at 35 or 40 feet, but when freediving my normal depth limit is 40 feet.
Descending a column of seawater in these conditions is spooky. There is a primal fear reflex connected with the unknown that is still very strong in most humans. I considered terminating my dive, but I hadn’t dived all week and really wanted to be out there, so I continued.
The deeper I got, finally to 32 feet, the worse this feeling was until finally as I descended into the murky billowing green depths I was fighting a physical reflex of flight. Hand outstretched, the dark bottom of the ocean approached me terrifyingly slow. At this depth I found that the bloom cleared at around 30 feet, leaving one or two feet of visibility. For this I had to peer under the plankton, looking much like someone who had lost something under their sofa.
The tax collector prefers poor visibility for hunting sea mammals.
Fear of the unknown. That which protected our species in primordial times so easily becomes our spiritual straightjacket. Draw your own conclusions.
Rev. Greg, Freediver
Back in the early 80’s very shortly after I received the Gohonzon and had begun chanting and going to meetings, I began a path of experiencing the other side. NSA values contained many bads and goods at that time, they still do. Nonetheless I was consistently attending Nichiren Shu services in Campbell and began trying to make sense out of my earlier experience with meditation, something I practiced consistently when I was involved with Drum and Bugle corps.
My initial months learning Gongyo, chanting daimoku and attending meetings weekly was highly charged. I was very high and very happy and was feeling the positive effects of my new religious path. However true to my nature I needed to continue to explore the opposites in my effort to understand and embrace Nichiren Buddhism. I made arrangements to attend a Zen temple and meditate in a group, something I had never actually done in the past.
I went; I sat and participated in the service afterwards.
What I experienced afterwards is something I never forgot. The next day I felt as though someone had grounded out and shorted my batteries. I felt dead, as though I had been robbed of my daimoku high. Imagine how it feels when a heroin addict who has overdosed is injected with the narcotic-blocking drug Narcan; the high abruptly and instantly stops.
I have shared this experience throughout the years to a select few, specifically during my earlier years as a mainstream member of NSA, but to this day I still don’t have an explanation for what I felt.
One thing is very clear; I felt a distinct and unmistakable feeling in the days following my Zen experience.
What I would like to address is how we interpret our own experiences, and how the subjective experience of truth is so, well subjective.
Back in those days when I shared my experience with Zen it was in response to the evils of Zen Buddhism, the greatness of Nichiren’s Buddhism, and how I would never go back to the Zen temple. By the way, it was two days later that I changed my network name to antizen.
If one is predisposed to believing that Nichiren Buddhism in SGI is the end-all of Buddhism, this is a good experience, one which clearly illustrates the slander of one of the four dictums of Nichiren’s Buddhism, one of the four slanderous sects of Buddhism in Medieval Japan.
However if you on the other hand are of the opinion that the Soka Gakkai is a mind control cult you could easily make the case that my brush with Zen merely reset my cult mind, shorting out not the batteries of Daimoku but quieting the illusionary cult high I was experiencing at that time.
Someone who practices Zen Buddhism may chuckle and think “what a cultie, he should have kept going to the Zen temple”, while someone in SGI would agree with me at the time that Zen is truly evil and slanderous and my daimoku batteries had indeed been shorted out and then needed to be recharged with heartfelt daimoku and NSA activities….
What do you think? I’ve traveled a long way on my journey of self-discovery since then. I tend now to merely believe that quiet meditation and energetic daimoku chanted in large groups are simply two ends of the Buddhist spectrum of practice.
Rev. Greg, Shidoshi