A Guide to the - Rissho Kosei-kai

The Right Length of a MealThere is a saying, "If you want something done, ask someone who is busy." It might seem morelogical to ask someone who is not busy, but such a person is often neglectful. There are manybooks of advice for men and women in business and others on how to manage time and makethe most of the twenty‐four hours of the day, but I would like to take a slightly differentapproach.Some people say they are simply too busy for community service, the peace movement, ortheir faith. They have convinced themselves that time is an absolute, that there are onlytwenty‐four hours in a day and sixty minutes in an hour, and that nothing can change this. TheLotus Sutra tells of the bodhisattvas who were so engrossed for eons by the Buddha Sun MoonLight's preaching of the Sutra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Law that the time seemedas short as the time it took to eat. The phrase in the Lotus Sutra is "listening to the Buddha'spreaching and deeming it but the length of a meal." In other words, time is relative.The same is true of space flight. According to the theory of relativity, if astronauts traveledaway from the earth at slightly less than the speed of light for 2,500 years, what on earth wouldappear to be 2,500 years would be for the astronauts only a fifty‐year period. If a newborn childhad set off in a rocket at the time of the birth of the Buddha, it would now be an adult turningfifty. Such an incredible situation is theoretically possible. Even without resorting to such adifficult theory, I am certain that everyone must have had the experience in daily life of timeseeming short. Half a day laughing and talking in pleasant company seems to pass in a flash, buta boring day feels very long. An unpleasant task that you do not want to do takes hours andhours, but it is easy to make headway with a pleasant task in a very short time. Time seemslong or short depending on one's attitude.Nichiren (1222‐‐82) was the most discipline‐oriented Japanese Buddhist priest, and sought away to human salvation based on the Lotus Sutra. In 1261, while he was in exile at Ito on the IzuPeninsula, he wrote in his Shion‐sho ("The Four Debts of Gratitude"‐‐that is, to our parents,rulers, all living things, and the Three Treasures):For over 240 days, from the twelfth day of the fifth month of last year [when this exile began]to the sixteenth of the first month of this year [today], I have been able day and night topractice the teachings of the Lotus Sutra. Because for the sake of the Lotus Sutra I am placed inthis situation [exile], whatever I do‐‐whether I am walking, standing, sitting, or lying‐‐I live bythe sutra daily with my whole self. What greater joy than this could there be for someone bornhuman in this world? . . . [Exiled like this] I in effect read the sutra even though I do notremember it, and live by it automatically even though I do not read it.Just before this passage, Nichiren confesses that for the previous six or seven years, though hehad earnestly believed in the Lotus Sutra, he had been preoccupied with study or worldlyaffairs, and that he had been able to devote time each day to reading only one chapter orchanting the title of the Lotus Sutra (the daimoku). Of course, throughout those years Nichirenmust have spent day and night with the Lotus Sutra. Yet placed in the special situation of exile,he became palpably aware of his devotion to the Lotus Sutra, and experienced a fullness of thespirit that he had not previously known.I myself have felt that most poignantly. After Rissho Kosei‐kai was established, for example, Ihad not a moment of my own. Though I had gone to bed at two in the morning, I would have toget up at four to make my rounds delivering milk. No sooner had I returned home for breakfastthan someone would come and ask me to visit their seriously ill neighbor. I would hurriedlyfinish breakfast and then go to the sick person's bedside to chant the sutra. After he or she33