mybuddhist blog

Hi Everybody, blog number 6 in this series which is essentially tracking the narative thread of my latest book, The Case for Buddhism. In the last couple of blogs I've traced the story of my journey over many months of study and debate from profound scepticism about the relevance of a Buddhist practice to my life as a television journalist, to making the determination to take up the prqctice. This blog picks up the thread of that story.

The Case for Buddhism p23
' I cannot say that at the start of my practice there was any clear vision or sense of direction. There wasn't an overriding idea or an obvious goal towards which I was heading. Why should there be?There was however I now realise a clear resolution. There seemed no point otherwise. If I try to put myself back in that situation, I was determined that once I had set out on this somewaht surprising road, I would continue until I was sure, one way or another, about the value of this practice in my daily life. It was easy enough for people to say to me, ' Buddhism is daily life,' as they did. The question was, did it actually work at that level?Did it make a fundamental difference to the way I viewed the ordinary stuff of every day?

So where have I ended up? I ought to say at once that I've never spent much time looking backwards. I'm much more concerned about the projects I have in hand now and where they are leading. But if I pose the direct question now, what has been the result of all those years of regular daily Buddhist practice, what sort of answer emerges? That's a tough question for anyone of course, and not one that can be answered lightly.

But I would go so far as to say that my Buddhist practice has had a greater and more profound effect on the way I live my life than any other single experience. That's a big thing to say about a long and eventful life. Moreover I simply can't think of any negatives. I have ended up with the most powerful and enduring sense of well-being and gratitude for all the things that are in my life...and I mean all the things. I can honestly say that for much of my life that was not the case. I can well remember for example that I would very rarely allow myself to use the ' happiness' word because as soon as you had uttered it, it seemed that whatever it was that you were trying to describe had either passed by or simp,y evaporated. Better not to pin a label on the experience.

Somehow, I can't claim to be entirely sure how, since causal connections are inevitably so difficult to trace, but undoubtedly I've been able to develop a much greater awareness of, and a much greater sense of gratitude for, the immense richness of my life. I also seem to have grown a much greater capacity to embrace everything that I encounter in my life. Not just the easy things, the good and the golden things, the stuff we all want. But all things, good, bad and indifferent. And there's been plenty of bad and indifferent stuff, as there is in all lives. Near bankruptcy as a result of fraud in the City for example, and losing most of the material possessions that I thought were so crucial to my happiness. For the past three years I've been engaged in a battle against cancer that has involved me in a fair bit of mental and physical pain. But as I have written elsewhere, as soon as I became aware of the cancer, so too I was aware of  my ability to face up to it, to embrace it even as part of my life. And those responses came as something of a shock to me. The knowledge that my sense of well-being and optimism about life wasn't dependent on nonly good things happening to me.

So what I am saying is that this gradual transformation towards a profound and stable sense of well-being has occurred almost sub-consciously, as Imhave gone about my ordinary daily life...as a Buddhist. And that is the crucial point that cannot really be overstated. Basically I've just got on with living my life. The only major change has been that I've tried hard to do that within the framework of those Buddhist values and principles that I slowly acquired. so I've maintained a strong daily practcie for example, difficult in the early years because I was so often questioning its value, but now as much a part of my life as breathing. I've made a real effort to respond positively to all the ' stuff' that confronts all of us on a daily basis. As you would expect I haven't always succeeded, but when I've made a mess of things I've made the effort to re-evaluate so that I can make a better shot at getting it right, next time around. Sometimes that's been easy, sometimes difficult, but as Buddhism tells us so often, trying, actually making the effort, is in itself, succeeding. It's not trying, not making the effort, that we can count as failure.

And I think I'm being whooy accurate when I say that I've worked hard to create value in the lives of people whom my life has touched. Not in extraordinary ways I might add, just the ordinary everyday ways of courtesy and support and encouragement and active help when it was needed. As both Buddhism and now modern social science tell us repeatedly, altruism, concerning ourselves with the needs and welfare of others is without a shadow of doubt, on eof the most powerful contributors to our own sense of well-being. Givin gto others is an immesne source of personal benefit.

But what we ought to focus on I suggest, are the implications of that brief account, which, I have no doubt, could be said to describe the lives of the vast majority of my Buddhist colleagues. And those implications seem to me to be inescapable. Put simply it suggests that a Nichiren Buddhist practice, provided it is lived with some degree of care and commitment...nothing extraordinary or even particularly demanding, certainly nothing we would consider to be overtly religious in any formal sense...that simple practice has the potential to transform ( that's the key word ..transform ) the difficult and unlikely stuff of our ordinary daily lives into a profound sense of well-being and gratitude for the joy of living.

Because that is describing nothing more than what has actually taken place in my life.'

Whew. That's enough for today I'm sure. In fact apolgies for going on a bit, but this is an important part of the story. Next blog I move on to a consideration of modern sociology and psychology, and what they have to tell us about human motivation and behaviour, and how that relates to Buddhist teachings.

The book by the way, The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon.

Best wishes,

William miodnight Tuesday 17th december.