Siddartha was the son of a tribal leader of the Kshatriya ,or warrior ,caste living around 2500 years ago. Like all upper class familes of that time he lived in the family compound where all his extended family lived. This form of cohabitation even continues today in many parts of India. It would have seemed palatial to the lower castes but not by todays western standards of housing. He grew up sheltered from the outside world and as he matured realized that he was living in an illusion , the world was very different outside. This was the begining of his journey. It is also wise to remember that he was part of the vedic/brahmanical religio-spiritual tradition and spoke a vernacular form of sanskrit which is an Indo European language related to english, although distantly .
        He would have followed the Brahmanical 4 stages of life for men i.e student ,housholder ,retiree,ascetic.

All of his religio.spiritual knowledge and understanding would have come through the Brahmins and the traditional way of life. He lived in what would be today the northeast of India (India only became a sovereign country in 1947 ).None of his teachings were written down during his lifetime and were passed down to us through the oral tradition until 400 or 500 years after his death they were written down. We must also remember that sages and philosophers always added their ideas onto the various sutras as was the tradition in various parts of the world.

" One of the functions of intelligence is to take into account  the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence " Lewis Mumford.

Is Buddhism too narrow of a description ?  I'm currently in the process of questioning a lot of my assumptions about life in general and spiritual or religious practice specifically . I lean towards Buddhism , and in fact am a member of a Buddhist organization and it's the word "ORGANIZATION " that bothers me.

Truth is one sages call it by various names..

Practice for Self and Others--seems a simple enough idea and very compassionate . It is of course a prerequisite for Nichiren buddhists. But what does it really mean. Separateley it's simple enough to comprehend. If you are practicing for other people then you must accept that those people are different ,or separate , from you , or your self, But doesn't Buddhism teach the oneness of all things ,beings , etc ?.So ,if you are practicing for your self doesn't that include everything else in the universe ?

The truth ,or reality , cannot be perceived through the medium of language. It must be comprehended through direct experience. Language is species specific . Instructions of how to gain enlightenment cannot be given in a spoken or written language and that's why we chant "nam myo ho renge kyo " .

मध्यमक 

	Whatever is dependent arising We declared that to be emptiness. That is dependent designation, And is itself the middle way.	”
—Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24:18 all things arise in dependence upon multiple causes and conditions.

All religions ,and most of the people practicing those religions , seem to believe that they are the sole owners of the truth and that everybody else is simply wrong. I believe this to be  a very dangerous way of behaving . Even worse is that people interpret holy writings in their own subjective way . Reading through a translation of , say"the Lotus Sutra ", we are left scratching our heads as to the meaning of various obscure descriptions and having someone tell us that they know exactly what those passages mean ,even though they don't speak ,read or write the language the book was written in , or come from that particular culture ,doesn't help in understanding what was meant.
  Take for example  when the Buddha says that Kashyapa will become a Buddha named Bright Light in a  kalpa called Great Adornment in a land called Light Virtue. How can we possibly know what that means, what significance ' or connotation , it has in the context of attaining buddhahood. In the original language of the Buddha these terms must have had some specific meaning. How do we find out what that is ? The Indian culture is still there in north eastern India although it is a Hindu culture , except for Bangladesh and a lot of Assam .

So , my conclusion is that all the reading , going to retreats, lectures, chanting and the like really don't help . Enlightenment is achieved by a "peak " experience ( Maslow ) that pushes you over the edge of illusion and forces you to accept the truth ,whatever it is .Is it the same for everyone ? I highly doubt it. I shouldn't really say that all the searching etc doesn't really help because in a way it sets up the "peak " experience but you can achieve it without all the rigamarole.Very few people do .

Change is extremely difficult on a personal level or on a collective level. Look at the Catholic church ,it just doesn't seem capable of joining the forward movement of human society . Our own organisation , as a collective , remains open and forward thinking but individual members who have been practising for a long time are unable to let go of out of date ideas that worked 20 or 30 years ago. To believe that our practice makes us special is a serious mistake and divides us from the rest of the spiritual community .
           I heard an experience of a member who has been practicing for a long time and it was centered on the fact that he had two surgeries which went extremely well because he is a practising Nichiren Buddhist . He found the right docter , was diagnosed quickly etc.He was protected because of the Mystic Law. I went through exactly the same thing before I started practising with the same results. What's the difference ?

"the spectacle is not a collection of images ,but a social relation among people mediated by images ".Guy Debord

Taken fron the " Society of the Spectacle " by French philosopher Guy Debord.

                        "Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness."time" has ceased, "SPACE " has vanished. We live in a global village , a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space.We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling ,the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us "
Marshall McLuhan

" The medium is the messge ". Marshall McLuhan

We are the environment . A must see website not only for Buddhists but everybody.
ecobuddhism

Reading the "Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra " . Came across a very troubling piece of dialogue where Ikeda is talking about how people decide what is the right religion for them. Endo, one of the SGI , leaders in the discussion ,pipes up with the statement that as far as he's concerned Nichiren Buddhism is the only religion.(page 31) Ikeda makes no comment.

One thing , or rather 2 things, that we must be careful of is to not let faith turn into attachment and dogma.I have found myself slipping into this mindset and need to monitor myself constantly;it's easy to see it in others and there are many examples  I can think of in our SGI organisation.So ,lets be very wary.

"...it should be pointed out that the "Law," not the "person," is to
be regarded as the proper standard in all things. Putting the person
first gives you an uncertain standard; it is to let that person's
mind become your master. At some point, relations based on such a
standard will become like those existing between a paternal,
godfather-like figure and those bound to him by personal loyalty.
In contrast, if you establish the Law as your standard, you will
become the master of your mind..."  Daisaku Ikeda

“I came to the conclusion long ago that all religions were true and that also that all had some error in them, and while I hold by my own religion, I should hold other religions as dear as Hinduism. So we can only pray, if we were Hindus, not that a Christian should become a Hindu; but our innermost prayer should be that a Hindu should become a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim, and a Christian a better Christian.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.”
― John Lennon

Organizing a religion , or shared faith , helps us get the support of others of the same faith. But , creating inflexible dogma that you have to believe in doesn't help . The "either you're with us or against us "  attitude simply turns people off. People need the freedom to believe whatever they want and the use of "holy books" that purport to contain "the " truth simply don't work in our information society. Words are symbols and in many cases these "holy " books have gone through several translations.

Is it conceivable to believe that you know the truth and know the only way to get to the truth ? Or , is there one truth but many ways to arrive at it ,

I havent posted for a long time but that's another  story . I've really been having  a lot of trouble understanding the SGI organisation and how to  cope within it .I believe that chanting NMHRK has a beneficial effect but cannot accept that it's the only way to enlightenment/happiness/understanding.