Why do you suppose it is that I read something again and again and then suddenly realize I haven’t been paying attention.

Today’s Daily Dharma says, “Superior-Practice is the embodiment of the fourth vow of a Bodhisattva: The Buddha’s teachings are immeasurable; I vow to attain supreme enlightenment.”

The Four Great Vows of the Bodhisattva are:

1. SHUJO-MUHEN SEIGANDO – Sentient beings are innumerable: I vow to save them all.
2. BONNO-MUSHU-SEIGANDAN – Our evil desires are inexhaustible: I vow to quench them all.
3. HO-MON MUJIN SEIGANCHI – The Buddha’s teachings are immeasurable: I vow to study them all.
4. BUTSUDO-MUJO-SEIGANJO – The way of the Buddha is unexcelled: I vow to attain the Path Sublime.

The Fourth Vow is the Buddha’s way, not his immeasurable teachings.

Gene Reeve’s “Stories of the Lotus Sutra” explains the correspondence between the Four Great Leaders of the Bodhisattvas from Underground and the Four Great Bodhisattva Vows:

[T]he four great bodhisattvas – Superior Practice, Unlimited Practice, Pure Practice, and Firm Practice – who lead the great horde of bodhisattvas who emerge from the earth are said to display, or correspond to, the four great bodhisattva vows:

Firm Practice: However innumerable living beings are, I vow to save them all;

Pure Practice: However innumerable hindrances are, I vow to overcome them all;

Unlimited Practice: However innumerable the Buddha’s teachings are, I vow to master them all;

Superior Practice: However supreme the Buddha Way is, I vow to reach it.

So I guess I wasn’t paying attention on March 7, 2021, or July 8, 2019, or May 14, 2018 or Feb. 13, 2018, or April 16, 2016, or Aug. 14, 2015.

I probably didn’t know the Four Great Vows by heart in August 2015, but that doesn’t excuse not noticing this error until today. Just Not Paying Attention.

My father is dead. He died in 2009. Now I have no role on Father’s Day other than to be appreciative of whatever my wife and son cook up to mark the occasion. At least that was my outlook before Rev. Shoda Kanai’s Shodaigo service from the Nichiren Buddhist Kannon Temple of Nevada.

Following the service, Rev. Kanai discussed our other father, the Eternal Śākyamuni, who has been teaching us since the remotest past. The sermon was something of a revelation for me. While I am very familiar with Chapter 7’s lesson about our link to Śākyamuni when he was among the 16 śramaṇeras who were the sons of Great-Universal-Wisdom-Excellence Tathāgata, the lens of Father’s Day brought this relationship into focus.

“These sixteen Bodhisattvas willingly expounded the Sūtra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma. Each of them taught six hundred billion nayutas of living beings, that is, as many living beings as there are sands in the River Ganges. Those living beings were always accompanied by the Bodhisattva[, by whom they were taught,] in their consecutive existences. [In each of their consecutive existences,] they heard the Dharma from him, and understood it by faith. By the merits [they had thus accumulated], they were given a privilege to see four billion Buddhas, that is, four billion World­Honored Ones. They have not yet seen all of them. …

“Those living beings who followed me, heard the Dharma from me in order to attain Anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi. Some of them are still in Śrāvakahood. I now teach them the Way to Anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi. They will be able to enter the Way to Buddhahood by my teaching, but not immediately because the wisdom of the Tathāgata is difficult to believe and difficult to understand. Those living beings as many as there are sands in the River Ganges, whom I taught [ when I was a śramaṇera], included you bhikṣus and those who will be reborn as my disciples in Śrāvakahood after my extinction.

As Śāriputra says in Chapter 3:

Today I have realized that I am your son, that I was born from your mouth, that I was born in [the world of] the Dharma, and that I have obtained the Dharma of the Buddha.”

Rev. Kanai used a quote from Chapter 28 to illustrate his point:

Universal-Sage! Anyone who keeps, reads and recites this Sūtra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma, memorizes it correctly, studies it, practices it, and copies it, should be considered to see me, and hear this sūtra from my mouth. He should be considered to be making offerings to me. He should be considered to be praised by me with the word ‘Excellent!’ He should be considered to be caressed by me on the head. He should be considered to be covered with my robe.

Happy Father’s Day.

Back when I was active in Soka Gakkai, especially in the early 1990s, I would attend monthly district meetings. These were always held in someone’s home and they would always feature someone’s elaborate experience demonstrating actual proof of the power of chanting the Daimoku.

These experiences never had anything to with Buddhism, per se. They were more like fun coincidences.

Fast-forward 30-odd years to yesterday, Friday, June 11. On Saturday, today, The Sacramento Nichiren Buddhist Church was having its summer fund-raiser, a drive-through, no contact Bento box sale. The meals were sold in advance and specific pick up times were assigned. It was a Covid-era innovation.

My first job at these fundraisers is to prepare the barbecue pit so that the grill is ready at 7am to begin cooking the 500 or so half chickens marinated over night in teriyaki sauce.

To meet that deadline I need to be preparing the piles of charcoal briquets by 6am. The distance from my house to the church is normally a 20-minute mostly freeway drive. But Saturday was the first day of a weeklong shutdown of the highway I use. That necessitated a surface street detour that I estimated would stretch that commute from 20 minutes to 35 minutes.

Going to bed at 10 pm, I set my alarm for 5am, figuring that I would get up, dress and do a portion of my regular morning service and then be on the road by 5:25am.

At least that was the plan.

I awoke at 4:50am and decided there wasn’t much point of trying to fall back asleep until the alarm went off. By 5:05am I had dressed, posted the Daily Dharma quote and  “watered” my altar – Kishimojin, Daikoku and Kannon Bodhisattva in the form of Kuan Yin have their personal cups and I have one more for good measure – and was considering how to abbreviate my morning service.

My routine normally takes a little under an hour to complete. I decided I would set a 15-minute timer and then do as much of that morning’s shindoku recitation as I could fit. Today is Day 9 of my 32 Days of the Lotus Sutra practice. I opened up the Nichiren Buddhist Sangha of Greater New England’s Myoho Renge Kyo Romanized and began reciting Chapter 5, The Simile of Herbs.

When I finished with Day 9’s portion of Chapter 6, Assurance of Future Buddhahood, thus completing Day 9’s shindoku practice, I looked at the time and realized that I had failed to set my timer. It was now 5:30am.

I made a quick cup of tea in a travel cup and raced out the door.

With a lot of help from the protective deities who control the traffic signals and the dearth of traffic at 5:30 on a Saturday morning, I was able to arrive at Sacramento Nichiren Buddhist Church by 6am.

When the cooking crew arrived at 7am everything was ready to begin the day’s task.

And that’s my experience with the power of chanting Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.

After more than a year of forced online-only services, it was nice to witness the return of the hybrid service. Sunday’s service from Nichiren Buddhist Kannon Temple of Nevada marked the official return to in-person services in Las Vegas. While the camera was fixed and didn’t allow a view of the attendees, it was nice to hear their voices and the uchiwa daiko drumming during Daimoku chanting.

While a hybrid service may seem new now, back in 2015, when I first joined Nichiren Shu, a combination of local and online attendees had been commonplace for years for Rev. Ryusho Jeffus at his Charlotte, NC, temple.

Today’s service in Las Vegas was the monthly purification ceremony combined with a jukai service (lay person taking of vows) and gohonzon bestowal.

Rev. Shoda Kanai used the illustration from Lotus World to show how the 10 Worlds are all depicted in the Mandala Gohonzon. Back when I was with Soka Gakkai I had studied who was represented on their Gohonzon. Missing from that Gohonzon is Devadatta, who represents the hell realm. SGI said it was no big deal, but it always struck me as significant since the Gohonzon without Devadatta cannot represent the 10 realms of existence.

Enjoyed attending the Kaji Kito service at the Sacramento Nichiren Buddhist Church Sunday. By the time the next Kaji Kito service is held on June 27 Rev. Kenjo Igarashi hopes to be able to return to individual blessings. For more than a year now, the group blessings has had to suffice.

Following the blessing Rev. Igarashi gave a sermon that covered a number of points. For me, the most notable point was the difference in the motivation of Nichiren to become a monk in comparison to the other Kamakura-era reformers – Honen, Shinran and Dogen. Nichiren had questions he wanted resolved, most important why people are born into this suffering world. The other reformers were placed by their families or because their parents had died.

That search for answers brought Nichiren to the realization that the greatest sin one can commit is to slander the Lotus Sutra.

The Lotus Sutra, Nichiren found, was the Supreme Teaching. In the Lotus Sutra everyone is equal. Everybody can become a Buddha because everyone has the Buddha nature in their mind.

“That’s why we chant Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, Namu Myoho Renge Kyo to awaken our Buddha nature,” Rev. Igarashi said. “That’s why we chant Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, Namu Myoho Renge Kyo so that our Buddha nature will come out some day. Then we can make a paradise in this world.”

On Sunday, May 9, 2021, I attended the Izu Persecution Service at the Sacramento Nichiren Buddhist Church. As a result, I was unable to attend the Nichiren Buddhist Sangha of the Bay Area lecture on Chapter 7 of the Lotus Sutra, The Parable of a Magic City. Fortunately, the monthly lectures are recorded and posted on YouTube.

If I have an affinity with one chapter of the Lotus Sutra more than any other, I suppose it would be Chapter 7. After all, this is 500yojanas.org, On the Journey to the Place of Treasures.

So it is little wonder that I bristled at this slide:

Long, highly repetitive chapter? Miles and miles of unending monotony, the scenery never changing?

For more than five years I’ve made it my daily practice to read a portion of the Lotus Sutra in shindoku in the morning and then in English in the evening.  Even after more than 63 times through the Lotus Sutra, none of the Lotus Sutra is monotonous.  It was really very hard to focus on the lecture after this. In reviewing the slide deck afterward, I felt better. The summary points I would have emphasized were mostly mentioned.

But then we got to this:

First the chapter is declared boring and now the plain words of the sutra are said to have no meaning. Chapter 7 explains why the Buddha taught the lesser teachings. It was an expedient to allow those followers who could not make the full journey to the treasure of enlightenment to rest and gain strength. Those in the crowd hearing the Lotus Sutra had been hearing him for life after life since he was a śramaṇera teaching the Lotus Sutra.

Using the Ongi Kuden to explain the Lotus Sutra is like relying on a commentary for understanding instead of reading the sutra itself.

As Nichiren said repeatedly, “True practicers of Buddhism should not rely on what people say, but solely on the golden words of the Buddha.”

The Ongi Kuden is not the oral teachings of Nichiren.  Modern scholars suggest the book was actually written by Nikko’s followers  at the height of the popularity of the Tendai teaching of Original Enlightenment between 110 and 185 years after Nichiren’s death.

Yesterday I published Original Enlightenment and Nichiren as the Original Buddha, an excerpt from Daniel Mongomery’s Fire in the Lotus, explaining why the Ongi Kuden is an unreliable source of Nichiren’s teachings. The most troubling implication to me, is the extent to which Nichiren Shoshu and, by extension, Soka Gakkai have used the Ongi Kuden to reject the Eternal Śākyamuni of Chapter 16 while elevating  Nichiren to the status of Original Buddha.

In Jacqueline Stone’s prize winning book Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism, she explains that such games with words were “characteristic of medieval Tendai kanjin-style interpretations: The seed surpasses the harvest; the stage of practice surpasses that of attainment; Superior Conduct, a bodhisattva, is superior to Śākyamuni, a Buddha; and Nichiren, who lived after Śākyamuni in historical time, becomes his teacher in beginningless time.”

The slide deck for the lecture included several supporting slides, one of which was this one:

This is the full text from the Ongi Kuden used earlier to say every moment is the Magic City.

To say “From the magic city to the treasure land is a distance of 500 yojanas” is nonsensical. The magic city was created 300 yojanas from the start to give a rest to those who wanted to turn back. What’s the point of changing that plain fact?

In Senji-shō, Selecting the Right Time, Nichiren admonishes his questioner: “You may ask for scriptural proofs to back up statements in later commentaries, but you may not look for proofs in later commentaries when statements in sūtras are clear.”

In a letter that discusses distinguishing the true sūtra from the provisional, Nichiren quotes Grand Master Dengyō: “Rely upon the words of the Buddha in sūtras; do not believe in what has been transmitted orally.”