Religion? Something like it...

“What should I blog about?”

“Religion.”

And that’s what we’re going to do. I see you there, cringing in fear. Worried, afraid, disturbed. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go on a crazy anti-religion rant. I don’t have time for that. I’m not going to go on a pro-religion spiel either. That’s what silly people do. I’m simply going to tell you how I was raised. Simple enough? Safe enough? I think so. Let’s begin.

It was a brisk spring day in Brooklyn, NY when a young woman – very pregnant too – was spending her Sunday doing gongyo at her older sister’s house. Suddenly, a force broke through unleashing within her the final barrier between her and her unborn child! Alas, taken most swiftly (and frighteningly) to Long Island University Hospital conveniently located in Brooklyn, the young woman gave birth to her final child. A little girl, expected to be a boy, was given her back-up name and the mother saved face!

As you see, I was born smack in the middle of religion. “Gongyo” is what they call this rhythmic chanting done in Nicherin Buddhism, the religion with which I was raised. Because of this, I have been told all of my youth that I was (and still am) a “fortune baby”. I don’t know what this means exactly, but this is the reason my mother pegs for why I managed to get hit by a car (TWICE) and have not even gained a fracture. This is why in the greatest point of adversity, everything just falls into place. This is why I was able to blindly apply to school and get in without so much as perusing the schools’ websites further than the application section.

In short: I’m really f***ing lucky.

It’s true though, but what does luck have to do with it? And why do you call is “Nicherin Buddhism???” Isn’t all Buddhism the same? I hear you cry, with ignorance.

No, it isn’t all the same any more than all Christianity or Hinduism is. With every religion, there are subsections. Mine is Nicherin. And what does this entail?

For as long as I started remembering I’ve been shipped off, every third Sunday (yes, the most random time in the month) to a wonderful place near The Village called The Culture Center (nifty name, isn’t it?). There, I met up with a bunch of other fortune babies and waited as our parents spent the day chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo or doing gongyo for who knows how long (a few hours). I suppose The Boys and Girls’ Club is the Buddhist equivalent of Sunday School for Christians, except they didn’t teach us much all about Buddhism. Nothing much to teach really.

Unlike other religions, even perhaps other sects of Buddhism, there was no higher power figure to learn about. No history or any of that cal. Just, how to chant. They spent the hours giving us things to color in – literally, coloring books to keep us busy – and then, when time permitted, taught us how to read the Lotus Sutra (my bible, except it’s entirely in Japanese/Chinese/gobbledygook and thus completely unreadable for me). The Sutra is just a mantra, really. A lot of words and things to think about, perhaps, that are read in a certain order. (At least that’s how it used to be until they got lazy and simplified the damned thing a few years ago and made it so you could just read the book straight through twice a day and leave it at that.) You learned that the Sutra was read twice a day, every day, if you wanted to. You didn’t really have to do anything, but if you didn’t then you couldn’t complain when you got no good fortune. In the morning, you read the first third and the ending third, and in the evening you read the whole thing straight through. After both readings you read and did the 5 prayers at the end. These were just silent prayers to make you think about those less fortunate, the deceased, your family, friends, et cetera. Can’t have everyone just praying for themselves now! Selfish bastards>_>

It’s not so bad, really. Just time consuming, like most religions. But it’s mostly like meditation. And as I said, there’s no greater figure to turn to or fear (or respect). Just, you.

Mother told me that we are all the universe, in and of ourselves. I believe her. Life, as she said, and as I’ve come to see, is a great field of chance and fate. Anything could happen, but there are a lot of final outcomes that we can’t really avoid. You know, things like, dying and the like. It’s just a matter of how you get there.

I was also taught that we controlled everything that happened to us. Everything good – and everything bad – was no one’s fault but our own. Everything we say and do is put out into the universe and effectively placed on a tab of sorts. And this tab tips the scales of fate one way or another, and determines what happens next in our lives. A little more simply put: you make your karma. Thus, I was also warned to try to be as kind as I could be because it’d all come back to me whether I wanted it to or not. Never immediate, never too far away into the future, just… there.

The things I learned being raised in Buddhism are things we all believe, I think. It’s just a matter of how honestly we believe it. I was taught that all that really matters in life is being a good person and accepting people. Being true to yourself and doing your best to make things better, if not for yourself, then for those around you.

Going back to the Boys and Girls’ Club. We didn’t just spend time coloring and the like. We also planted gardens and put on skits and played the piano. We sang and dance and were given these little sheets of paper with flowers or lions on them… These small pieces of propaganda to encourage us to do daimoku (the nam myoho renge kyo bit). Every 5 minutes you chanted, you colored in a lion-mane hair or a flower petal, until it was all filled out. You didn’t get anything for it. No incentive other than seeing if you could. I wonder if I would have been more willing to fill the things out if I got chocolate or something for doing it… But I appreciate the lack of incentives. I feel that this just further showed that they wanted us to choose the religion ourselves (even if they insisted on saying it wasn’t a religion – a systematic practice based on a set of beliefs is pretty much what I feel constitutes a religion). If I wanted to chant, that was my prerogative. I didn’t have to, but I was encouraged to do it so I would maintain my good fortune. Chanting doesn’t erase the bad things you did, it just tips the scale more where you want it to go.

Succeeding The BGC was the young adults group thing. When you graduated the BGC you were like, I’m awesome! And I’m a teenager-ish! And you got to focus on one art to help build your fortunate spirit. Sometimes I would be with the drummers, but mostly I was with the actors and writers. Lots of character building and all that. In short, being with the SGI just gave us something to do with our lives, kept us off the streets, kept us encouraged and surrounded with racial and social diversity. Wonderful stuff. And got us a chance to perform at Madison Square Garden. Life is good.

Now, I know I didn’t say too much about my religion, because there isn’t much to say. We chant, if we want to. We dream a lot, and hope for a lot, and just try to be good. Try to be nice. In my religion the only thing you’re encouraged to not be is a murderer and a hater. Killing people just isn’t a nice thing to do. And hating people isn’t nice either. Forgiveness is one of the great lessons we’re taught. To forgive, and furthermore, to understand. As I said, there’s a great weight placed on the concept of karma – cause and effect. Everything happens for a reason, and you should try to see why things happen to you. It’s probably this teaching that makes me angry to see people bitching about bad things happening to them. They probably earned it, somewhere along the line. Unless you regret and have remorse for the things you’ve done, then you’ll probably have to pay for it sometime in the future. Think about The Butterfly Effect. Sometimes the most unnoticed and ignored things can cause the most magnanimous effects.

So yeah, raised a Buddhist. Taught to believe in karma and controlling my fate just the same. No heaven. No hell. No angels or demons or gods. Just, reincarnation. A great cycle the continues over and over in such a way that we’d never notice the point where we die and are reborn. It just happens. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Sure, at face value, it seems boring and maybe kind of scary, but I think this idea of having no real end keeps things looking up. There’s also a chance to make better, somewhere along the line. And I think that’s why we have déjà vu, too. To remind us of things that we’ve done. Maybe it’s us telling ourselves the things we did right – and we remember those – and when we don’t have it, it’s something that we changed.

It’s all good. Life is good. Boring as hell, but hey, there’s always the next cycle ^_^

<3 <3 Kat