The horrific catastrophes in Japan have prompted many to pray, meditate, chant, and donate for those who are suffering. Sadly, other people are displaying their smug misunderstanding of the Buddhist concept of karma.
Barbara O'Brien explains Karma and Japan. Also, you might want to check out this post.
The Buddhist priest Nichiren is often tarred as a crazy man who claimed that earthquakes are caused by bad human behavior. He did make those claims, as The Endless Further discusses. Nichiren wasn't alone in his views at the time, of course.
I can excuse Nichiren's ignorance. He didn't have benefit of the scientific knowledge we have today. I am less forgiving of Nichiren's contemporary heirs who insist that "if Nichiren said it, it must be true."
On the Nichiren Shu message board, there was some discussion of this topic. (I recommend this post.)
As Nichiren's heirs, it falls to us to show how his core teaching of daimoku is a vital and beneficial practice for modern society. We're doing him a disservice if we repeat his mistakes and parrot his incorrect assumptions about geology.
And I say that as a somewhat reluctant heir of Nichiren. I don't like the fanatical, smug and just plain wrong interpretations of karma that many of his followers champion. I don't want to be associated with it.
So I hereby proclaim on behalf of Nichiren:
People don't cause earthquakes. Karma does not cause earthquakes. Stupidity does not cause earthquakes.
Can we all stop believing in a simplistic system of reward and punishment, please? Thank you.
2 comments
To get a sense of how small the planet is, check out this NYTimes graphic showing the projected movement of the radioactive plume from Fukushima to SoCal:https://www.nytimes.com/intera...Lesson One of the Lotus Sutra: There is no safety in the threefold world. We are in a burning house. Dogmatic belief doesn't make it safer.Chanting daimoku doesn't make it safer. The point of chanting daimoku as Nichiren intended is not to try to put out the flames -- not to tame the temporal/physical world by somehow doing all the right things and thinking all the right things to turn planet earth into the Buddhaland eventually.The point is to recognize that the Buddhaland exists concurrent with peril in each moment and to enter it immediately. That's real esho funi.Buddhism is not about storing up "good karma" to cash in one day for a ticket to Buddha paradise.At least, I'm pretty sure it's not.
Your comment reminds me of something one of my buddies says: "You can't fix samsara."The nature of samsara is that it's always going to be samsara -- the unawakened state of suffering. You can buy yourself a shiny new car and live in a beautiful house far from any earthquake zone and think you have escaped the sufferings of birth, old age, sickness and death. But you're still in samsara -- we all are -- no matter how comfortable we make ourselves "in the threefold world."Even if the effects of the radiation plume sweeping over LA will be negligible, it's still a reminder that we can't insulate ourselves from suffering, no matter how sincerely we believe otherwise.