A friend sent me a link to this post about how to chant an hour of daimoku per day:
* Break it down - Just start chanting 1 minute, then another, then another
* Do it Now... Do it Now... Do it Now
* Force myself to chant - Use fear and Anger to fuel myself to chant. .
Another friend and I have been talking about the difference it makes in our lives to chant 20 or 30 min. per day....
She said that it was hard at first to get herself to meet her 30 min. goal, sometimes forcing herself to get her minutes done by midnight.
I bristle at "forced" (self-forced) daimoku, but I agree it's the only way to get yourself back in a regular groove of chanting.
My friend explained it this way: The only way to get really good at something and become an expert is to practice. Approach chanting the same way you would approach learning to play a musical instrument or any other skill, and practice it regularly and seriously.
Repetitive practice requires self-discipline. I'm stating the obvious, I know, but it's often good to review the fundamentals of Buddhist practice. It's common to trip out on doctrinal discussion and theory, and neglect the basics.
5 comments
I don't do well with quotas and pressure. I also question the need/value of chanting for a specific time period each day. Even avid runners vary their routine to prevent injury. Just a couple thoughts off the top of my head.
Hola,What an interesting topic. When I was a new member in NSA, chanting was very hard for me. It was like eating sugar by the spoonful. Now, that was some rotten karrma with the Gohonzon!! And, it was, too. I battled with that for years.One thing I learned is when I sat there and my butt seemed on fire and I REALLY didn't want to chant, it was like Fudo Myo-o, you know, the entity on the middle right on SGI Gohonzons? He is sitting there in the midst of flames, holding his sword up, "There will be justice, we WILL change this!!" So, I came to understand, when I felt like that, that's exactly when I needed to sit there and tuff it out. Owie!! But, it would pass and some crummy thing would leave my life permanently.Oh, in the early years, my life was so dicey and such hell, I HAD to chant or I wouldn't have made it. All this desperate daimoku. Finally, that changed, my money fortune, job fortune, whatever, changed and there were lots of members to chant for that I cared about. At this point, there was a lot to chant about that wasn't personal drama so much, although I still had plenty of issues, but other peoples' well-being and growth, too. Where to start?Then I learned, "Well, look at your heart", as it was paining me. That's how I came to know my Buddha nature, which is located around, or to the left of, my heart, it seems to me, and I think Nichiren mentioned this. I would say, "Heart, what is paining you the most?" This was always a major surprise. This, that, others, animals, me, the planet, in no particular order except true urgency. "Hmmm," I thought. When it occurred to me that I could uncover and deal with the otherwise sometimes confusing and invisible sufferings of my greater life, I could get into chanting daimoku when I didn't have an obvious sword threatening me or, Ho Hum, the clock to pacify.At this point, chanting when I was personally fairly comfortable got a LOT more interesting. Once I learned this, I shared it with the members who had this issue (all of us) that I was helping to practice. "How long should I chant?" they would almost invariably say. "Well," I would tell them, until your heart is no longer 'painy'. That might be 5 minutes or it might be 3 hours, given your personal situation" and I would tell them of the butt-on-fire Fudo phenomenon.Facing one's karma head-on, dealing on a consistent basis with the Truth, whether one likes it or not (NOT!!), that takes real courage, I know. That was a major piece of constructing the "Ship to Cross the Sea of Suffering" in my determination and life and I really have to thank the training I received in NSA in my early practice to drive that "ichinen" with information of my mission, my Buddha nature, and what the Mystic Law wanted me to do. And, so I prospered, helping them, and cleaning up me.These days, after 40 years of practice, I chant even more, in the 20% or so of my mind that I am not using for other things. I had heard long ago that Mr. Ikeda did this and I thought, "How is that possible? Sounds boooring!! Also, tiring." But, now my daimoku is so much more effective, as I have cultivated goodness, with it and it is satisfying to send it to the ills of my encounters with the social and environmental realms.So much to do, so little time,Armchair
Fujioka's famous advice: "Chant until you can smile."
Like many, I have promoted and participated in many a daimoku toso. Ussually, out toso's were an hour to an hour and a half long. We also had many ten hour toso's for big campaigns.Over the course of my practice, my unofficial, yet close count over 35 years is approximately 75 million daimoku. There were many long stretches of time when troubles beset me that I would chant ten hours a day. It doesn't take long to fill up a daimoku chart that way, but how productive is chanting ten hours at a stretch? What quality of concentration can be maintained? Frankly, such efforts are more a desperate show of faith than the karmic jaws of life.It seems to me that chanting to feel fulfillment, peace, or until satisfied is superior to the endless, painful austerity we have all experienced from time to time.What is better, chanting five minutes in the zone or chanting an hour, more mindful of feet that have fallen asleep, unfocused, then refocused thought until some numerical goal is achieved? There was a time when I applied the method of "five more minutes," when chanting. There is something to say about challenging one's lazy nature and chanting an hour or two, snapping your wandering mind into sharp focus, and then there is the liberating daimoku where you chant until that connection is made and transformation achieved.I no longer inflict that painful spiritual austerity on myself and chant until I feel clean inside. This approach feels more natural than the regimented athletic training approach.To each their own, but even tens of millions of mechanical daimoku don't seem as effective as passionate, empowered daimoku from the heart. For those who like the triathilon approach, more power to you. My real transition occured only when I put away the clock and connected with the mantra.Gakkoren
Thanks for your thoughtful, informed response, Gakkoren.I wanted to follow up about this because last night I touched base again with this same friend, the one pushing herself to chant 30 minutes a day. She was facing a pretty serious crisis, which prompted her to push herself.She said that she chanted a half-hour a day for about five days, then all of a sudden, her circumstances shifted dramatically, and she simply no longer had time to chant that much. She said that the crisis had virtually resolved itself. She said it felt as if her life suddenly accelerated.How many times have I heard stories like this? A little bit of concentrated daimoku -- then, out of nowhere, something wow happens.I've heard it almost as many times as I've heard about people chanting for hours and months and years, yet feeling that nothing really changes or improves.So, yeah, chanting can become the "endless, painful austerity" Nichiren warned us about.Even so, there's a lot to be said for cultivating the personal discipline to chant regularly, do gongyo, and study Buddhist texts and commentaries -- practice, in other words. Practice is especially important when things are difficult and breakthroughs seem a long way away. Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth, hunker down and endure.Everyone wants to chant empowered daimoku rather than mechanical daimoku. But how can you really tell the difference if you haven't chanted a lot of both?