Chapter 4 from Nam-myoho-renge-kyo: A Personal Exploration of the Wonderful Buddhist Mantra by Cris Roman.
If you were to chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo I know beyond any shadow of a doubt, you would see a definite effect if you simply persisted for several weeks, chanting ten or fifteen minutes each day at your leisure.
As I said earlier, it sounds too good to be true.
There are definitely more things that you need, and hopefully want, to understand about Buddhism, of course.
Before you get your spider sense tingling too much in anticipation of all kinds of constraints and provisos to come, you should know that I have already told you the core, essential teaching. From here on in, everything is an add-on.
Although I'll probably sound like a used-car salesman, I want to distinguish add-ons from options.
Add-ons allow you to gradually deepen and more fully integrate your Buddhist practice and the effects of that practice. Add-ons are essential to the long-term continuation of Nichiren's teaching.
Options may not be essential but they can enhance the character of the Buddhist experience.
What exactly is the Buddhist experience? What happens to you when you chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo?
All human beings are unique in both their experience and potential. Therefore the Buddhist experience may differ from one person to the next. Add to this the fact that there is nothing more personal for any human being than the events and changes that attend to his or her religious belief.
Your religious belief, or lack thereof, determines how you think and how you function. How you define life and death, joy and sorrow, important and insignificant, the people and the things around you -- all these derive from your fundamental take on what the world and the universe is all about.
In general, the "Buddhist experience" is the process of enlightenment and Nichiren's promise that it can be attained in this lifetime. The real benefit of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo lies in actualizing progress toward enlightenment.
I, along with tens of thousands of others, was told that chanting would bring me whatever I wanted and thereby prove itself. I was told to chant for what I wanted and it would come. In my case, as you already know, I wanted to get laid and, at the time, some cheap marijuana would have been appreciated as well.
I have known people who have chanted for money, sex, health, their loved ones, an altruistic spirit, a Lexus and even one who wanted to meet Elvis (after he died). Some got what they wanted and some didn't. I did get a shopping bag full of grass and I already told you about Donna.
But what of the people who didn't get what they wanted? Obviously, the lion's share of them stopped chanting, but many would come back day after day, week after week, asking people more experienced why chanting wasn't "working" for them.
To make a long story short, I believe that what happened in telling people about Buddhism was that a concept known as "benefit" got grossly misinterpreted.
The sutras, as well as Nichiren and his followers, talk about the "benefit" of the practice. Without going into more Japanese terminology, suffice it to say that there are many different Japanese terms for the one concept of benefit. The Japanese have more than a dozen words alone that mean "human being," depending on age, sex, status, or whatever. The Japanese language, it seems to me, attaches many qualifiers or descriptives onto single-word nouns that the uninformed listener or reader is just not aware of.
Anyway, the sutras talk about the benefit of the Buddhist practice and tend to categorize those benefits into two types: conspicuous and inconspicuous.
Conspicuous benefits are said to occur on two occasions: when a person first begins to practice and when a practitioner is in danger. These conspicuous benefits are notable for a couple of reasons. First, they seemingly occur in the absence of any corresponding cause. In the case of the new Buddhist, this can be encouraging because the benefits may be recognized as having stemmed from his or her new-found practice.
In the case of one whose life is in danger, the source of encouragement is self-evident, i.e. he or she is still alive. Secondly, conspicuous benefits are relatively uncommon and not considered to be particularly significant from the broad Buddhist perspective.
Inconspicuous benefit is believed to be the greatest reward and lies at the heart of the Buddhist practice.
Ah, I can hear you now: "By labeling their main benefit as inconspicuous, these crafty Buddhists essentially align their teaching with all of those who would have you believe in an intangible God on the basis of unanswered prayers." Not quite.
Inconspicuous benefit does not mean that which is unseen or unnoticed. Rather it indicates that which develops inconspicuously, accruing a bit at a time until it hits you over the head. Inconspicuous benefit is said to provide the greatest joys and lessons of all during the course of the Buddhist practice and ultimately prepares the believer for the greatest inconspicuous benefit of all: the attainment of enlightenment.
What distorted the teaching of Nichiren's Buddhism to Americans in the sixties, seventies and eighties was that there was a sincere, yet naïve, attempt to spread the teaching to as many people as possible.
Novice practitioners were given the impression that Nam-myoho-renge-kyo was a magic phrase that would bring them whatever their little hearts desired. When the magic didn't occur, many people stopped chanting. If only they had been encouraged on the basis of Nichiren's writings and the type of experience he was actually saying would occur, I believe there would be hundreds of thousand of people in the United States chanting today.
Rather than crying over spilled milk, however, what I want to do is put all of this on the record so that these errors will be perpetuated no longer. I will not tell you that you can get anything you want by chanting.
Hell, even assuming that we know what we want and what's perfect for each of us, it goes without saying that our notion of what's perfect, given our current state of (un)enlightenment, is in itself imperfect.
What I will tell you, at the risk of sounding redundant is that chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo will, within a short period of time (I'm talking about three months here) have a profound, recognizable and attributable impact on any human life.
Over the long term, i.e. the span of one's life, this practice will deliver on the Buddhist promise of enlightenment or, in Western terms, make one feel as though he or she has arrived in "heaven on earth."
This latter is quite important, for Nichiren's teachings deal little with what happens after death, with the exception of admonishing his believers to make wise decisions which lead to fortune in the next life.
In Buddhism, death and the ensuing state of non-interactive existence are viewed as natural recharging points for a life that is eternally an integral part of the infinite universe. Just as sleep refreshes us for the next day's activities, so does death allow a revitalization of the active energy force so depleted by the act of living.
Most of us do not go to sleep at night filled with dread and angst in anticipation of what the sleeping state holds in store. This is because we have some conscious understanding and experience of the natural cycles of waking and sleeping. In the same way, Buddhism teaches that a growing awareness of the true nature of life -- combined with the experience of the correctness of that understanding -- will similarly dispel any fear or question about death that we may have. We are free then to deal with the events of living while not wasting our precious time worrying about what death may or may not hold in store.
So how come I kept chanting?
I was fortunate in the experience of conspicuous benefits involving sex and drugs. Do I mean to imply that the chanting placed a woman in my bed and marijuana under it? No, what I am saying is that the timing got better -- just as with Nichiren down at the beach. Chanting put me a little more in sync with the world around me so that I was better able to take advantage of opportunities that arose.
I should note that I did not see it that way at the time. In those days I was content to believe that Nam-myoho-renge-kyo brought me a woman and some weed. It was enough to keep me going.
What kept me going, at least in the early years, was a kind of one-two punch that sustained my chanting. First, there was the definite sense that I had found my long-sought-after bridge to the internal reality I learned existed on that long-ago New York morning.
Second, there was a real sense of mission, most of it admittedly artificially programmed by the organization (some would say cult) I had unwittingly joined, which kept me feeling as though I were doing something important.
However, there was a third, most important factor that kept me practicing: the undeniable awareness that my life itself was changing.
It wasn't just internal growth. I'd achieved plenty of that through natural maturation, a fair amount of LSD, and a lot of the meditation that occurs as a natural by-product of chanting. This by-product can certainly be obtained from other chants, whether they be Om or one that you buy from the Maharishi or the tongues you speak in while practicing some forms of fundamentalist Jewish or Christian beliefs, or just bio-feedback enabling you to enhance your alpha waves.
But the changes in my life had more to do with the environment, the world around me. People were dealing with me differently and, more than my timing just being better, my surroundings were somehow supporting and nurturing me in a way I had never before experienced, and had never suspected they could.
Carl Jung had a name for this. He called it "acausal synchronicity." He developed the concept following a therapy session in which he was doing therapy with a young woman. While engaging in dream analysis, the woman was telling Jung a dream in which she'd been given a jeweled scarab. It was blowing and raining outside Jung's office at the time and he heard a tapping at the window. Thinking it was a loose shutter, he went to the window and saw that the tapping was being caused by a giant beetle. Jung reached outside, grabbed the beetle and took it over to the young woman, saying, "Here is your jeweled scarab." She immediately burst into tears and Jung took advantage of the situation to open her up to greater probing concerning both her dream life and the real-life problems she had been facing.
It was a major turning point in her therapy and Jung became convinced that the synchronicity between her dream recounting and the reality of the tapping beetle at the window was key to the transformation. He called the synchronicity "acausal" because it was seemingly without any precipitating factor.
Would that Jung were alive today, for I would love to write and tell him that there is such thing as causal synchronicity and it is linked to the chanting of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.
During the first decade of my practice and continuing to this day, I have experienced plenty of this synchronicity within my life. I may not have tons of money in the bank or drive a Lexus, but the times the environment has risen up to support and nurture my internal life direction are beyond number. I have been given countless "beetles." (Including, I believe, The Beatles.)
From a Buddhist perspective, this is not a matter of some divine being attending to our needs. Rather, Nichiren would say that the Buddhist practice incorporates all aspects of reality -- physical and spiritual as well as internal and external.
It is only natural that what you initiate within yourself becomes reflected in your environment. The fact that many people do not see this happening regularly is only testament to the shallow nature of the understanding and consciousness from which they are initiating thought, speech and action.
The initial efficacy of chanting has nothing to do with belief, faith or understanding. This is most important if people are to begin chanting or even consider the Buddhist practice. It is hard enough to try something new, let alone combine that attempt with some kind of major emotional or conceptual realignment.
I am very aware of the fact that the vast majority of those who express a desire to try the Buddhist practice are loath to continue it for even the three-month test drive that I mentioned earlier. I think this is for a couple of reasons.
The whole thing, even though I've tried to couch it in totally English terms, just feels too strange or foreign. And what transpires after even a couple weeks of consistent chanting is of such magnitude that many people simply get a little frightened.
After years of paying lip service to practices and rituals that often work only to console the mind, the real effects deriving from a genuine cause are sometimes a bit nerve-wracking.
Additionally, the majority of people do not continue chanting for long because of what might be termed the diet/exercise syndrome. There are tons of statistics indicating that the useful active life of new exercise equipment in the majority of homes is somewhere under seven days. And all of us probably know somebody who has been saying for several years that "the diet starts tomorrow."
Whatever the reason, Nichiren himself stated repeatedly that the Buddhist practice is "easy to receive, yet difficult to continue." I would have to say that, based on my decades of observation, he was absolutely right.
One thing I can tell you however -- I have NEVER seen anyone stop practicing after three consistent months of chanting because they said it didn't "work."
It may not have "worked" in the magical way in which they were initially led to believe, but they all knew that it "worked."
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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