Gary Snyder on Aghan Buddhas

Impulses

The neighborhood called Watts is in the ghetto, the most distressed, depressed and underdeveloped area of south-central Los Angeles. Along with poverty, misery, and violent crime, Watts is the home of seventeen beautiful hand-made structures and towers. An Italian immigrant built the Watts Towers in his spare time over thirty years between the 1920s and 50s.

The towers have survived vandalism, abandonment, accusations of being communications relays for a Japanese invasion, neglect, demolition orders and the 1965 Watts riots.

In 1968 I was in Junior High. I joined a special class that was bussed for half the day to schools in different parts of town. The class was part of some experimental program in cross cultural sixties something-or-other. A bus picked up kids from three schools and deposited us all for classes at a fourth.
Each of the three was tougher than the last and the fourth school was toughest of all.

None of the schools were in areas as tough as Watts. I don't know if Watts even has schools. When you drive its streets children and school-aged kids wander about and play freely during the day.

I joined the program for several reasons – I'd get credits for traveling instead of sitting in a boring, mindless class. The class had the appeal of being alternative. And the magnetic Evie Paine was signed up. Evie was smart, lovely and had an innocent, intelligent curiosity. As I struggled with the end of childhood and the doubts of adolescence she offered the aspiration to something greater, something higher. Ahh, Evie Paine. I had to let her know I existed.

One day the class went on a field trip to visit the Watts Towers. Fun. Field trip.

The Towers were great. The hard material of urban decay - broken glass, scrap steel and mortar - spire into the sky. Hope and beauty rise out of waste. Thirty years of volunteer labour, using materials at hand and scavenged; they soar out of the ghetto and offer us life's eternal challenge: Can we do the right thing today with what we have today? The towers stand as proof that our answer matters.

Kids attract kids and the toughs of the neighbourhood hung around. A bit of jostling, attempts to touch the girls. I wandered a bit, away from the towers to a cross street. A couple of kids started hassling me.

Someone older got between us, someone with a name tag, telling me to go back to the group, not to fight. In fact, fighting those boys was furthest from my mind.

Things got worse and we were sent to the bus. I went to my usual spot in the very back. There sat Evie. The neighbour kids started pelting the bus with rocks. Glass was flying from broken windows. I threw Evie to the floor. Rocks were coming in.

Just as I threw myself over her I saw my mates leaping from their seats, yelling for battle, charging to the door. Every single boy, but me. The driver stumbled up the stairs, blood flowing from his face and head and just closed the door before our boys went out.

In my adrenalin rush I managed several conflicting feelings. Fear. Joy at being the protector. And amazement. I was stunned by how the other boys reacted – so instinctual, so immediate and so opposite from me. How could I be so different? Thinking back, decades passed, I am still amazed. We each reacted by programming. Is mine so different?

The driver got the bus to the Watts police station and the long process of dealing with the incident began. Evie and I untangled and climbed up to our seat. She was still shaking. I held her. We eventually got back to our school and were met by officials and the principal and more police and reporters. I held her hand til the end.

official trailer of the film "I Build the Tower" the Watts Towers by Sim...

Bus 67

Perhaps there was a strike somewhere, or perhaps it was the normal Sunday schedule. Bus number 67 was full that September afternoon. In the front row sat a lovely couple of the generation and upbringing who, you could just tell, always dressed properly for going out. Both in tan overcoats, he wore a fedora and plaid scarf. She, a wool knit beret, black gloves and proper brown ankle boots. They sat contentedly, chatting quietly, apparently immune to the fatigue and alienation that afflicts bus passengers around the world.

We climbed aboard the 67 at the Nation stop, fighting through our bags and carry-ons to swipe our tourist transit passes on the ticket scanners. The couple looked up at us with simultaneous bright smiles. He started to get up and point to his seat, but we shook our heads, no, thank-you. I threw our carry-ons onto a small rack. They couple shuffled closer against the window trying to make room for one of us.

The phrase book would be a waste, so with body language, hand signals and a few mispronounced words we tried to explain that we wanted to stand. We chose to take the bus, not the faster metro, so we could see everything, not miss a moment, a street scene or, if lucky, an encounter.

Their smiles brightened and warmed. They spoke to us and occasionally pointed out the window. We did not understand.

Later we talked about the lovely elderly couple and invented stories about where they were going. Visiting grandchildren? Were a few sweets in her handbag? They would not be going shopping as most stores closed Sundays. To or from church?

My inventions grew more elaborate. They were visiting his widowed elder sister in the 13th. His wife would make tea and clean the apartment while he'd attempt again to convince her to move somewhere she'd not be alone. “But I am alone, cher frère,” the sister always replied.

They got off the 67 just before Place d'Italie. He scampered down the stairs first, then offered his arm to help her down. We turned to look through the window. We watched, hoping to wave goodbye. A folded umbrella was in one arm; his love in the other. His chest was out, his chin was up. His step was light as he led her from the curb into the Autumn afternoon. This is how to take your girl out on a Sunday afternoon. This is how I've always taken my girl out.

Talk at World Peace Prayer, November 6, 2011

Good morning. It is a very long time since I spoke here. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to transform my destiny and develop good fortune by speaking about the priesthood issue and the spirit of the Soka Gakkai. I am very happy to hear that the Tuesday morning daimoku crew have been studying about these issues.

Talking about the priesthood issue is not some boring history lesson. Rather, it is about today and it is about tomorrow. It goes to the heart of our individual practice and it goes to the question of whether our movement will endure.

In your districts, for several months you've been studying Sensei's lecture on the gosho, Letter to the Brothers. The Ikegami brothers were faced with an intricate and extraordinarily cunning manifestation of fundamental darkness. What is fundamental darkness? It is the belief that one person is better then another person. It is the belief that one group is better than another group. That you are better than or worse than, others.

Fundamental darkness divides us, makes us feel unworthy, alienated, arrogant or diminished. In today's terms it is something like the Occupy Wall Street's 1% versus 99%.

By contrast, the Lotus Sutra teaches us that we all equally have the great inner potentiality of Buddhahood. We all equally have a tremendous energy within. That is the energy of transformation, of revolution and liberation.

Fundamental illusion says, no, you don't have that energy. You aren't good enough. The spirit of Soka is the spirit to fight that fundamental darkness, to believe in and stand up for ourselves and our communities and our world.

In “Letter to the Brothers,” Nichiren writes, “The great demon of fundamental darkness can even enter the bodies of bodhisattvas who have reached near-perfect enlightenment.” Sensei explains that this possession takes place, not from the outside but from within. His lecture reads, “They are defeated by the darkness that is innate to life itself....this devilish nature gives rise to the desire to control others, or even take others lives, and causes destruction and war.”

So Sensei identifies fundamental darkness with the desire to control or manipulate others. Fundamental illusion is the belief that your will, your needs, are more important than, the needs of others.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine met with some top youth leaders of SGI USA. He asked them the following question. “After Sensei's passing, how will you be certain that our movement continues to follow the path of kosen-rufu? How will you make sure we do not fall into corruption and lose our way? How will you know our members are being led correctly?”

Good questions, aren't they? Serious questions, worthy of serious consideration. In fact, I believe these are the only questions worth asking today. As Sensei comes to the end of his life, we need to be engaged in a earnest dialogue on this topic. I am sure those young people thought carefully about my friend's questions. One of the young leaders answered, “I believe in cause and effect. I will find the person who shows the most actual proof and follow that person.” Another answered, “I believe in unity. I will find the person who has the most followers and follow them.” A third answered. “I trust the organization. I will follow whomever is the president.”

My friend found these answers unsatisfactory. He could easily imagine a future where a charismatic leader, with a lot of fortune, becomes president and leads us all to ruin. So my friend went to the writings of Nichiren to find its answer. The gosho was very clear. It says that to identify the votary of the Lotus Sutra you must find the person, or persons, who fight against fundamental darkness at the risk of their own lives. The true practitioner is the one who challenges great enemies for the sake of the happiness and the equality of all.

The gosho reads, “if I do not call forth these three enemies of the Lotus Sutra, then I will not be the votary of the Lotus Sutra. Only by making them appear can I be the votary. And yet if I do so, I am almost certain to lose my life.” WNDI Pg 53

This is what the writings of Nichiren teach us about identifying the practitioners of the Lotus and this is the spirit of Soka, the spirit to defeat fundamental darkness, to fight unyielding for your own happiness and the happiness of others. It is to believe in others' potentiality for enlightenment even when they've lost that belief themselves. As a side note, you may find it difficult from time to time to maintain that belief. You may occasionally doubt your own dignity and potentiality, or you may come to doubt it in your boss, your partner or your district coordinator. When those times come, I suggest you plunge into activities with your fellow SGI members. Because together we are taking action based on the Soka spirit, even when as individuals we falter. Your happiness, your families happiness and the future of our movement, depend on this struggle.

I will share a tiny bit of my experience with you, not because I have a particular attachment to the past; I don't; but because I am concerned for the future.

When I was young I had a remarkable experience. I wanted to meet our great mentor more than anything. I wanted to meet him more than I wanted to live. I was a sickly, sad and lonely boy. Not much different than the man who stands before you. Amazingly I was even more obnoxious, more self-righteous and more pompous then, than now.

It is a long and bizarre story how I came to meet Ikeda Sensei. And I don't have time to tell it here. But at the age of seventeen, just out of high-school, I spent a week with the greatest philosopher of our age. It was in a suburb of Paris in May of 1972. Ikeda Sensei was there to prepare for his dialogues with the English historian, Arnold Toynbee. He and Mrs. Ikeda also celebrated their wedding anniversary and for the first time outside Japan he celebrated his inauguration as Soka Gakkai President on May 3. I was there looking for him and with all the passion and clumsiness and arrogance of my youth I tried to help him for that week. I witnessed how, with his every step and every breath, he worked to encourage others.

From that one week with our great mentor I decided that my life was worth living. And I made a determination and decided that I would try to support him and try to protect the great work he was engaged in.

Life is long and has many ups and downs and unexpected twists and turns. I came to Calgary. Here the organization was led by a charismatic man who had great mental powers and influence. Unfortunately he lacked the mentor-disciple relationship and subsequently did not understand the spirit of Nichiren's writings and the Soka Gakkai. He sought division between people instead of equality and ultimately he fell into ruin, wounding many people in the process.

For some reason, in those days, whenever the priests came to Calgary, I was tasked with taking care of them and making arrangements for their ceremonies and events. So I got to know quite a few of them over the years. And when the high priest Nikken came to visit Vancouver I went there to assist in that movement. I witnessed a few small incidents that revealed the true nature of the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood. For example, there was a labour dispute in the hotel that the priest was staying. We had to make a change in their schedule as a result. It was very minor, as I recall, like what door the high priest would exit from or something else quite trivial. We met the high priest at the elevator and someone explained the change to him. His response was a stream of expletives. Now, I understand a wee bit of Japanese but I was unsure of it meant. But I remembered what I heard and later asked Yoshiko. She said she'd only heard such language in grade B Japanese gangster movies.

Finally in 1990 and 1991, fundamental darkness manifest as the priests tried to destroy our precious organization and destroy our precious teacher. I fought with all my heart and all my energy and time to protect our organization in my own small way. I did everything I could to visit every member and communicate with people in the community and university to explain what was going on. I started to write to six people via the new technology of Internet. The six became more and more, until finally I was writing to over 2,000 people around the world.

Of course, together with Ikeda Sensei, the members of SGI won the battle with the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood. Our victory was so decisive that many people today are only vaguely aware of the 'priesthood issue' and what I speak of may sound like ancient history.

But I believe that our struggle with the Nichiren Shoshu priests was only a warm-up for far more difficult battles ahead. Fundamental darkness, the belief in power and control and division, has not been defeated. It is alive in our society and in our lives. As a community of great Bodhisattvas we must experience and confront these dark functions both inside and out. It will manifest again. And we must prepare with the Gosho and with a serious internal struggle. Thank you very much for listening to me.

Paris March 21 to March 29, 2010

Crackin' the code

A friend shared a concern with me. He spoke of some recent experiences where even long-time practitioners were unable to explain basic Buddhist concepts. Can you give me an example, I asked. He gave me several. He told how at a meeting someone asked what was a "Buddha nature" and no one could answer. He gave other similar examples.

My friend is not an overly critical type and he wasn't telling me this to complain. He was telling me this to share his commitment to study, understand and implement the teachings.

People were either afraid to get it wrong, or they spoke in vague abstractions, or they deferred to "I should study more." No one spoke with any confidence. In fact they were clearly afraid to be convincing.

I thought, something is amiss. It is as if the language we use to talk about our faith is encoded. We either repeat the code or confirm our confusion. We are not able to communicate our understanding, which seems to me evidence of not understanding. And this Buddhism is supposed to be for all. Maybe I can do something to help, maybe I can help folks understand, maybe I can help them crack the code.

Deep breath, OK, I will give it a shot, here goes...

Toda-Sensei went to prison in June 1943, charged with violating Imperial Japan's Peace Preservation Act. He was a thought criminal. But even in a totalitarian system, no-one gets arrested for having thoughts. They get arrested for acting on those thoughts. For months prior to the arrest Toda and his mentor were followed as they conducted meetings, wrote, and spoke to build their fledgling organization. The threat to 'peace' was not their thoughts, nor two obscure school-teachers refusing the Shinto talisman. The threat was in sharing their thoughts with others.

In prison Toda lacked everything you think you need for a happy life. And he lacked everything you think you need to practice Buddhism. He did not have a Gohonzon, he was isolated from his mentor, he had no contact with anyone to encourage him. He did have a poor translation of the Lotus Sutra. He threw it away. It came back to his cell. He threw it away again. It was returned again. He thought the guards were mocking him.

In January 1944, he began to read the sutra. He may not have been aware of it but he'd actually been "reading" the sutra all along. By sharing Nichiren Buddhism in the face of powerful resistance he already was practicing the Lotus Sutra exactly as Nichiren taught, "because you have read the entirety of the Lotus Sutra with both the physical and spiritual aspects of your life, you will also be able to save ... all living beings. Others read the Lotus Sutra with their mouths alone, in word alone, but they do not read it with their hearts. And even if they read it with their hearts, they do not read it with their actions. It is reading the sutra with both one’s body and mind that is truly praiseworthy!" (WND1, pg 204)

Before imprisonment Mr. Makiguchi said, "without facing powerful enemies you can call yourself a follower or devotee of the sutra but you are not yet a votary. Only by facing powerful enemies can you be considered a votary." He and his protege, Toda, were indeed votaries of the sutra and thus the movement they started just might "save all living beings."

Anyway, alone in his prison cell, in the winter of 1944, Toda-Sensei began to chant and to study. His study began with a sutra that proceeds the Lotus. It is called The Sutra Of Infinite Meanings. In that sutra is a passage about the entity of the Buddha's life. It describes the Buddha through a series of negations: the Buddha is not coming or going not black nor white nor green nor blue, not this nor that, etc. Mr. Toda understood the superficial meaning of the passage -- that the ultimate truth is beyond language, beyond distinctions. This meaning depicted the Buddha abstractly. Perhaps because he was a teacher or perhaps because of his practical business-sense Mr Toda was not satisfied with the superficial understanding. He intuitively sensed that an entity must be real, not an abstraction, even though he could not grasp what it might be .

He chanted, he meditated, he struggled mightily. What could it be? He was not to be content with simple, pat answers. He was not interested in philosophical musings. He had to know.

Finally he got it. He had a revelation. Buddha was life itself. Buddha was the thing that made life alive.

From that moment his life was irrevocably changed. He resumed chanting and studying. But now every word of the sutra came alive. He understand every teaching, every concept in terms of life itself. As Nichiren wrote, "You must never think that any of the eighty thousand sacred teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha’s lifetime ... are outside yourself. (WND1 pg3)

The teachings of Buddhism were no longer ancient, archaic and inscrutable. They were imminent, applicable, real. They could be expressed in the language of now.

This is the key. This is how you too can crack the code. When you realize that every sentence of the Gosho and every word of Sensei's guidance is about your life; when you cease to think of kosen-rufu as happening somewhere else, or some-when else; when you consider every teaching as being about human life; then you will understand. You will 'get it.'

So how do you get there? You might be thinking, boy-oh-boy I better get busy and study.

Here is a surprise: I don't think so. I don't think studying turns the key. In Mr. Toda's case the cause for his awakenings was not the study. The cause was the efforts he made with Makiguchi-Sensei to build the fledgling organization and awaken others.

I believe that the way to turn the key is by opening your mouth and talking to another. See, I don't think wisdom is something you get and then share with others. I believe wisdom emerges from sharing. I also don't think benefit is something you get and then share with others. I think benefit comes from sharing with others.

Powerful forces exist in our lives that try to take us away from the moment; they try to convince us that "back-then" or "over-there" is where it is really happening. It is hard to overcome those forces by simply looking inward. You know; you've tried. You keep slipping away, drifting into abstractions, falling asleep. You can't grasp the teachings because you have no position of holding. You require a point of perspective, a place of leverage, traction.

That point of traction is on the outside. It is in your earnest discussions with those around you. Sensei calls this, "racking your brains" to communicate the greatness of this Buddhism. "If you give serious thought to the happiness of your friends and the welfare of your society and community — racking your brains over how you can contribute, taking action to try to make a difference — then you will find vibrant wisdom welling forth from your life. Courage will rise within you quite naturally. You will develop your character in the process." (December 9, 1999) See? You think you first need courage, wisdom and benefit and then you can help others. Sensei says you've got causality backwards, that courage, wisdom and character development are the result, not the cause.

Ultimately you are trying to communicate the greatness of another life. As a practical matter, they simply won't get it if you are merely parroting others or using jargon. You have to find their words, their context, their points of reference.

Don't worry about "getting it right." Worry only about helping another to become aware of their inner majesty. In that struggle your wisdom will arise. The teachings will become alive and active inside you. You will experience the joy of the Law and you will get it.

Toda-Sensei had another revelation in prison, several months later. The second revelation was the realization of his mission. He saw himself lifted into the air as one of the Bodhisattvas of the Earth in the great ceremony of the Treasure Tower. He awoke to his life's purpose.

Every life has purpose. You don't have to be a member of the SGI to have purpose. We aren't that special. One of our purposes is to help others awaken to their purpose. Everyone needs a reminder once in a while.

You might think, "I wish I knew what my purpose is. I should train myself so that when my mission comes I will be ready. Maybe I should get guidance and find out what my mission is." Again, I don't think so. I don't know what your mission is but I bet it isn't somewhere else. I bet it isn't around the corner but right where you are. Nobody can give you a mission, although dialogue can help you to focus and give it clarity. Sensei has often said that human revolution is in daily life. Today. Here. In his 2010 New Year's message, Sensei wrote, "Ultimately, worldwide kosen-rufu begins with encouraging the person right in front of us."