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.