Preface To Chants: What Kind Of Chants Should I Take?

That's an awful pun, sorry.

I knew a woman once who was Japanese who worked with me.  She had married an American GI & he had brought her back to the States.  But their marriage fell apart so when I knew her she was single.  Not that I had any interest in dating her.  She was quite sweet & pleasant to work with, though it was often amusingly difficult to communicate with her.

She was usually having financial issues, probably because of her divorce & being separated from her family.  (I got the impression her family frowned upon her marrying an American.)  She would ask all of her co-workers advice about purchasing things, & she would openly daydream about things she really wanted - sometimes clothes, sometimes jewelry, sometimes big-ticket items like property or a car.

One day she was talking about an expensive car she wanted.  She said, "I am going to chant for it."

I said, thinking she was mistranslating a word, "Do you mean, 'pray for it'?"

She said, "Oh no, I don't pray.  I am a Buddhist."

I was a little perplexed by this.  Weren't Buddhists, I wondered aloud, supposed to be detached from the material world, since desire caused suffering?

She laughed at me as if I were naïve.  She explained to me that you could use Buddha energy to make things happen for you.  The Buddha wanted you to be happy!

I of course thought she was full of beans & had discovered some bastardized - or, worse, Americanized - form of Buddhism that completely inverted the teachings of the Buddha.  The conversation I recreate above is a summary of what we talked about, not actual quotes.  I wouldn't remember exact words anyway, but it would have covered more than five minutes to share a few sentences with her - her English wasn't great.

This first-person narrative online explains to me something I never bothered to follow up on: this is apparently a form of Buddhism called "Nichiren Buddhism."  The Wikipedia page establishes this as a venerable strain of Buddhism, older than Protestantism.  However, the blogger's experience suggests that it's exactly the sort of Buddhism my old co-worker was practicing.  "Earthly desires equal enlightenment," a practitioner tells the narrator.  She points out that they were not chanting "for altruistic things."

Hm, do I currently know any practicing Buddhists?  I should ask them about this group.  If you read this & you have something to add or correct, please do so!

I don't remember my co-worker's name - it's been over twenty years since I last saw her - but I thought about her when I decided to do a show about chanting.  I hope she's gotten everything in her life she's chanted for!