my buddhist blog number 127

Hi Everybody,
Hope all is well with you.
We're closing in on the end of this chapter and this book. Only half a dozen pages to go.
I've just learned that the Spanish version is about to be published! Which is really great news. It makes the book available to the huge Spanish speaking audience in the US and in South America.
Right well we've been explorign the meaning of the mantra that Nichiren Buddhists chant, nam myoho renge kyo. It is the title of the Lotus Sutra, which contains the key teachings of Mahaayna Buddhism in classical Japanese. Over the past few episodes we've looked in detail at the underlying meanings of nam, and myoho and renge. So you can revisit those episodes if you wish to refresh your memory, and in this one we're talking about kyo.

So justas with myoho and renge, the word kyo embodies many meanings. It is literally translated as ' sutra' or the voice or teaching of the Buddha. But it also measn vibration or sound, so can be taken to represent the vibrations that spread out from someone in the process of chanting. Indeed there is a well-known Buddhist saying that ' the voice does the Buddha's work,' and there is no question that the sound or the vibration that is created by a group of people chanting, even quite a small group, can be very powerful.
I can still recall with great clarity for example, the very first Buddhist meeting I went to, some time before I actually started practising. It was a dark cold winter's evening I remember and we were walking along this street of narrow Victorian houses in West London, with me thinking not particularly positive thoughts such as, ' Oh well, it can't last much more than an hour this meeting!' And then, as we turned up the short garden path to the house, coming through the closed front door was this wonderful resonant sound. Strong. Confident. Vibrant. It actually made the hair tingle on the back of my neck I recall. A sound produced by just a dozen or so ordinary people, chanting nam myoho renge kyo.'

Enough for today I think.
I have to say re-writing that passage I can still recall that first meeting. And I've been chanting every day since then. When I say that this practice has profondly changed my life, I mean precisely that. It has changed my life in more ways than I can recount, all of them immensely beneficial.
See you next time,
William
The Case for Buddhism is available in paperback from Amazon and as a download on Kindle.