Shinkyo's Blog

A Visit from the Boy Scouts

In March of 2007 I got an email from a Boy Scout leader in Lexington telling me of a project they were taking on later that month. On April 28, they were doing what they called a “multi-faith hike” and wanted to include our temple in their list of stops. Since that was such an auspicious day, and I always enjoy talking with people about the Dharma, how could I say no?

I replied and told him how delighted I would be to meet with them, but warned that since our temple is only about 300 square feet, we may not be able to accommodate a large group. He replied that he expected 20 people, including the scouts and their leaders, and sent me a list of questions that he thought would be helpful for me to use in my presentation to them.

Once I read the questions, I was even more certain that I wanted to talk with these young men. I too was a Boy Scout many years ago, so I was familiar with their activities and the values they worked to instill in their members. I thought it would also be great practice speaking to people who were interested in Buddhism but didn’t know that much about it.

I’m sharing these with you now since I often get requests from people for an overview of Buddhism in general and Nichiren-Shu Buddhism in particularly. This may also help people reading this to come up with answers for when others ask us these questions. (A version of this article has been published previously in the Nichiren Shu News.)

Here then are the questions.

1. Who started your religion?
2. What are the primary documents or scriptures of your faith?
3. What are your main beliefs?
4. What is required to be a member of your religion?
5. What do you believe happens when and after we die?
6. Describe the God you worship.

I should also mention that the group was spending only 20 minutes at our temple, since they also had a Muslim Mosque, a Jewish Temple, and a Methodist Church on their itinerary. So being able to cover all of these questions in that short time was another part of the challenge.

On the arranged day, I made sure I was there early. Candles and incense were lit at the Butsudan. I stood at the door outside the building that contains our temple so they would know they were in the right place. As the first few boys started trickling in, I directed them to where in the building to find our temple. For what seemed like five minutes there was a steady stream of them appearing. By the time the last stragglers came through our door there were almost 30 boys and men, crammed into every available square foot of our little temple.

Who Started Your Religion?

I told the boys that to answer this question there were two people we needed to talk about. I asked how many of them had heard of the Buddha. Several hands went up. One boy said he was a prince who lived a long time ago. One thought he was fat. One thought he was skinny.

Yes, I told them, the Buddha was born as a prince. He lived in northern India 500 years before Jesus was alive in another part of the world. In fact, he was the crown prince in his father’s kingdom, and could have anything he wanted. Even his name, Siddhartha, meant “every wish fulfilled.” In other words, he was more spoiled than Paris Hilton.

They knew exactly what I meant by that.

Even though the young Siddhartha had all the material comforts he could want, I continued, he knew there was more to life than just being comfortable. He wanted to know why people were so unhappy, and how he could make it so that nobody was ever unhappy again.

He left home and became a wandering holy man. For a long time he tried to live with very little food and water and got to be very skinny, just as the one boy described. But that practice made him so weak that he almost drowned while he was bathing in a river. As he lay exhausted on the bank, a kind shepherd girl brought him a bowl of milk mixed with grain. He ate it. As he felt the strength coming back into his body, he realized that the extremes of denying himself or indulging himself would not lead to what he sought; he had to find a “middle way.”

After he recovered, he spent a night meditating under a sacred tree. As the morning star came up over the horizon, he became aware that he had realized what he was looking for. People around him immediately recognized that something wonderful and profound had happened. They asked him, “Are you a man? Have you become a God? What has happened to you?” His answer was, “I am awake.”

The other person I told the Boy Scouts about was of course Nichiren, the founder of our branch of Buddhism. I explained how he lived 750 years ago in Japan. He was born into the lower classes as the son of a fisherman. But people saw his intellect and curiosity even as a child, and he was taken in as a novice at a monastery near the village where he grew up. In those days, the only way to learn how to read and write, if you were not part of the nobility, was by becoming a monk.

What are the Primary Documents of your Faith?

After the Buddha “woke up” or became enlightened, he spent 40 years traveling through what is now northern India teaching people about what he had found. In those 40 years he taught many different things to different people at different times.

For example, when he first started teaching, he told people that to be able to end their suffering, they had to give up their families, their jobs, their homes, their towns and their possessions. They had to come live as monks and nuns in the communities he set up. He gave them all rules for living with each other and for living with people outside that community. Even today, 2500 years later, there are still many of these communities all over the world where people work and live together to practice what the Buddha taught.

Later in his life, the Buddha told people something that seemed to contradict what he had taught before. He said that people could become enlightened without leaving their homes or their loved ones. He did not prevent people from joining the other communities he had set up if they thought they had to. But he gave them things to learn and ways of living their normal lives that would help them wake up to the same realization he had found.

It is said that there are over 14,000 sutras, or collections of what the Buddha taught during his lifetime. There were many other examples of the Buddha teaching one thing to one group of people at one time and another group of people at another time. For many people this was very confusing. They wanted to know which of these teachings they should believe.

When Nichiren was 17 years old, about the same age as several of the Boy Scouts who were listening to me, he made a vow that he would become the wisest man in all of Japan and solve this mystery. For the next 17 years, Nichiren walked all over Japan, studying each of the sutras he could find and talking with the great Buddhist scholars of his time. He covered an area as far as between Cincinnati, Lexington and Atlanta, all on foot. He wanted to know which of the sutras, which of the collections of the Buddha’s teachings was closest to the Buddha’s own mind, to his own understanding, to his own Enlightenment.

In the Lotus Sutra, Nichiren found the answer to this mystery. The reason the Buddha taught things differently at different times was because different people have different abilities to understand and practice what the Buddha was trying to teach. Just like when the Boy Scouts teach somebody how to make a fire, they may need to start with showing how to use matches properly. More advanced people can learn how to use flint and steel. In both cases the overall goal is making a fire. One just has to suit their methods to the ability of who is being taught.

Nichiren concluded that the Lotus Sutra was the most profound of the Buddha’s teachings, and the one that would lead us in our time to becoming just as enlightened as the Buddha. Based on what we learn from Nichiren, in our branch of Buddhism, we focus on the Lotus Sutra.

We approach the Lotus Sutra differently than other people may approach the central documents of their faiths. We do believe it contains information that the Buddha left for our benefit. However it does not contain a list of commandments and instructions telling us what to do and what not to do. There are many parables in it that necessarily must be interpreted, just as the whole book must be interpreted. We use Nichiren and each other as guides for how to interpret this book, but ultimately each of us has to make sense of it for ourselves.

This is just like the instructions in the Boy Scout manual. One has to take those instructions, make sense of them, and do something with them. It’s not like you can look at the section on knots, memorize everything it has to say about the square knot and say you know the square knot. You have to take pieces of rope in your hands, use the instructions to make a knot, test it, see if you’ve done it right, and if not try again. Then you have to take what you have learned there and apply it to your life. Like putting up a tent or building a tower. Learning the Buddha’s teachings is exactly like this.

What are your Main Beliefs?

This question I had to answer slightly differently from how it was posed. It made more sense to talk about what the Buddha taught rather than what we believe. To us faith means something different than it may mean to other people. As I am fond of saying, this practice isn’t something where somebody tells you to just check your brain at the door on your way in and believe everything I or anybody else tells you whether it makes sense or not. Faith and understanding do not oppose each other. Using your mind is essential to this practice.

There is a story of how the Buddha was teaching in a town called Kalama, which was at the crossroads of several trade routes. Many teachers would come to this town and tell people different ideas about how to live and what was important. When the Buddha and his group of monks arrived the people of Kalama asked him how they could tell whether something somebody taught them was true.

The Buddha told them not to believe something because it was written in a book, or because other people did it, or because it had been done that way for a long time or even because he himself told them that it was true. He advised them to take a teaching, apply it to their lives, and then to use their own judgment to decide whether it was harmful or beneficial. If beneficial they should continue it; if harmful they should stop it. Just like what I had said before about knots, we need to take the Buddha’s teachings and try them for ourselves in our lives for them to mean something.

What did the Buddha teach? Let’s start with happiness. The Buddha realized that most people, and even he himself before he became enlightened, go through life wanting to feel good as much as possible and feel bad as little as possible. When we feel good we say we are happy and when we feel bad we say that we are unhappy or that we are suffering.

The first thing the Buddha taught about happiness was that suffering exists. No matter how much we may want to deny it, or ignore it or want it to go away there are times when we are unhappy.

The next thing the Buddha taught was that there was a cause or a reason that suffering exists. It’s not because we are bad or some God hates us. It’s not even because we don’t have something we want. It’s because don’t want what we have. Even better, we can learn to get a lot more control over our own minds and our desires than we do over what goes on in the world around us, even though we think we’re better at manipulating the world than our minds.

But the Buddha didn’t stop there. He said he had learned how to end suffering, how to become happy through what he called the eightfold path. First we have to see things clearly, then we have to think about them clearly, then we have to speak the truth, then we can know how to do what is right, then we can live in the world without harming other people, then we can know how to apply our efforts and energies properly, then we begin to understand how our mind works, then we know how to concentrate our mind on what is important.

All these steps can seem either very easy or very difficult. And mastering them is a wonderful thing to do. But then later in his life the Buddha taught something else. He explained how what he taught about suffering was just a preparation for what he really wanted to explain, namely that anybody could become just as awakened as he was.

In some religions this is heresy. To think that one of us humans with all our flaws and difficulties can become just as wise and good as Jesus, or Mohammed or any of the beings that other religions consider as the most perfect example of what we can become, to think we could be just like them is taken as a sign of pride and arrogance.

There used to be these bracelets with the initials “WWJD” on them. I don’t know if people still wear them, but the initials stand for “What Would Jesus Do?” and the idea was for the bracelet to remind its wearers that they should do their best to act like Jesus in every situation of their lives. Isn’t this trying to become like Jesus?

If we know that we can become just like the Buddha, and we want to become just like Buddha, how do we do it? The Buddha taught that the essential thing we need is a strong determination to benefit other people all the time. We should want them to be happy. Why? Not because he tells us what to think. It is because they themselves want to be happy.

Instead of defining our happiness by what we want, we should define our happiness by how much we help people get what they want, by being of service to other people. This is very much like what is in the Boy Scout Law: A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. All these are meant to guide Boy Scouts to be a benefit to each other and the world in general.

What is Required to be a Member?

I chose to answer this question slightly differently from how it was asked. The real question is how can we practice what the Buddha taught? The answer is that we don’t have to be Buddhists to learn from the Buddha.

Anybody can read or listen to the teachings, think them over carefully, try to put them to work in their life, and see if they work. Then you go back, get more teachings, try those out, and so on. It’s just like in Boy Scouts when you learn what you need to become a Tenderfoot, then once you do that you learn how to become Second Class, and so on all the way up to Eagle Scout.

If you can do this as part of a group, it is much easier. Just like it’s easier to be a Boy Scout when you have a Troop to work with instead of just trying to do it by yourself. You can do a lot more on a camping trip with other people than you can do by yourself.

The Buddha knew this too. He taught how important it was to have what he called a Sangha, or a group of people working together to practice his teachings. He knew that different people have different abilities, different talents, different experiences and different perspectives on things. Until someone could become as enlightened as he is, no one person has all the answers.

It’s like the story of the blind men standing around the elephant, a story that many of the boys had heard. I was even able to get two or three to tell the story for themselves, how one man had the elephant’s trunk and thought the elephant was like a rope; another had its ear and thought it was like a heavy coat; another had its leg and thought it was like a tree; another put his hands on the side of the elephant and thought it was like a wall. None of the men was wrong, but none of them had the whole truth either.

I told them that there are some specific things that someone can do to become a member of our branch of Buddhism, but that we were happy to practice with anybody whether they are members or not.

What Happens When and After we Die?

Time was getting late. The boys were interested in hearing more but one of their leaders looked at me and pointed at his watch. I suppose they had another appointment to keep.

I explained that there were times that people asked the Buddha questions and he would not answer them. The reason is that he knew that if he answered one way or the other it would not help them either with their happiness or with becoming a Buddha.

One thing he did say was that there is not a permanent heaven or a permanent hell. Since all of us, all beings, are eventually going to become Buddhas, then even the beings who are suffering in hell or who are completely full of joy in heaven will eventually leave those places and continue their progress towards becoming Buddhas.

Something that Nichiren taught is that heaven and hell are just states of our minds. When we are angry we are in hell; when we have joy we are in heaven. There are of course other states of mind besides these two. Both the Buddha and Nichiren talked about these two, and more importantly how we can move from the more difficult states of mind, like anger, to states of mind that are more similar to our true nature, like generosity.

Describe the God we Worship

Many religions believe there is a powerful supreme being who controls what goes on in the world every day and decides after we die whether we go to heaven or hell. We don’t believe that.

We believe things happen for a reason and that the Buddha’s teachings help us find that reason. And while we don’t really worship the Buddha or even the statues and other representations we have of him, we work to develop a deep reverence and gratitude for what the Buddha taught.

Maybe the closest thing we have to what other religions call a God, I explained to them, is a teaching included in the Lotus Sutra. The Buddha said this teaching is the most difficult to believe and understand.

The Buddha taught that even though people looked at him and saw a man who was born in what is now northern India, left home, became enlightened, and taught for several decades, the real “Ever Present” Buddha existed before that man was born and will continue to exist for a countless number of years after that man dies. In all that time this Ever-Present Buddha is teaching all beings in all worlds, even the ones in heaven and hell, teaching them how to become just as enlightened as he is. He teaches whether we listen or not and whether we practice his teachings or not. He is always thinking, “How can I cause all beings to set themselves on the path to Enlightenment and quickly become Buddhas?”

Seeing Off

There were a few minutes left for questions. One boy wanted to know what the Kanji characters on the case for my inkin (ceremonial bell) meant. His father went to Japan many times each year and had brought things back for him with writing like that on it.

Some wanted to know how many members we had in our temple and how many members there were overall in Nichiren Shu. I told them there were several thousand in North America and Hawaii, and many millions in Japan.

Some wanted to know whether I was always a Buddhist and how I became a Buddhist. I told them that I was brought up as a Christian and decided about 15 years ago to take up this practice. However if they wanted to hear more details about why, they would have to come back, which I told them all they were welcome to do any time.

Their leader then thanked me sincerely for talking with them. I thanked them for including our temple on their hike. A few were interested in taking some pamphlets with them. I could hear lots of conversations in the hallway as they filed out that gave me the impression they had heard something interesting. I also noticed that several of the boys were taking pictures of our building as they left. I do hope to see any of them again soon.

南無妙法連華教

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