Hi everybody,
Had wonderful news from Italy this week where one of my books, The Reluctant Buddhist, or Il Buddista Rilutante as it is called in Italian has sold over 5500 copies in the past year which just blows me away, that it has touched so many people's lives. Don't know how to express my gratitude.
But here we are in this Approaching the Practice chapter launching into a slightly more detailed and yet wholly practical account of the meanings locked up in these characters nam myoho renge kyo. Not one that carries us off into the deeper realms of Buddhist philosophy perhaps, in case we get lost without trace, but one that might serve as a working reference, bearing in mind that if it stimulates you to know more, you can seek out one of the references in the bibliography. So, goggles on, here we go.
Nam. The word nam comes from the Sanskrit word namas and although it is commonly tranlated as, to devote one's life to, it has a multiplicity of overlapping meanings. Perhaps the most important among these meanings are ' to summon up,' or ' to awaken,' or, ' to draw forth,' or ' to make great effort.'
Why is knowing about these other meanings so helpful? Because they express subtle differences in our life state or state of mind when we are chanting at different times. When we are faced with a major challenge for example we may be thinking about summoning up or making great effort to draw out this inner resource rather than just awakening.
Myoho
Myoho is seen to describe the profound relationship between the very essence of life, or the life force that is inherent throughout the universe, and the literally millions of physical forms in which that life force is manifest or expressed at any given time. As Nichiren Daishonin defines that idea,
' Myo is the name given to the mystic nature of life, and ho to its manifestations.'
Thus in the Buddhist tradition, everything that exists, both sentient and insentient, is an expression in some way of that life force, and is subject to the eternal rhythm of life, formation, continuation, decline and disintegration. Everything but everything is subject to that process of change or impermanence as it is so often described in Buddhism.
So myoho is made up of two elements, myo which refers to the unseen or the spiritual element which is beleived to be inherent in all things, and ho, which refers to the physical manifestation that we can observe with our senses. In Buddhism all things, all phenomena, have a myo aspect and a ho aspect. They are the two different but inseparable aspects of all life, ' two but not two' as Buddhism often expresses it, as inextricably interlinked as the two sides of a sheet of paper.
Thus the ho aspect of a painting for example, is made up of the canvas and the paint that is spread across it. The myo aspect is the feeling or the emotion or the creative energy within the artist as he applies the paint in a particular way, and the emotional impact on us as we view it. Music similarly has a clearly recognisable ho aspect in the arrangement of the black and white strokes or the notes on the page, and the physical vibrations in the air caused by the instruments as they interpret them. The profound myo aspect is the effect the music has upon our emotions and feelings as we receive the sounds produced by the instruments in that particular way. As Shakespeare expressed it so pithily in Much Ado About Nothing, it is wholly inexplicable that a sequence of sounds produced on violin strings made out of the guts of a sheep...can move our hearts so readily to tears!
Enough for today.
Next episode we'll deal a little bit more with myoho and then move on to renge.
See you then.
Best wishes,
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon and on Kindle.
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