Mantras

I was talking to a friend the other day who was a member of Soka Gakkai. This quote is taken from their USA website.

The essence of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is expressing our Buddha nature. It is the essential way to reveal our Buddhahood.

So the practice that comes from Nichiren, a Japanes Buddhist leader who tried to make an essential Buddhist practice available to everyone in society is just to chant the title of the Lotus Sutra in Japanese. No meditation or rigorous philosophical teaching is thought to be needed.

My friend was explaining to me the other day that the chant just helped you to tap into universal Buddha nature or love I think. From quite a lot of Buddhists' point of view this is an incorrect view. From many Buddhists' point of view this would be like a deific existence that you are tapping into when chanting.

From my point of view I think that the point of Buddhist philosophy is to make sure that we are not projecting our own self onto some idea of an eternal existence or some idea of a nihilistic existence either and that we need to have a appreciation of that through meditation. Later we can develop an experience of reality that is really beyond words but does have some definitely consistent qualities like compassion and loving kindness and joy and freedom from negative states and emotions.

In Buddhism that comes from the Tibetan traditions, which is the only living traditions of Indian Mahayana in its detail at any rate, you can say there are the following six necessary elements to the practice:

1) focussing the mind on an object to maintain a stable mental state.
2) maintaining an open awareness.
3) gaining a good philosophical understanding of emptiness.
3) cultivating compassion, loving kindness and joy.
4) establishing an idea of reality.
5) developing an experience of reality.
6) becomming fully awake.

A mantra can immediately have a beneficial effect on focussing the attentention as a first step. The mantra could be just: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, all good children go to heaven! or even just one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, let's go surfing at Porthleven.

Mantra practice then has more complex and less easily identifiable effects on the other necessary elements of practice.

I can see how the mantra, if faith is combined with the practice, brings improved emotional health and could be used to invoke a quality of experience of reality based on a described idea of ultimate reality. I believe the practitioners of Nicheren Buddhism consider that tapping into Buddha nature through the chanting then gives increasing understanding and knowledge of emptiness and positive emotions and necessarily a more open awareness.

This is the same idea in much of Vajrayana or tantric Buddhism. However some would argue that you have to have a strong base in the philosophy behind the idea of emptiness combined with a strong base in cultivating wholesome emotions before you can develop a clear idea of Buddha nature which is needed before you can properly undertake a tantric practice.

Fascinating!

Norbu