Chanting is by you, of you and for you. It stays there.

Think about a certain situation: chanting while you are alone. You are not affecting anything but yourself.

Some people who are new to SGI or do not have any understanding of the world think that chanting affects other things directly. They could chant for a sunny day on the fourth of July, so their family reunion would go over well. If the sunny day happens, they feel they had an effect, and if it doesn’t, that they didn’t chant long enough or sincerely enough.

This example, of course, is ridiculous, but the idea that chanting somehow has a direct effect on something else seeps into discussions at SGI meetings. Someone might chant to get rich, and if they do so by working hard for the next ten years, it’s pretty obvious that chanting made them strong enough, and focused enough, to accomplish the goal. However, if they win the lottery, a few people are inclined to laud chanting for their result. Actually, it was Lady Luck who gave them the winning ticket, and the iron laws of probability do not change for anyone.

When you chant, there are things going on in your head, and sound comes out. Your mind is being slightly reprogrammed. The sound has little physical effect on surroundings. You could detect it with a telephone microphone or other devices, but as far as something distant goes, the sound just doesn’t get there. And that’s the only thing. Science has understood for decades the means by which forces and information are communicated from one location to another. The means are particles, electromagnetics, material vibrations, gravity. That’s the whole list.

You can ask if any of those means can bring something out of your brain to affect some other thing in the real world. The first problem is the source. Brains have been examined over and over and over, and more and more is being learned about them. But what is being learned is not new ways in which they can generate forces or influence external objects. That particular part of science wrapped up decades ago. What’s being investigated are the internal details of the brain, for example the microbiology of brain cells, or the allocation of neural masses to different types of processing (verbal vs. visual, for example). Someone who doesn’t understand what’s going on in brain science might think there is still some chance that a new center of influence will be found – not so. So, the first problem for someone who wants to hold out that the brain can communicate either information or influence is that there is nothing in the brain to create it.

The second problem is the media. Remember, there are four. There are particles being emitted by the brain that impact other items, but they are randomly emitted. There are radioactive elements in all matter. They amount to very, very small amounts, but non-zero. However, radioactive decay, that leads to particle emissions, is a random event, except in nuclear chain reactions, which do not happen in our brains. No information is carried by random events, nor can any desires we have alter what these particles do when they pass through the skull into the exterior world. So, particles are no use.

The next media is electormagnetics. The brain does emit low-frequency radio waves, and they can be picked up by sensitive equipment. However, the power levels are so low that they can have no effect by themselves, and there is no coding that they use reflecting the detailed thought we have. The bandwidths are too low. The waves are simply like the waves emitted by our house wiring. They are the result of electrical currents circulating in the brain. There are more or less of them depending on whether we are asleep or awake, or on what kind and amount of thinking we are doing. They are not even detectable by another person, nor by any distant electromagnetic receiver, except perhaps inside an EM anechoic chamber (Faraday cage).

The vibrations that come out of the brain are about zero, (blood pulsing), but those that come from speech certainly contain content. This means that normal means of observing the effect of what we say can tell us what total effect happens. Everybody from age 1 knows this. But no one should figure that the sound we make can affect anything directly. The power is too weak, and there is no receiver that is sensitive to it. Lastly, gravity needs a huge mass to have an effect. Thus, there not only is no source, there is no means. We could talk about receivers, but that is a waste of time as there is nothing to receive.

So, we need to conclude, what we doing in our heads, stays in our heads. We chant of, for (if we want to), and by ourselves (if we want to). It goes nowhere unless we do something ourselves, i.e., communicate to someone else something. Chanting is an internal mental process, and there is no way that it can get out into the rest of the world to make any change unless we take some physical action, like speaking or writing. It’s like the rest of our internal processes. Our heart beats, but that only affects ourselves. It produces a tiny bit of electromagnetic energy, and is the source of an infinitestimal amount of random radioactive decay particles, and it vibrates inside the chest cavity, but none of this has any effect on the rest of the world. We can detect these things with sensitive instruments, but these instruments only tell experts about the state of health of the heart. Sensitive instruments applied to the brain only tell experts about the state of health of the brain. There is nothing in the heart or the brain to send signals to the external world.

Let's not forget that Buddha was a human, now long dead. We do not chant to the Buddha. We study his recorded teaching. Some earlier sects of Buddhism amalgated his person with some earlier supernatural religious beliefs, making him into some sort of immortal being. This was expedient teaching, for people whose minds were not sufficient prepared by science to understand that supernatural things do not exist. There was nothing the matter with this; in fact, it was a wonderful thing as it communicated a great deal of learning to people in that state. There are still huge numbers of people in that state, who still have these beliefs, and it is still a wonderful thing that they do. The world would be a much worse place without expedient teaching. Buddha understood this, and his principal followers also did. We must never do anything to disparage expedient teaching. It keeps the world going, and it paves the road for more advanced and clear teaching. But we must not allow ourselves, who have the benefit of good education, to fall back to expedient teaching's ideas and think of the Buddha as a supernatural person. We chant to the Gohonzon, which is correctly referred to as a mirror. We do not chant to the Buddha.

That being said, it should be easier to choose goals for chanting. No more physical effects. No more mystical communication. Only ways to improve ourselves mentally so we can improve our situation in the world. Fortunately, that is a huge task that can take a lifetime to accomplish.