Health then Order

If you ask someone, anyone, what is the most important thing to them, the usual answer is health. With health, one may accomplish anything within one’s capability. Without health, the only thing one works on and strives for is getting it back. Of course there are desperate situations, where you have lost your health, and are for example, terminal, and then you ask yourself what you want to do with your final days. But, whenever there is a chance of recovery, we go for it.

Some people do not answer health as their first priority. These are people who have never lost it or had it in jeopardy. There is a saying, “You don’t know what you had until you lose it”, referring to a lost love or something romantic. It is much more true about health. People born with perfect health who have never been seriously threatened by injury or illness may not have any conception of how valuable it is. This is especially true for young people who may not have even seen their parents suffer ill health. They simply have no experience with it.

The other end of the spectrum are those who are chronically ill and have always been that way. They have never experienced the exhilaration of good health, and don’t have the same longing for it that those who have had it and lost it have. If you’ve never been to Paris, you can hardly feel a strong emotion to return once again. Imagination is no substitute for the real thing.

After people have come to the conclusion that health is the most important thing, the obvious question is “What is second?” Many answers come up, depending on the person, and what they have had and lost and possibly regained. “Prosperity” might be one, and “A good family” or “A good spouse” might be another. A few people give religious answers. Some have a very specific goal that has eluded them, such as the return of a prodigal child or relationship, or a variant on health, such as “Lack of depression”.

Why is health an undisputed number one, and number two up for grabs? Health is number one because it is the chief enabler, as well as a provider of good feelings, in and of itself. When you are healthy, your endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine are up, which are the pleasure and reward chemicals that are the mechanism we use for making decisions, the neurotransmitters that condition our brain to seek activities that produce more of the same. They are the basis for our motivation. But besides a direct squirt of pleasure in the brain, health makes the accomplishment of everything else not impossible. A complete lack of health makes it impossible to get anything else done, and, returning to the neurochemical side, saps our motivation to do much of anything. Lack of health is a depressant, unless of course it serves to strongly motivate you to get it back.

This second side of health is a clue as to what should be the second on our list of things to wish for. What else makes it possible for us to accomplish things? Don’t say, “Money”, because money only allows us to buy things and services. It does not allow us to accomplish things ourselves, except perhaps by providing more time. Often money comes with a catch, having to work for it, or at least preserve it, that uses up much time. At this point I want to throw in the topic of this writing: order.

Order means that you have things in your life put in some efficient organization. Order means your mind is focused. Order means your possessions are in expedient places. Order means your schedule is under control. Order means everything is orderly. And what is the real utility of order – it is again a huge enabler. It makes it possible to get things accomplished.

Order doesn’t run pleasure neurotransmitters into your brain’s cortex, like health does, unless you have been trained to enjoy it. That’s the same mechanism we have to provide reinforcement for anything else in life. You don’t like school unless you have been trained, or specifically, your neural nets have been trained to produce “happy chemicals” in your brain when you go to school, think of school, or are reminded of school. How that happens is pretty obvious to everybody, so there is no need to repeat it here. Order is the same. It is not an intrinsic pleasure source, like food, sex and affection. It is simply a trained source of pleasure, if indeed it is one. However, this has little to do with whether or not it is an enabler of other capabilities in life.

For those who are already orderly, and who have as well experienced disorder for significant periods in their life, these statements about order enabling other accomplishments do not need clarification. But many people probably are in the extreme situations – they have always, since childhood training, been orderly and don’t know disorder, or, they have always, because of lack of childhood training, never been orderly. So here I will discuss it.

Accomplishments often mean “putting something somewhere”. Like putting facts into your brain and then putting them down on a series of examination papers – which is the accomplishment of education. Like putting money into a bank account – which is the accomplishment of wealth. Like putting glycogen into your muscles and putting yourself across a finish line – which is athletics. Life is all about moving material and intangible objects into some place. Eating is simply putting edibles into your mouth. And so on.

If you want to put something somewhere, you have to have access to it. If you have order in your life, in your mind, in your thoughts, in your actions, you can more quickly and more effectively get something and put it somewhere. People who have trouble getting anything done typically have little order in some or all of the aspects of their lives.

If you don’t have order in your activities or your schedule, it’s hard to hold a job or to complete your education. If you don’t have order in your finances, it’s hard to make investments or save money or pay off debts. If you don’t have order in your paperwork at home, it’s hard to file taxes or get government approval for something. If you don’t have order in your food supplies, you lose things through spoiling. If you don’t have order in your home, you can’t find things easily, and you have a hard time maintaining cleanliness. Cleanliness is a type of order, meaning that dirt and other debris is in their places, i.e., the trash pile. Order in eating means getting the nutrition you need. Order, or in other terms good organization, is the key to doing almost anything at all.

How does that connect to SGI and Nichiren Buddhism? The mind is a place that needs ordering, perhaps more than many other ones. But you can’t just go through your cortex, medulla, amygdala, hypothalamus, and just straighten them out. Something can be done with education, but the activity in the brain is often simply incoherent. Lots of stuff is going on at any one time. Chanting quiets down a lot of this, and allows orderly thought to occur.

People who are not familiar with chanting and other forms of meditation often laugh at the claims that SGIers make about having victory in some aspect of life, resulting from chanting. That is because they simply do not understand that mental order, keeping your thoughts in line and in focus on what it is you need to do, is a tremendous advantage in accomplishing everything.

There is other training that works on focusing your attention and thereby your activity. Certainly, military training stresses getting important things done briskly and properly, and repetitive exercises in doing various activities reinforces the mind’s order here. Repetition is a great teacher. But for more amorphous tasks, where you have to think about solving a problem, quieting the parts of the mind that are not concerned with this task is a great advantage. That is why chanting works, because it produces order, and order is second only to health, in my humble opinion, in getting things done.

Test it yourself. Try and work with a totally messy desktop, with hundreds of miscellaneous papers, notes, books, magazines and other information objects strewn about. See how that goes for a week. Then take some time off and clean it off. Organize everything into orderly files. Then try to accomplish something in that environment. After the two weeks you should have no doubt as to the advantages of order. Then, if you make the leap from desk to mind, you should appreciate chanting.

Compassion vs. Truth

I have many good friends in various religions that believe in afterlife. This is an important part of their belief system.

I have already figured out, and proved in a reasonably scientific manner, as reported in previous blogs, that there is no afterlife, neither reincarnation or heaven or anything else.

I haven’t tried telling them. There is a problem in that it is extremely hard to educate someone to abandon a major pillar of their life. So the communication would be difficult and even more difficult with people who do not think logically or scientifically, and lack even a basic education in scientific reasoning and factual bases. However, even if that could be surmounted, there is another problem.

I don’t want to hurt them.

Compassion battles with truth in many situations, ranging from a lovers’ “little white lies”, to the repetition of national myths (“We are the best nation with the best system of government”, e.g., communism and others), to the subject under discussion. Some seekers of truth believe that truth is its own reward, that it is a higher goal than anything else. Often these people are sociopaths, unable to feel any sympathy, who are clever enough to rationalize their desire to be appreciated as a grown up version of the momma’s boy who was praised for being smart. Some may have other psychological origins. Most of us, on the other hand, feel both compulsions: truth is an enabler and should be supported whenever possible, and compassion is an emotional drive and one that keeps society functioning smoothly as well. How on earth can we come up with some rules of thumb to decide when to go along with the lie, and when to confront it?

So, what’s the point of truth about the afterlife? We at SGI believe that the goal of humankind is here in this life, and we should not throw away happiness now for the prospects of a better reincarnation or some new world for whatever a soul is. But that does not mean everybody needs to understand that this is it. That might do just the opposite, and make the recipient of the “Bad News” (sorry, your death is the end of it all) any happier at all. On first blush, only those that care a lot about it, so much so they sacrifice their happiness here, should be helped – but they are the ones whose happiness might be most impinged upon by the bad news.

We might coin a term “referred happiness” to mean the good feelings (lots of endorphins, dopamine and so on) that thinking about how great the afterlife will be. What is SGI trying to promote, when they say they want people to be happy here and now? If a person is happy here and now because they have some imaginary friend, should we tell him that there is no one there? And prove it unmistakably? This might be a suitable substitute discussion topic for people who cannot discuss afterlife questions rationally. If false and imagined things are providing happiness, should they be forcibly removed?

War and the Origin of Religion

Nowadays there is certainly a connection between war and religion. Some religions have an antipathy toward war, especially, SGI Buddhism. Buddhism in general was a revolution against war. SGI Buddhism has carried the torch, with SGI President Ikeda taking a strong stand against war and against nuclear weapons. The two earlier presidents of SGI Buddhism were imprisoned by the Japanese government during the world war of the 1940’s, largely for their opposition to war. The first one died there.

Other religions have opposed war. One newer religion, the Quakers, take a strong stand against it. This was possibly one of the reasons they were persecuted, and came to settle in America. Other smaller religions have opposed war, and usually suffered for those beliefs. Buddhism became almost extinct in its home country because it opposed Hindu traditions, including the division of society into classes such as the Vashtriya, the warrior class.

Most other religions do the bidding of the ruling powers and support war. This is by far the majority approach. Earlier history has religion being the cause of war, for example, the Crusades, and the Islamic push to conquer the world for Islam, when battles extended from Spain through North Africa and South Asia to Indonesia. In particular, it was those religions that promised heaven that have amassed the most soldiers and spent them in battles. Hindu, the mother of all religions, stressed over all things dharma, the duty that one’s position dictates to an individual. The warriors’ caste had the dharma to defend their own nation and occasionally attack other nations. As an exception, the Mongols, who founded the continguous largest empire in history, were religiously tolerant. Genghis Khan had advisors from many different religious groups. But their warlike abilities may have originated from something other than the heaven-promise, or dharma, simply culture. Culture is another way of saying that they had an implicit dharma, or alternatively, that their cultural idols were all brave warriors.

Exceptions aside, the question here is “Did the demand for warriors lead to the foundation of religions?” Of course, any massive institution of society does not arise from a single reason, but rather the confluence of many forces leading to its origin and sharing its evolution. War and religion, two of the most massive institutions in the history of world religion, certainly had many connections. But what came first, and gave rise, perhaps only partially, to the other?

This question is a bit ill-framed. Exactly what is a religion, and how do you know one when you stumble over it? Anyone accepted as an influential person in a tribe or early society had some explanation of why the sun rose and why rain washed away crops this year. The reason could be anything, of course, as these things can hardly be affected. Teaching people a fallible way to encourage it, i.e., some invented god to propitiate, with sacrifices or ceremonies, would tend to keep such an influential person in power. If the desired event fails to materialize, the ceremony itself can be blamed. Or the indifference of the god can be tagged as the cause. This seems to be a feedback loop whereby the influential person can demand more sacrifices or whatever to try again.
On top of this interaction with natural forces comes the interaction with other tribes. Stealing is one way of gaining resources, and maybe more efficient in some situations than hunting or agriculture. Armed robbery, which is what early military adventures were, is an advanced method of stealing. So, as raiding became established, warriors were needed, and some influential person somewhere came up with the idea of an afterlife. Maybe it was built on an invention for the consolation of grieving relatives when someone passed away. By claiming they were simply transferred to some other place or body (heaven or reincarnation), the relatives wouldn’t grieve so long. The big invention in social con-games was the inclusion of a promise of an improved afterlife (better position in heaven or a better social standing next time around).

This is, of course, all speculation, and like much intellectual speculation, it sounds like it might be true. It is going to take a lot of more investigation to figure out if there is any merit in it.

Warrior Castes

In studying Hinduism, the grandfather of all religions, I read some passages from the Bhagavad-Gita, one of the earliest of Hindu religious texts. In it, Krishna (one of the trinity of gods, or a manifestation of the single god, however you like it) was talking to Arjuna, who was deciding whether to go into battle. Arjuna was born into the Khastria caste of warriors, and so had the obligation to go into battle and conceivably risk his life and limb.

Krishna talked to him about reincarnation, about he (whatever “he” represents) would get reborn when he died into another creature, and if he followed the guidance of his religious leaders (whatever that happened to be, and for him it was go into battle), he would get born into an even better situation.

Clearly it is an advantage for a culture to sacrifice some of its young men in battle to protect the existence or resources of the population as a whole. However, young men being somewhat intelligent, you have to have something to tell them to get them to sacrifice their lives. The original idea seemed to be that they have an inner essence, a “soul” if you will, that will go to some better place if they get killed. In Hinduism, it was a better situation for their next experience on earth. In early European cultures, some sort of Valhalla existed. Christianity turned it into an unearthly paradise, as did Islam. Could it be that one of the core reasons for the origination of religions, starting with the earliest, Hinduism, was to motivate young men or men in general to go out and possibly get killed for the good of the whole tribe (or sect, or some group). Some brilliant wizard thousands of years ago figured out that people believed him, and he might as well make the tribe more likely to survive by motivating his warriors to do their duty and not shirk it, by telling him this tale of their survival, despite their death. This was obviously a neat trick.

The core belief stayed as part of the main religions in the world, and just the unprovable promise got changed, largely into even more grandiose rewards. The other social benefits of a religion don’t require any afterlife imagination. For example, building churches can be done by any dictatorial power, no matter whether enforced by custom (the oldest guy gets to decide), by power (the guy who’s recruited the soldiers gets to decide), or by religious authority (the guy who’s impressed everyone with his knowledge of things in general extends the awe that surrounds him to supernatural domains). But getting people to die some traumatic way, doing something not necessarily pleasant (killing other people might be some taboo), takes a real attractive promise. So, lo and behold, religion is born!

Buddha tried to squash this, which is why the Hindu theologians ganged up on him after he died to get rid of these ideas. (Successfully in India and other places). Buddha was in favor of peace, and this means that people don’t get born into warrior castes. See my earlier blog on the disappearance of cultures that don’t have warriors, e.g., Buddhist ones. Rather than sacrifice their defenses, they skewered his beliefs.

The New Butso-don

This is a plug for the SGI member who made my Butso-don for me... It is a very nice, very reasonable butso-don. Made out of cherrywood, it was sized to fit my gohonzon. Thirty years ago, gohonzons were a bit smaller, and Chuckie sized it to fit. The cloth backing was chosen by me. It has a light in the top that shines down. All the better to chant!

To contact Chuckie, use this email: . or abchuckie AT ctc.net

The Roots of Buddha and Buddhism

After studying Buddhism for a very long time, reading the Buddha's sutras, and learning about some of the events in his life, I suddenly came upon the realization that I understood almost nothing about the Buddha's environment. Gautama grew up as a Hindu, surrounded by Hindu religious beliefs, with Hindu parents, with Hindu educators, with Hindu friends and with a Hindu wife. Yet somehow, the writers about Buddha that I have read from, mostly in the context of Soka Gakkei, have never seen fit to enlighten me about this environment.

I decided to put an end to that and start learning about Hinduism, with even the goal in mind to understand the Hinduism of Buddha's time and location. Gautama certainly participated in the Hindu rituals, was baptized (and other things) in Hindu tradition, and maybe learned yoga, meditation, chanting, commandments, rituals, and more from his Hindu tradition. What exactly of his teachings is different, and what is carried over from his Hindu past?

India, in the common American view, is like Africa, primitive, unhygenic, poorly educated and not a place to go on vacation. Except for a few travel ads for the Taj Mahal, it is hardly mentioned. It almost has not entered most Americans' consciousness. Our geographic ignorance is legendary around the world, and I doubt many Americans could describe where it is located. Since it is so backward, why learn anything about it? So we Americans grow up without hearing anything about India, or about Hinduism, except for a few news flashes, as when someone important is assassinated. But then again, we don't much keep up with anywhere but home anyway...

Yoga comes from India, and many Americans are taking up yoga. But they do so without understanding its position in Hindu life and the Hindu religion. It is almost like it is some sort of exercise regime that someone dreamed up, and we can learn about.

These two factors, that Buddhist thought more or less ignores Buddha's Hindu roots, and America's (maybe Europe's too) disdain for the culture have certainly combined to leave me with a black hole where my education about Hinduism should be. Time to fix that.

A quick read of a simple book on Hinduism left me in shock. Such a huge amount of religious thought, continuing on after Buddha of course, was laying in wait for the interested reader. I can see spending the next year studying, not about Buddhism, but about Buddha's roots -- following a fascinating track back to the time 25 (or 30 in some people's opinion) centuries ago.

Silent Chanting

Sometimes there is little time in a day to chant, for example, if there is a lot of traveling involved. I commute daily for an hour and a half each way, mostly by commuter train, and this takes up so much time there is often no time left for chanting at home in the morning or in the evening. Family needs time, home maintenance needs time, finance needs time, health needs time, and more. What to do?

My chapter leader talked about chanting while driving. I have done that many times. On an open road, with no traffic to worry about, just Interstate miles to grind through, it’s easy to chant. There is no gohonzon or equivalent, as the eyes have to be kept on the road, but that’s only one part of chanting. The verbal part is more important. So I can sound off, if I'm alone as is usually the case, and chant for a half hour, or forty-five minutes, which is my limit from my throat getting hoarse. It feels good, just like chanting at home.

My next experiment in chanting was with silent chanting. Obviously, on a commuter train or bus (which I also use frequently), I can’t be sounding out “Nam Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo”, without disturbing all the sleeping, reading, computer-watching, or daydreaming or gossiping fellow-travelers. So instead, I tried to focus on an object, usually a small object separate from its surroundings, and repeated in my mind our mantra. It does something, but it is nowhere near as powerful as chanting out loud. On some days, I could feel the focus kick-in at the 20 to 25 minute mark, as it sometimes does with chanting before the gohonzon, but other days it just didn’t happen. Now that also happens with chanting out loud, but it happens more often with silent chanting than with loud chanting. It is also much harder to stay mindful of the chanting if it is silent. There is probably something going on with the verbal-to-auditory feedback that helps keep the mental noise down, and without that, the mind drifts more readily. The environment is also obviously not as conducive to chanting, with other people around. Fortunately for me, on the morning train almost everybody is quiet, so there is no distraction from some inconsiderate person babbling on the telephone or to their seat partners. On my train there are some groups that do that, but not in the train car I choose. Only a small, small number of people act that way, for which I am most grateful and appreciative. It is so appalling to have to listen to foolish banter for a hour of trapped time.

There also seems to be an experience effect as well. It worked better when I started, rather than after 6 months of experimenting with it. After some months, there seemed to be a separation in my mind, so that two parts were operating distinctly and independently. One part was repeating the chanting, probably the verbal part of the mind, while the other part, the thinking part, was thinking about something else. This, of course, goes on while meditating in any fashion, but there is less control and more drifting when chanting is only inside the mind.

I am looking for a different solution now, so that I can find some more time for out-loud chanting, and divert some tasks to train time. When work/family/health/etc. pressure and stress are greatest, it is hard to find break time for chanting. Rather than give in to this, I need to organize my time better so over-stress doesn’t occur. I usually don’t spend enough time organizing my work, often because it seems obvious what to do and how to, but this may be an error. So the experiments continue…

One Buddhist in a household

SGI is totally unlike other Buddhist sects. It does not have a priesthood. Nobody wears old-style robes and lives on alms. There are no temples. SGI was formed, initially, as a lay offshoot of NSA(Nichiren Shoshu Association), and split off in the 90’s to become something entirely new. It’s just all about people, ordinary people, who are SGI Buddhists. This means that the attitude of the religion is different. We have mentors and students, typically more experienced people helping less experienced ones learn about Nichiren Buddhism and its practices. But there is no top-down structure in which a hierarchy tells people what to do. Even the current president of SGI, Daisaku Ideda, refers to himself as a mentor. This means that the influence of individuals is about all there is to keep the religion going.

A single SGI member in a household has a more difficult situation than one where two spouses are both members. Spouses are the most important person for most marriages. With only one member, there is no mutual reinforcement of SGI theory and practice, and instead of the inspiration of practicing together, practice is exclusionary, making a difference between the two spouses. Of course, marriages are full of differences, i.e., reasons why the couples spend time apart, doing different things. In the single-Buddhist household, religion is yet another separate activity. This makes the practice harder, and it serves as yet another difference between the spouses. Often there are too few common areas, times when both can do something together, enjoying the activity as well as each other’s company. Having yet another non-common one, especially in an area as important as religion, is unfortunate.

SGI activities are another split-time problem. One spouse goes off to do an activity, leaving the other at home with separate time. Clearly the pressure builds to do less, so that there is more couple time. Couple-together time is very important to continue a marriage as a good value, yet activities detract from that. Rather than there being a common bond, there is a dividing line. It would be very nice if each of the spouses respected the other’s beliefs, and supported their activities, much like if two spouses enjoyed different sports, but were interested enough in the preferred sports of the other spouse to discuss them and appreciate the other spouse’s interests.

Religion isn’t like a sport, however. SGI tells us that our role is to seek our own happiness, and then to seek that of others, by helping them understand Buddhism and to use its beliefs for their own lives. In a marriage, this doesn’t translate to listening to the other spouse talk about his or her own religion and supporting it to the fullest. Virtually every religion has a façade of tolerance, hiding an evangelical goal. To put it bluntly, if a spouse believes that their own religion is the answer to life’s questions, and they invest their own beliefs in it, they would naturally want the person they care about the most, hopefully their spouse, to fully enjoy and appreciate it as well.

Does this mean the one-Buddhist household is doomed to problems and dissatisfaction? The key to avoiding this is to practice tolerance, of course, but even more than tolerance. Remember that Buddha explained about expedient teaching – which is what ordinary people need to appreciate and absorb his understandings. Other religions should be regarded as expedient learning, perhaps steps on the pathway to deeper understanding, or perhaps the furthest step that a particular person can take. When a person grows up embedded in an expedient religion, it may be completely impossible to disentangle their feelings and thoughts from it. Thus, the Buddhist spouse should simply wait and hope, and when appropriate, gently explain the similarities and differences between Buddhism and the religion of the spouse.

Shaka-buku is the Japanese term used for conversion, and is especially prominent in SGI writings. It is considered an important goal for all members. However, over this is personal happiness. Shaka-buku should never be a means of harming the marriage, or of upsetting the spouse. Shaka-buku must take its place behind the goals of maintaining the good atmosphere of the marriage and of aiding and promoting the happiness of the spouse. These priorities are not often spelled out in SGI writings, but they become obvious when thinking about the one-Buddhist household.