Personal Practice
It is impossible for me to write a customized daily practice routine for each person who may read this book. I figure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. I’m just making sure you understand that what follows will be a suggestion. Please use this according to your situation based upon the idea that every moment is an opportunity for you to engage in your Buddhist practice and to live a life based upon the Lotus Sutra.
Chant Odaimoku endlessly and ceaselessly
Every moment of your day fill up with Odaimoku. Every step, every breath, every thought focus on the Sacred Title of the Lotus Sutra. This swamp you live in is the perfect fertile ground upon which the most beautiful Lotus will appear, if you nourish it with the fertilizer of Odaimoku. These are not simply nice, optimistic, feel good words this is an absolute truth.
Memorize the sutra as soon as you are able
It is not necessarily ideal to always chant from memory, and if you do not have to then don’t. But there may times when, perhaps isolation, when all you will have is your memory. Learn the sutra, memorize it. I believe this is important, as I will illustrate in a story following this.
Here are some ways to incorporate Odaimoku into your daily life, many of which you can do without anyone knowing.
• Chant while walking; either instep by chanting Namu on the left foot, Myo on the right foot, Ho on the left foot, Ren on the right foot, Ge on the left foot, Kyo on the right foot. Or you may wish to disguise the activity by chanting and not walking in an easily identified fashion.
• Chant while doing chores
• Chant while exercising
• Chant while eating between any conversation
• Chant during any free moment
• Chant during any movements or between structured activities
• Find creative spaces in your day to insert Odaimoku – they are there, you’ll need to find them
Silence Can Save Your Life
About six months after I first began to practice I was assigned to a new duty station in the Marine Corps in 1969. When I got to the new assignment I was placed in a room in the barracks with 7 other guys. We were all about the same age and this was during Vietnam. I was only one year out of boot camp and had finished with about half of my specialized training. So, yes I was ‘green’.
On the first day in the room I learned that I was in a very dangerous situation. The 7 other Marines had all recently returned from completing their tours in country. They were very damaged young men. They were also expendable to our country so no one cared if they got better or not, they would be discharged, sent home, and forgotten about. Well, the first thing they each told me was that if I made a sound, and especially if I made a sound at night they would kill me. There were already many holes in the walls and broken furniture in the room, no one cared what they did.
I’ll level with you, I’m not a big guy, I’m not intimidating to others. I’ve never weighed much, and never had big muscles. There was no way I could defend myself against these young guys. In order for me to survive I had to play by their rules. That meant that all of my practice, my personal chanting, my reciting the sutra had to be done silently and from memory because once they turned out the lights I could have no light on, and I had better not bump into anything in the dark.
I don’t know what your situation will be. You will more than likely need to be creative in how you practice.
Many times during my Marine Corps service I was stationed in barracks that housed 80 or so guys with no walls and no personal boundaries beyond your rack and your locker. There was not quite time, virtually everyone had a stereo and they all played at maximum volume. The noise was deafening. This is where I learned to meditate in silence even in the midst of so much activity and noise. I learned how to be at peace, at ease, in mindful meditation even when the environment around me was tumultuous. I learned and I hope you will also that silence and ideal conditions are not the most important thing for your enlightenment nor for your happiness.
Wisdom the Way of Survival
Using your wisdom and choosing how to respond will serve you better than reacting without consideration.
At one point in my school life I was challenged to an after school fight by the most notorious bully in the school. This guy was huge and could certainly cause me much physical damage. He challenged me to the fight in the morning one day. I was scared shitless. What the hell was I going to do?
It came to me that perhaps my best defense would be to hope for early teacher intervention. So my plan was simply to tell as many people throughout the day about this after school fight. I told everyone, people I knew and people I didn’t. Mostly it was people I didn’t because I was still new in the school so I didn’t have many friends.
At the designated time and location I showed up. So did virtually all the rest of the school, at least a couple hundred or so. Well, the bully never showed up. There was no fight, and I won. I did not intend to win the fight I simply did not want to get hurt. The bully lost face and never again was a problem for me. I had friends I had not expected to have. I didn’t intend it to happen that way. I was trying to use the most clever thing I could think of in order to survive.
It is true it doesn’t always work out that way. Perhaps I’ve only been extremely lucky all of my life, or perhaps not. I do believe that wisdom and skill will serve us better than unchecked emotions or thoughtless behavior. In your situation you will need to be perhaps the most clever person in your unit.
You do not need to be a Pushover or a Badass
The above two incidents are only a couple of examples I could share with you from my life. What I hope you can understand is that it is proper to push back or to claim your space, but only with great skill, compassion, and wisdom. Sometime it may be appropriate to step back such as when I had to maintain the silence to survive. Other times it is perfectly appropriate to stand your ground, such as when I met the bullies challenge but with skill. Perhaps he was afraid to show up with all the students and teachers there, I was not since I ‘invited’ them. Maintain your personal dignity with skill and wisdom. Learn when it is most appropriate for different methods.
This is actually a practice that you may learn faster than many people who are not incarcerated. You have no choice but to learn in order to survive. People on the outside can avoid the lessons by living in an illusion of control, safety, and freedom.
We are all Prisoners, or Not
Yes, believe it or not whether you are in prison or not we are all prisoners to some degree. The difference is whether or not we can see the bars that confine us. For you the bars are very physical and easy to be distracted by. You may believe now that the physical bars define your prison. I challenge you that you are mistaken. The physical bars are not your prison, any more than the lack of bars is freedom. Your confinement or freedom lies beyond the physical. Folks not incarcerated only imagine they are free for the most part. Yet it is not difficult to find many people who are imprisoned by debt, job, family, society, money, education, skin color, country of origin, language, and on and on the list could go. We all have our prisons, some more harsh than other it is true, but confinement it is.
How do we each, and how especially do you, achieve our Buddha freedom? How do we each realize that our lives can soar wherever we may be? How do each of us realize that we are not bound and nothing but ourselves prevents us from the freedom of enlightenment?
Our freedom begins when we wake up.
