Joe Isuzu's Daily Slander

I haven’t written in a while. Been very busy helping my dear old mom make the adjustment from autonomy to something else without her losing her sense of self that is reflected in her independent mobility. Kicking ass and taking names has an expiration date. Oy. Until I get something she’s comfortable with, I’m Driving Miss Daisy.

Thomas Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home Again has become a catch phrase. It seems that every time I do go home, what I use to love about my hometown, has been eroded away with time. Change happens. But I just wonder when the official dress code became green oxygen tank with nose bib while the “look du jour” is incredibly obese. The local Sizzler is the equivalent of Tarzan’s elephant graveyard. They even have a bowl of M&M’s in the salad bar to offset anything healthy you might put on your plate by mistake. After taking a leak in the men’s room, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. For a millisecond, in contrast to everyone around me, I thought I was as good looking as Mad Max and here I was, stuck in Bartertown.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to do is ask some of the questions that nobody seems to ever address in a SGI meeting. (At least none that I ever attended in 35 years.) There’s a bunch, but for now I’ll just do a couple. This sort came about from the “what do the beads mean?” question. I already wrote about that in Tug Of War. Conclusion: I don’t need beads.

1. Why can’t you take a picture of the Gohonzon? continue reading…

OKAY!
Okay, I’m out of the sick bed and my health is mended. Hark! What was that? An audible gasp of relief from the worried readers of this blog? Hmm? Must have been the wind. Or maybe that dragon (the one that lives in a cave and when it breaths out wind results) is relieved; “whew!”
WOW! There’s been a lot of writing happening on the comment section of the last blog since I got sick. I’m going to try and throw a blanket over all this conversation. Not a wet one I hope.
NANCY
Nancy and I have given each other Carte Blanc to say what ever we please to each other. We talk to each other quite a bit. Some may say that this is because of a bond we formed in the infinite past. But there just isn’t any real proof of either of us having had an infinite past, so I’m going to say that it’s from me hooking up with Greg on FWP and then Nancy asking me to MC his memorial and us becoming fast friends after. So when she calls me a “dumb ass”, I hear “cupcake.”
Everybody else who has commented here I only know from his or her comments.
This particular dialogue in the comment section has been a healthy reminder of what I believe, how I got to the point of believing what I believe, areas where I still have doubts and why.
“DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH?” Chris Tucker to Jackie Chan in “Rush Hour”
Between the capacity of the people, the place, and the time, Nichiren usually picked time as the most important and hardest to fathom for sages. I don’t believe in prophets: Shakyamuni, Muhammad, Nostradamus, etc. That’s pretty tough for a guy practicing something during a time that was supposedly predicted to become. I once wrote about Shakyamuni and posed the question of why the three time periods, the five 500 years time periods, and people argued it was all kinds of things, metaphors being one, which weren’t true because it was a linear prediction and it really doesn’t matter WHAT the prediction depends upon because that was never the point. The point was WHY predict and why linear. Those points kept getting lost in everyone’s efforts in trying to JUSTIFY the prediction according to Nichiren.
The same thing has happened in the last blog and especially during the comments.

So just to clarify:

I DO NOT PRACTICE WITH ANY SEPARTION BETWEEN MY EFFORTS TOWARDS ABSOLUTE HAPPINESS IN MODELING THOSE EFFORTS ON THE SO CALLED BELIEF AND UNDERSTANDING CHAPTER OF THE LOTUS SUTRA AND THE ESSENSE OF THE INTENTION OF THE REST OF THE SUTRA BECAUSE ACCORDING TO THE LOTUS SUTRA, REGARDLESS OF WHERE MY FAITH ORIGINATES, I STILL RECEIVED THE GIFT, WHICH MAY NOT BE THE GIFT I EXPECTED, OF ENLIGHTENMENT.

The theoretical and essential cannot exist outside the relationship between each other. There is no separation. Nichiren revealed the essence of what we need to do to be absolutely happy IN THIS LIFETIME, DISTILLED in form. It either works or it doesn’t. So far I haven’t been disappointed in it. But someone has predicted that I will be. And you know how I feel about prophets.

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EXPLAINING THE CAUSATION OF THE TEN WORLDS
WND VOL. II PAGES 204-205
The precepts of the Lotus Sutra are viewed from two aspects. First, they are precepts of comparative myo, or comparative wonderfulness; second, they are precepts of absolute myo, or absolute wonderfulness.
First, with regard to the term “precepts of comparative myo,” it means that, when the Mahyana and Hinayana precepts set forth by the Buddha in the first forty and more years of his preaching life are compared with the precepts of the Lotus Sutra, the former are seen to be “rough precepts,” while the latter are seen to be “wonderful precepts.” The precepts set forth in the various other sutras are disliked because the are precepts before the truth was revealed, precepts to be practiced over numerous kalpas, precepts of those forever predestined by nature for the two vehicles, while the precepts of the Lotus Sutra are the precepts of the truth, precepts for the immediate attainment of enlightenment, precepts allowing persons of the two vehicles to attain Buddhahood. When the latter are compared to the former, one can see which are rough and which are wonderful. Therefore we speak of the latter as “precepts of the comparative myo.”
THE FIRST THING
It cannot be an easy task to translate an ancient language into something a modern person can recognize as a coherent sentence that will resonate its meaning within the reader. That being said, what first attracted my attention to this passage is that, in my anally retentiveness, I noticed the conclusion is inconsistent with the premise. I’m not sure if this is because of a mistake by the publisher, the translator, or Nichiren himself. But the conclusion in this case should be that the “latter” becomes “precepts of the absolute myo.” This would make it consistent with other letters by Nichiren where he argues absolute over provisional in context with capacity and time.

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