You have a lot of guts to write me. But I fear you won't understand my response.
When I first met someone like you online, I told him a true story that he didn't "get." Here goes:
One of my favorite Gakkai activities was on the lawn crew. At the DC Community Center, we have a big lawn and flower beds. Often, on a Saturday morning, a few of us would be planting tulip bulbs or mulching the hedges or spreading fertilizer on the grass. Often, while we were engaged in this activity, someone would come along with "helpful" advice: a neighbor, a homeless guy, a YMD wearing white clothes. All sorts of people would have opinions about what we were doing. Invariably, this advice would be about how we were doing things wrong and that this was how we should do things. And the wisdom I learned from the lawn crew was to NEVER listen to that advice. If you are not willing to get dirty with the rest of us and work hard, then you have no credibility for giving advice.
This holds true for all aspects of the Gakkai: If you are not willing to get dirty with the rest of us and work hard, then you have no credibility for giving advice.
Do you get it?
No group from the outside has any right to tell Gakkai members how the organization should be run. This includes IRG. This includes Nichiren Shoshu. This includes Nichiren Shu. This includes disgruntled SGI members of all stripes. SGI is composed of SGI members who are constantly struggling to improve things. If you criticize the organization, you are criticizing yourself. How much good has empty criticism ever done?
Now right from the beginning of your letter to me, you go off track: You say: "the organization is not meeting my needs." What makes you think SGI should be meeting your needs? That's a pretty strange idea. Do you think SGI is some entity outside yourself? Cause and effect is absolute -- we have exactly the SGI we deserve. If it is not what you wish it to be, then change yourself. Isn't this what we do in Buddhism? Is there some other method of effecting change? Please let me know.
The only source you need as a guide in understanding Buddhism is the Gosho. Did Nichiren Daishonin complain in the Gosho? Did he write letters to his disciples about how he was suffering through persecution? He wrote from Sado: "I, Nichiren, am the richest man in all of present-day Japan." Did he write this because he was crazy? Or was he some kind of holy saint?
Nichiren was a human being like you or I. When he wrote that sentence, he had realized his mission as a Bodhisattva of the Earth. THAT is what is important, not who gets chosen to be district chief or whether you like President Ikeda's poems (I don't like them much either, but that's not important). Wake up and find your mission.
Imagine that you are fortunate enough to discover what your mission is: it will be a mission that allows your own unique contribution to kosen-rufu. When you look back on your life, it will be filled with memories of friends who started practicing and were able to change their lives. You'll remember the daimoku you chanted with them and the tears of joy. All the stuff you are worried about today is like dust in the wind compared to that.
When you really practice joyfully and chant a lot -- that's when you develop the perspective of the Buddha. Then everything you see is just as it should be. It's fuel for growth; that's all it is. And, with that kind of attitude, you can't lose, no matter what.
One more story, then I'll let you go: Before I started chanting, it was my theory that no one really could get ahead in life. That all those success stories you hear are just lies and propaganda. I always used to say "You just can't win." And it never failed that people agreed with me. Until I met the Buddhists -- they never agreed with that statement. They knew you could change things. It is possible to win. That gave me hope. That's why I joined.
Kathy Ruby
Read an interview with Kathy Ruby here.