OKAY!
Okay, I’m out of the sick bed and my health is mended. Hark! What was that? An audible gasp of relief from the worried readers of this blog? Hmm? Must have been the wind. Or maybe that dragon (the one that lives in a cave and when it breaths out wind results) is relieved; “whew!”
WOW! There’s been a lot of writing happening on the comment section of the last blog since I got sick. I’m going to try and throw a blanket over all this conversation. Not a wet one I hope.
NANCY
Nancy and I have given each other Carte Blanc to say what ever we please to each other. We talk to each other quite a bit. Some may say that this is because of a bond we formed in the infinite past. But there just isn’t any real proof of either of us having had an infinite past, so I’m going to say that it’s from me hooking up with Greg on FWP and then Nancy asking me to MC his memorial and us becoming fast friends after. So when she calls me a “dumb ass”, I hear “cupcake.”
Everybody else who has commented here I only know from his or her comments.
This particular dialogue in the comment section has been a healthy reminder of what I believe, how I got to the point of believing what I believe, areas where I still have doubts and why.
“DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH?” Chris Tucker to Jackie Chan in “Rush Hour”
Between the capacity of the people, the place, and the time, Nichiren usually picked time as the most important and hardest to fathom for sages. I don’t believe in prophets: Shakyamuni, Muhammad, Nostradamus, etc. That’s pretty tough for a guy practicing something during a time that was supposedly predicted to become. I once wrote about Shakyamuni and posed the question of why the three time periods, the five 500 years time periods, and people argued it was all kinds of things, metaphors being one, which weren’t true because it was a linear prediction and it really doesn’t matter WHAT the prediction depends upon because that was never the point. The point was WHY predict and why linear. Those points kept getting lost in everyone’s efforts in trying to JUSTIFY the prediction according to Nichiren.
The same thing has happened in the last blog and especially during the comments.

So just to clarify:

I DO NOT PRACTICE WITH ANY SEPARTION BETWEEN MY EFFORTS TOWARDS ABSOLUTE HAPPINESS IN MODELING THOSE EFFORTS ON THE SO CALLED BELIEF AND UNDERSTANDING CHAPTER OF THE LOTUS SUTRA AND THE ESSENSE OF THE INTENTION OF THE REST OF THE SUTRA BECAUSE ACCORDING TO THE LOTUS SUTRA, REGARDLESS OF WHERE MY FAITH ORIGINATES, I STILL RECEIVED THE GIFT, WHICH MAY NOT BE THE GIFT I EXPECTED, OF ENLIGHTENMENT.

The theoretical and essential cannot exist outside the relationship between each other. There is no separation. Nichiren revealed the essence of what we need to do to be absolutely happy IN THIS LIFETIME, DISTILLED in form. It either works or it doesn’t. So far I haven’t been disappointed in it. But someone has predicted that I will be. And you know how I feel about prophets.

QUOTING NICHIREN
Quoting Nichiren will lead to a couple of things.
One is that in looking for that cool quote from some page that you told yourself you could use to explain the unexplainable, “How do you like me now numb nuts?!”, you get to revisit the works themselves and all those cool marginal notes that seemed to make sense when you wrote them.
The other is that when someone quotes back in rebuttal; “I gotchur quote right here! Merry Christmas fucker!”, you end up re-reading the passages to see if the other guy’s quote is not about what you’re arguing. So you end up doing some reading which is healthy. In the end you need to remind yourself of when and where Nichiren lived, who he was addressing and why. Also that somebody else took words that have no direct corresponding counter parts in modernity and tried to make them make sense. Nichiren’s writings are a subjective guideline. (That may piss some people off, tee hee)
DAITRIBE
I stand corrected. I should not have used the word “DIATRIBE” as it is pejorative and inappropriate for a comment section. The person I used it about is “adamant”. He also refers to himself as “compassionate”, which is of course, religious jargon, and that I MEANT to be pejorative. Personally, I waver between “dumb ass” and “smart ass”. The only consistent quality I have is “ASS”. It’s also my best quality. There is plenty of room to move vertically.
ANDY ROONEY
As an “ass”, I’m going to do a little riff as my favorite curmudgeon Andy Rooney:

“You know what I hate? I hate indicative Buddhists. You know the type: they dress like what they think a Buddhist is supposed to dress like; they speak like what a Buddhist is supposed to speak like; they act in a way that you can see them acting in a Buddhist way. Their sentences always seem to have a metaphor containing words like “fruit” or “gift” or “flame” but they really aren’t talking about apples or freebies or butane: “Reaping the gift of the fruit of the flame of the gift.” From my understanding a Buddha is a regular guy or a gal, yeah girls too, who comprehends life in a profound way that only another Buddha would understand. That’s a little cliquey, don’t you think? Is that why they think they need to act like a Buddhist? The original person who everyone calls THE BUDDHA wasn’t a Buddhist. He was an enlightened person. His followers all got together and tried to come up with some way to identify themselves as his followers and started Buddhism. Which meant they all felt that they had to modify their behavior and that became indicatively problematic . Of course, I hate indicative Amish, Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, and Christians too. Maybe it’s because it’s the religion that makes them act different and stand out in the societies they socialize in. They remind me of my teenagers, trying to figure out who they are and identify with a group by dressing and behaving like the group. Of course, as a parent I’d keep an eye on how much individuality they could display at any given time because it came in the form of looking and acting like everybody else in the group. I’d say, “No you can’t get a tattoo, not while your living under my roof.” Or, “No you can’t change your name to Daisaku. Not until you’re 18.” Maybe Frank Zappa had the right idea. Name your kids so they purposely stand out with a built in sense of individuality like the song “A Boy Named Sue”. I don’t know Moon Unit, Diva, or Ahmet but I know their brother Dweezil. (Could you pick that up for me, I just dropped a name.) Great guy. He’s had a very interesting life. Now he too is a father with two little units of his own. And you know what’s really funny? That’s not his real name. If you like apples, reap the fruit of that gift.”

I’ll be back soon visiting Don Quixote and what it takes to battle windmills.