😎 Likedeeler Chanting 😎

likedeeler (66)in #travel • 7 years ago (edited)

The Shanti Stupa in Leh, Ladakh and the adjacent monastery belonged to Nipponzan-Myōhōji-Daisanga, a Japanes Buddhist order, of the Nichiren lineage.
This order is actively involved in worldwide endeavours for peace, building Shanti Stupas, Peace Pagodas, and doing peace walks and participating in demonstrations for peace all over the world and they are also opposing nuclear power, making them into a bit of a rebel sect among the usually docile and authority obeying Japanese Buddhist orders.
Maybe this spiritual activism makes them also particularly appealing to Western aspirants, joining as monks and nuns.

Nipponzan Myohoji Peace Walk

I had seen them already in the eighties in Germany without knowing anything about them, but now, in one of their monasteries, I got to read some brochures and books about them.
The founder, Nichidatsu Fuji, had been apparently quite the character.
He had this vision, that Buddhism was on decline in the Land of the Buddha and needed some revival. He came to Calcutta in 1931, almost starved there, but then got lucky, met some rich supporters, also Gandhi and Nehru, and after Indian independece he was made chairman of the Committee for the Revival of Buddhist Sites, and the order took off in India.

Nipponzan-Myōhōji nuns and monks were active wherever there was war and trouble, often not caring for their own safety. One Japanese monk in Sri Lanka was killed by Tamil Tigers when he refused to leave Jaffna after they had issued an ultimatum to him. Though active for peace, since he was a Buddhist, the Tigers saw him as a represantative of the Sinhalese Buddhist majority against which they were fighting and killed him.

The main spiritual practice of Nipponzan-Myōhōji is the chanting of the mantra Namu myoho renge kyo, "I take refuge in the wonderful law of the Lotus Sutra".
The Lotus Sutra is revered as the highest expression of the Buddhist message.
Gandhi himself was so impressed by the power of that mantra and the nonviolence of Nichidatsu Fuji that they became friends and Gandhi encouraged his followers to also chant this mantra.
So this became my first mantra and the chanting of it my first formal spiritual practice.
What would have made me appear a lunatic in Germany in those days, was normal in India, making it very easy to pick up some spiritual practice.

Every morning we would get up while it was still dark, go to the temple and chant the mantra for one hour while beating the rhythm on our fan drums. Being in the company of about 20 monks who had been chanting this mantra for many years, after some time into the chanting I started to fly, an incredible high permeated every fibre of my existence, some powerful stuff there. After the chanting there was some recitation of the Lotus sutra in Japanese, accompanied by the beating of the rhythm on some wooden block, all very cool and then, the best part, we would walk out of the temple to the Shanti Stupa in one long line, beating our fan drums and chanting Namu myoho renge kyo. We would circle the Stupa three times clockwise and then, everyday, like magic, the sun would come up in the East above the mountains and we would greet it, bowing three times, the Shinto influence being very present in that ritual.

It was such a wonderful, powerful way to start the day!
You felt really alive and thankful that the sun came up to give life and energy to the earth, a new day rising.
Afterwards breakfast, then we would go to the Shanti Stupa and work on the paintings for a few hours, then lunch. Food was a mix of Indian and Japanese, Japanese Miso soup and rice, Indian chai, chapatti and vegetables and a very special dish I had never tried before, the ”soup of humility”. After you had finished your plate, which was a stainless-steel thali, the typical flat Indian plate with a vertical rim, to the last bit, nothing, not a single ricecorn would be wasted, you then poured some of your chai on the plate, wiped the plate clean with the fingertips of your right hand and then drank the ”soup of humility”. It tasted delicious, the sweetness of the chai mixed with Indian spices, I really liked that ritual of waste nothing.
After lunch we retreated to our rooms for study time, or chatted a bit with Nakamura San, the monk of the Leh temple, who would give us some lectures then. When I asked him about the meaning of Namu myoho renge kyo he smiled and said
”No meaning, just chant it!”
While then I thought that he just could not be bothered to explain that to some Westerners and took the easy way out, I now understand that there are many aspects of the mantra which cannot really be explained but must be experienced, like when Laotse said:
”The Dao which can be explained is not the real Dao.”

After study time we worked again on the stupa paintings, then dinner and one hour of chanting again in the temple and then the highlight of the day, the Japanese bath.
After the sun was gone, the temperature dropped quite a bit, from about 20, 25 degrees Celsius to about ten, so this Japanese bath was always a welcome treat in the evenings.
You would undress and shower first, mixing some boiling hot water with cold water and pouring it over you with a scoop and thus cleaned you would then join the others in a big metal pot, a bit like the missionary´s final destination in Africa, which actually also had a fire going on under it, but the fire was fuelled with wood from the outside, so no smoke in the bath house, quite a clever design.
It was a bit scary at first to climb in, thinking you gonna get boiled in there, but once you were in, it was actually quite wonderful after all the work and, even worse, all the sitting on your heels, while chanting in the temple, while eating, while sitting with the monk for lectures. So finally in the evening you could relax and unwind in the warm water. Heaven!
And then, nice and warm, straight into my sleeping bag in my beautiful room, where, during the day when the sun was shining and I could enjoy that gorgeous view of Leh and the surrounding mountains, just staying there was therapeutic.

I remember also going on an alms round with the monks somewhere in Leh. The Ladakhis would wait at the road for the monks to get their blessings and would give them food and stuff like incense sticks in return. Nakamura San was first, then all the other monks, then some lay people and us foreigners.
The Ladakhi children were very eager to get touched on the forehead by the monks for blessings, but when I tried to bless some children, the smaller children did not mind, all blessing was the same to them, but the older ones had a different view and evaded my hand, apparently I did not pass their quality test, only a monk´s blessing was desirable. 😇

So after all the challenges and excitement and dangers of my trip in general and our trekking tour in particular, I could now really unwind and relax in the monastery, find some peace and quiet.
With all this routine and peace and friendly people and good food and no care in the world I could see myself staying there for the rest of my life, becoming a monk, as some Westerners did, joining the order. Life seemed so easy there, no struggling no clawing no dark hands of life.
But I also thought, if I stayed there I would miss out on a lot of other experiences in life. That´s the problem in life, you can do only one thing at a time, but in the same time you miss out on thousands of other things.

I have tried to find a video with the chanting of Namu myoho renge kyo in Nipponzan-Myōhōji style but I did not have much luck with that. There are many videos were they chant the mantra faster than we did and with a different pronounciation, apparently the different Nichiren sects have their differences regarding the pronounciation of the mantra too.
So the one I found comes pretty close, it just lacks the fan drums, but the rhythm is the same as in Ladakh and at least they say namu instead of nam like all the others.

And for some more enlightenment an interview with a Japanese nun, and oh wonder, she says the same thing as Nakamura San did.