Faith can be a wonderful thing and it can also be dangerous. I’ll write more about the power of faith with regard to managing illness and disease. For now I would briefly like to stop here and speak of harmful religious ideation, a term that frequently used among chaplains when working with patients and families who would believe something that was harmful to their lives and contrary to the advice of their medical providers.
Being Nichiren Buddhists we chant the Odaimoku, Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, and we believe in the power of that phrase in our lives. It is not a magic incantation though. Even Nichiren only attributed the extra years of his mother life to proper medical advice from Shijo Kingo and his own faith and practice of the Lotus Sutra. This is an encouraging statement from the founder of our school of Buddhism, that with proper medical advice, care, and treatment coupled with firm faith he was able to prolong his mother’s life by seven years.
He was not able to prevent her eventual death and I know of no instance where he even suspected that he would be able to do so. Even with the power of Odaimoku he was not without doubt that he would die on Sado Island or that he wouldn’t succumb to the rigors of life on Mount Minobu. He was always frank in speaking of the hardship and struggle of living and we might say he was the most ardent believe and practitioner of the Lotus Sutra.
I don’t believe that it was that he doubted the benefit of chanting the Odaimoku as it was that he realized that having life as a human ultimately would mean the decay and death of the body. Odaimoku is not a magic phrase meant to replace skillful living and skillful means for caring for this fragile body.
To live is to die.
Hearing someone say such things as all you have to do is chant and have faith and you can overcome anything is not always a helpful thing to offer. There are some illness, some karma that we may not be able to over come, that perhaps all we can do is minimize or mitigate or lessen.
When we offer such advice what we fail to consider is that if a person is not able to eliminate or cure an illness or overcome a situation as we might expect then we subject them to potential guilt about their own self worth or their own faith. This can lead someone to think they don’t have faith when in fact they do.
We simply do not know what the trajectory of a person’s life is to be. We can be the best support when we can be present to them, be aware of their suffering, agree to walk with them in a non-judgmental capacity as a friend who will be with them no matter what. It isn’t wrong to encourage people it is not always helpful though to put the encouragement in terms of faith or the potential that somehow they have failed themselves or failed you or failed in their faith.
I have been with patients who’s illness has been compounded with guilt that they have done something wrong or that their faith isn’t good enough or that they have received divine punishment of some sort. These feelings strongly impact in a negative way the curative the medical providers are offering.
I will write more of the power of faith and believe to impact a person health in both negative and positive ways. Our faith in the Lotus Sutra and our chanting the Odaimoku attunes our life to the truths of the universe. The truth that all sentient being are equal and have an equal potential to manifest Buddha in their lives in accord with their life form, their power, their nature, and so on through the Ten Aspects or Ten Suchnesses. As sentient beings who inhabit a material life form we are all equally subject to the cycle of birth, growth, old age, sickness, decay, and death. As co-participants in this miracle of life and death we as Buddha can be acutely aware that all beings, ourself included, have this potential for suffering and our faith can guide us and enable us to guide others in how to eliminate suffering even while not eliminating pain and loss.
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