With these writings, I hope to give practitioners of Nichiren Buddhism a leg up on what it took me more than twenty years to figure out.

I suspect that anyone hearing about Nichiren for the first time might have a reaction similar to mine back in 1968. Hearing about the chant was bizarre enough, and I had trouble seeing the relevance regarding what a thirteenth-century Japanese monk had to say about religion. Nonetheless, the promises given me about the effects of chanting were tantalizing, so I decided to give it a try. In those days, it was quite easy to receive a Gohonzon and after about six weeks of chanting, I received mine.
The individual Gohonzon is a scroll, about 18" x 10", that is unfurled and enshrined in what is called a Butsudan (Buddha box) in the room of your choice.

There was a lot of solemnity in the ritual of enshrining my Gohonzon and, after the Gohonzon was in place, a lot of congratulations. But I was fairly unimpressed.

As I mentioned, the Gohonzon has a lot of Chinese writing on it and, in those days, my main thoughts in sitting before it and chanting were that this was a truly alien practice. My main feeling was "I can't believe I'm doing this bizarre shit." Nevertheless I continued because there was enough positive reinforcement in terms of what was happening to me.

The Gohonzon definitely felt like something outside of me that I was chanting to. Even though I had long ago given up notions of a transcendent God and my own Jewish roots, I recall being ever so slightly plagued by the commandment, "Thou shalt have no other God before me." I was definitely praying to an alien object of worship, with no ties at all to my Judeo-Christian heritage, and it felt really strange and a little dangerous.

At the time, I was totally unaware of Nichiren's admonitions in "On Attaining Buddhahood," concerning the mistake of thinking or perceiving of the Buddha as being outside you. This applied to my friends in the Org as well -- we were all practicing Buddhists, but our mind-set was as Western as it could be. As far as we were concerned, we could have been praying to a big statue of the Buddha instead of a scroll.

We were looking for some force from without to deliver the goodies.

For nine years I continued to chant like this. During this time I watched many people fall by the wayside. The Org was giving instruction that truly exacerbated people's sense of imperfection instead of alleviating it.

By focusing on the organizational expedient that "you can always do more" (particularly for the Org), people were being led away from the fundamental Buddhist truth that perfection lies within and any attempt to develop it is both praiseworthy and a tremendous source of karmic reward.

In retrospect, I feel most fortunate that I continued to practice. I was definitely sensing that things were changing for the better in my life and, I suppose, the fact that I rather quickly made it into the hierarchy of the organization helped a lot too. (I don't know how long I might have kept going in this vein had I been subordinate to some of the bullshit I was handing out as Buddhism at the time.)

A few experiences along the way helped change my perceptions about my Buddhist practice and led me to where I am today. There have been internal epiphanies, seemingly independent of any external catalyst, except perhaps the Gohonzon.

One such incident happened only a few weeks after I had received my Gohonzon. I had enshrined it in an upstairs porch at my Aunt and Uncle's home in Washington, D.C., where I was living at the time. I was sitting there chanting and suddenly the entire environment changed. The room faded away and I suddenly felt as though I were kneeling outdoors in a Japanese robe in the middle of some field or rice paddy, chanting to my heart's content. Then, after just a few moments, I was transported back to the reality of my porch in Northwest Washington.

It was a vivid experience at the time and stays with me to this day -- just like seeing the Pieta or trying to dive off the New York subway.

What that experience did for me at the time was allow me, in a way quite distinct from the acid trip and other synthetic experiences I had had, to at least seemingly touch an alternative reality.

In those days I had an intellectual awareness of the concept of the eternal cycle of life expounded by Buddhism, but I had not really bought into it. This experience, however, gave me pause to ponder the possible fact of an earlier lifetime.

I have had one more experience like this. My wife and I were sitting with some friends in a lovely French bistro in Denver. We were discussing the erosion of civil rights we felt was occurring in the country. Anyway, just as in Washington twenty years earlier, there was a great fade-out during which I now felt as if I were a Jew in pre-1939 France, sitting in an outdoor café and discussing the threat of Nazism in a rather blithe and unconcerned fashion. Next thing I knew, I was back in Denver with my friends enjoying my coq au vin.

It seems like when people talk about past lives, they were princes or princesses, historical notables or excruciatingly poor. Neither of my two experiences gave me any insight into either my status or function in a previous life, but they have given me a sense of the unbroken chain that Buddhism says lies at the depths of my existence.

Nichiren writes that, for the most part, we cannot know what we were in a previous existence, but that a true sage can intuit his previous condition from the effects he is experiencing at present.

I don't pretend that these past-life glimpses -- if indeed that's what they were -- had any more significance than to pleasantly confirm present directions. People who know me will tell you that I'm not really prone toward the mystic or the intuitive. Nonetheless, I mention these experiences as incidents that helped to fundamentally deepen my insight into the Buddhist teachings.

In the spring of 1977, the event occurred that would forever change my life, the way I viewed Buddhism and the way I would approach the Gohonzon.

I was working for the Org's newspaper at the time and had been assigned to write an article explaining Nichiren's writing "The True Entity of Life." I was practicing Buddhism to the best of my ability, but was still fundamentally looking at the Gohonzon as some external source of benefit.

"The True Entity of Life" is an exceeding long and complex thesis in which Nichiren responds to a disciple's question about the phrase "true entity of all phenomena" mentioned in the Lotus Sutra. The disciple was a very intelligent priest himself and so Nichiren's response is quite theoretical and convoluted. Suffice it to say that I found the thesis totally incomprehensible. I looked to the translation of a lecture that had been given on this writing by one of the top Japanese lay leaders, hoping that it might provide a clue that might help me understand the "true entity of all phenomena." No such luck -- I was more lost than ever.

Finally, in desperation borne from days of chanting and an approaching deadline, I did the only thing I could think of: I smoked a joint. It was probably the first doobie I'd had in about eight years (no self-respecting leader in the Org would do drugs) and it did the trick. I just didn't care any more. I enjoyed the high and wondered why I'd deprived myself for so long.

Then, cognizant of the fact that tomorrow was still the deadline, whether I was high or not, I figured I'd better try and do something. I took the newspaper with Nichiren's writing and the Japanese leader's lecture and spread it all over the living room floor, and started looking for something that might at least give me an angle.

After literally crawling around on the floor for about thirty minutes, freaking out because I couldn't find anything, a sentence jumped off the page that hit me like a sledgehammer. It was from the lecture and it read, "All religions in the past regarded God or Buddha as a sacred, superhuman being."

All of a sudden, I realized what I had not comprehended: the notion that there is no distinction between we common mortals and the entities that go by the name of Buddha, God, Messiah, or whatever.

In the Org of the sixties and seventies, there was not much made of the Buddhist concept of immanence. In other words, even though we chanted and were told the Gohonzon represented the enlightened life within, we were still continually admonished to kowtow to the greatness of the Nichiren.

More significantly, we were told that, since Nichiren was dead, the only people who could possibly understand the real meaning of his teachings were either the priesthood or the Japanese lay leadership.

Sound familiar?

Despite it's best intentions (and I'm giving them a lot of credit here), the Org took the path of least resistance trodden by every religious organization since time immemorial, placing itself between its believers and the object of their beliefs as the arbiter of truth.

My one stoned evening with the Gosho shattered that fallacy forever and, from that moment on, my relationship with Nichiren, the Gohonzon and myself was transformed.

In that instant, for whatever reason, I finally understood with my entire being the tremendous error of my ways in looking to some kind of outside sage, saint or teacher to provide the answers for my life. I knew in an instant that I must only look to myself -- my own mind, my own feelings, and my own potentials -- for salvation.

This isn't to say that I immediately declared invalid all that which I was receiving in the way of external input. It is to say that I gained a fundamental trust in myself that I had never experienced before -- a taste, if you will, of the enlightenment Buddhism had been promising.

This new-found trust was not just a feeling. It was an awareness from which I began to take action. The first action was in writing a great study article on "The True Entity of Life." My insights resonated with people and, all of a sudden, I became more and more in demand to lecture on this and other of Nichiren's teachings. This marked the beginning of my rise to the top of the Org study department and set the stage for my second stay in Japan.

Whatever it was I had "cracked" about the Buddhist teachings, it seemed real and permanent and indeed allowed me to read and understand discourses and theses that, just a week earlier, were cloaked in mystery and esoterica to me. It was almost like magic.

The other thing that happened was in my direct and personal relationship to the Gohonzon.

In gaining this new-found awareness and trust in my own understanding, I immediately did something that was verboten in the Buddhist organization at the time: I began to seriously question the authority and direction of its leadership. I did not argue with their intent or their strategies. Rather, I simply realized they had very little to say to me. What I needed I had derived from Nichiren himself, both in his writings and his object of worship.

The line that I must seek guidance from my seniors in faith no longer held sway over me because I, for the first time, truly understood the admonitions of "On Attaining Buddhahood."

All these years, I had been seeking, and been encouraged to seek, wisdom from without and suddenly I realized I contained all the wisdom within.

Let's put it this way: I felt myself starting to cross that bridge I first glimpsed in 1968. Sure, I would have to make tremendous efforts, watch out for the pitfalls of arrogance and complacency, and make sure my thoughts and actions were rooted in the world of Bodhisattva. However, I could finally trust the gyroscope of my own internal faith and wisdom to keep me on course toward the kind of life I wanted, the other side of the bridge.

You have no idea how liberating this was and the final stroke of that emancipation began to occur as I sat before my Gohonzon, and it continues to this day.

Without the imagined figure of some organizational leader inserted between me and the object of worship, telling me how I should chant and what my aspirations should be, I began to make a much more direct connection to that scroll.

I am not saying that, in ten years of chanting, I had not felt anything before. Focus on anything long enough as a meditation point or object of worship and you will naturally develop a relationship with it. Whereas I originally viewed the Gohonzon as something strange and definitely separate from me, over the first few years of my practice I became accustomed to chanting to it and enjoyed the relationship I was developing.

Sometimes, when I was suffering, I would get really mad at it and blame it for my troubles, very much like you would rage at an unseen God as the source of your pain. Intellectually, I knew the law of karma made very clear who was the real source of my difficulties, but there is often a great disparity between what you know and what you feel.

Other times, when I was really in need, I would face the Gohonzon in the most respectful and submissive way possible, begging for the money or love or sense of mission that would ultimately fulfill me. Still other times, probably few and far between, I would sit and chant with a heart overflowing with appreciation for my life and what I had already received.

Even before my great realization in 1977, I knew enough to acknowledge that life can always be worse and you should appreciate what fortune you have.

I always, or generally, enjoyed chanting, but much of it was rote and much of what was going on in my mind was more rambling than I cared to admit. This was because I thought I was supposed to be concentrating on that scroll out there. I didn't know enough to be paying attention to my mind.

In his writings, Nichiren claimed to have placed his own life in the Gohonzon. As I began to chant following my great awakening, I decided to take him literally. I decided to face the Gohonzon as though I were facing Nichiren himself. I decided that my communication with Nichiren would have to be telepathic. I would throw my thoughts over to the Gohonzon and literally listen to my mind to see if anything came back.

You know what? It worked. It continues to work to this day.

Perhaps you can understand why this has proven so liberating. No longer was I dependent on anything or any person other than the Gohonzon itself to provide me the feedback I might need in terms of making life decisions. This does not mean that I had no use for the external world and the good people in it. It just means that finally I became fully able to trust my own judgment, knowing that it was coming from a place both objective and internal.

There comes a point where language truly fails to convey that which we wish to communicate. I'm not advising you to "accept Nichiren into your life" or "praise Buddha."

I am talking about a completely subjective interpretation from which I extrapolate nothing special or universal. First of all, for all I know, I am the only person who has had this experience. God knows there have been enough people, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike that have looked at me somewhat askance when I have mentioned that I feel like I'm dialoging with Nichiren.

Secondly, this type of experience is not any kind of prerequisite for Buddhist faith in general. It is just my experience. I present it only to give you my sense of how the Gohonzon and my relationship to it has evolved for me.

I might also note that I do not view Nichiren as my savior. He's more like a good buddy. The sutras teach that the Buddha has the attributes of parent, teacher and sovereign and, over the years, Nichiren has been all that to me.

More important, though, my sense of Nichiren, which has grown out of my chanting to the Gohonzon, has led me to believe that he was really a good guy. Not divine (except in what he taught) and not supernatural -- just a man who was so tapped into the deepest levels of consciousness that he was able to make them practicable for all humankind at a conscious level, communicating even across time and space through his creation of the Gohonzon.

*

Chapter 1: Looking for a Bridge

Chapter 2: Nichiren and the Lotus Sutra

Chapter 3: Defining Nam-myoho-renge-kyo

Chapter 4: The Benefits of Buddhist Practice

Chapter 5: A Focal Point for One's Faith

Chapter 6: The Gohonzon and Bodhisattva Practice

Chapter 7: A Personal Relationship with the Gohonzon

Chapter 8: Theoretical Underpinnings of the Gohonzon

Chapter 9: Theoretical Underpinnings of the Gohonzon, Part Two

Chapter 10: Gongyo, An Intensely Personal Symphony