When the book stood up

Some of my environment is crowded. I have a row of books about Buddhism near my Gohonzon, and they are tipped over a little bit to keep them from falling over. One day, recently, when chanting, I watched as the end book, a paperback on Sakyamuni, tipped up vertically, from about 10° angle to perfectly vertical. Nothing near it moved, nothing in the room had moved, nothing was going on in the house, and nothing was happening at all except my chanting.

If I was a believer in supernatural things instead of a scientist, I might have assumed this was a sign from something to me. However, it was probably that the book was simply spreading pages out, expanding a tiny bit, and it was on the verge of tipping upwards for a long time. Then, either a coincidence happened, and it stood up while I could see it, or the sound vibrations of my chanting provided the tiny bit of energy it needed to move over the energy barrier keeping it at a slant. There’s no need, and I have no interest in, figuring out the physics of the tipping, but it reminded me of something.

I had long ago decided to investigate Sakyamuni’s life and thought more deeply. The tipping of the book on his life reminded me of it. I’ve started writing a bit about what I know already, and will likely keep digging deeper.

It also reminded me of what fortune telling is all about. It is about taking little signs and using them to investigate things already in our mind. Tarot card reading is an example of that. If the deck is shuffled, the cards that are displayed are random, and therefore there is nothing there to predict the future. However, they can remind the reader of something in one part of the subject’s mind and help connect it with something in another part of the subject’s mind. They can suggest considering the opposite of some fixed assumptions. Thus, tarot reading sometimes makes us come up with some unique ideas; they are formed of what we already knew but had not put together yet. The same probably holds for other forms of fortune telling. To figure out a personal puzzle, some random process that links up various previously-unlinked thoughts may provide insight, and that insight, based on our own knowledge, might lead to the solution to the puzzle.

Chanting doesn’t affect the world, it affects people. Mostly, it affects the person who chants, and that person can affect other people, or even some aspects of the world. So that means to chant to have a sunny day for a summer picnic is frivolous; but chanting to be prepared for the contingency of a rainy day is completely logical and sensible. No one seems to bother to say this in SGI, possibly out of compassion for those who have not yet formed clear ideas of what to chant for.