Hi Everybody,
I'm off on my hols next week, hoping to climb onto a windsurfer in Lemnos Bay, so I'm going to try to fit in a couple of extra episodes this week, just to keep up the pace. Had a great e-mail from the jazz singer Cleve Douglass Jazz this week saying that he'd just picked up one of my books in the SGI culture Centre in NY and, he went on... he thought it was one of the best books he'd had the pleasure of reading for introducing people to the principles and values of Nichiren Buddhism! Can't tell you what a powerful impact it has when someone just takes the trouble to pen a few words. Every writer needs feedback. We love it of course when it's good, but it's just as important when it's critical because it sharpens our focus...how can we improve things. Anyway...I was well pleased. Thanks Cleve!
OK so let's move on from the examination of chanting to looking at the second main pillar of the practice which is study. Once again Buddhism is esentially like any other subject we might be interested in, in that to gain the greatest value from our practice, then clearly we have to spend a reasonable amount of time studying it, in order to understand more fully its basic principles and beleifs. That is part and parcel if you like of the commitment, part and parcel of the responsibility that we accept in taking up the practice; studying a wide range of things from the letters and other writings of Nichiren himself, which are still extant, to commentaries by Buddhist scholars and accounts by individual Buddhists of the ways in which their practice has changed their lives. Nichiren makes no bones about its importance. Indded he goes so far as to say,
' Exert yourself in the two ways of practice and study. Without practice and study there is no Buddhism.'
It could scarcely be expressed more bluntly could it...without practice and study there is no Buddhism! Indeed study becomes a continuous process. many practitioners fold it into their daily lives, spending a few minutes each day reading or studying a Buddhist text or a piece of commentary, because it is such a broad ranging philosophy.
But tha thaving been said it is equally important to emphasise that this is not in any way an intellectual practice. The practice is not about knowledge so much as about spirit. So the study is not about acquiring knowledge in a sort of egocentric way, knowledge as an end in itself. It is wholly about deepening our understanding of the principles that inform the practiceand how they play out in everyday life. Because of course, in the final analysis, that is what we are talking about, it's about our values and our behaviour above all, about how we personally seek to create value through the situations and the people we encounter as we go about our daily lives.
So that's a few words on study. next time we look at action and an important issue that we tend to call actual proof.
See you then.
All my best wishes,
William
No comments:
Post a Comment