Today, Daisaku Ikeda the leader of a Buddhist group Soka Gakkai International wrote a warning to members in the newspaper about scams.  A lot of people in his area have suffered from scammers, especially older people, who were more trusting.  Workmen pretend to offer services around the house, they might see that your roof needs mending or tell you that the next time it rains you’ll get a serious leak. Old people imagine being wet and catching cold, and they are frightened. Feeling as if they should act quickly, they give money for these scam builders to buy materials. Contracts of course are worth nothing unless the person who signs it is honest. A criminal will sign a false name and disappear with your money.

However much we warn people, ‘If it seems too good to be true, it probably is’, hope somehow still triumphs over both experience and common sense. Although I am very sensible, and my Dad taught me from an early age not to buy from a cold seller, I sometimes find that I am reproaching myself for not buying a lottery ticket or phoning an expensive phone line.

     ‘You can’t win,’ I tell myself, ‘If you don’t enter.’ The odds are stacked against me nonetheless, and it would almost certainly be a waste of my money. Almost certainly. It’s the almost that gets us!

In previous communications, Daisaku Ikeda has advised us to ‘gargle regularly in order not to catch colds’ and to ‘get home early on dark nights’.  If only I had taken heed of the former! For the past week I have been unable to speak, with a sore throat, a virus I caught from the hundreds of children I see each week when I’m teaching.  Most years I do follow his advice, on the basis that it seems sensible. This year I outwitted myself again and decided that, since I never get throat infections, it must be because I am lucky, as oppose to because I usually do what he says and gargle, ‘just in case.’ Like the rest of mankind, I am my own worst enemy.

As I was cooking yesterday, my husband found himself delirious with married bliss. He now has a wife who is unable to speak or make any noise. I can barely tut. All I can do is cook and do the washing, and am easily satisfied by his occasional trip to the chemist to get more throat medicine.  I am trying to perfect a silent glower, as famously used by my mother in law when she finds spare particles of dust on the shelves for example, or realises we’ve bought the kind of washer-dryer that Which magazine expressly told us was the worst one, and complain that it keeps breaking down.

To return to the main point of this week’s article, what is the role of a religious leader? How can you tell if someone with a position of authority within a church, mosque or temple is a genuine spiritual person, a cynic just doing their job, a megalomaniac after political power, or a genuine but inadequate person, perhaps experiencing doubt or difficulties themselves at the present time? After all, we are all human beings, just the same (except the Pope, of course, who is divinely inspired).

In the past your local religious leader would control most areas of your life. You would, for example, take advice on how to live happily married before the wedding.  People did this even with priests who could never marry, as if they would have good advice on marriage!

In England, famously, as the novelist Jeannette Winterson repeated gaggles in her magnificent novel ‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit’, the protestant church required that married couples had sex through a sheet (you need scissors to prepare this. I have never tried it but it sounds quite kinky, although I think the intention is to avoid taking pleasure from the flesh).  They insisted for centuries on the ‘Missionary Position’ (man on top) and not because it is the most pleasurable, but the most pragmatic to conceive a baby, which should be the sole reason for sexual activity among Christian folk. It is still illegal in some American States to use any other position.  I can’t help but imagine policemen who regularly patrol bedroom windows to keep a check on this sort of thing.

Although generally we modern people would rarely consider it the religious leader’s role to advise us on how to ‘do it’, some religious groups still have extremely detailed stipulations about what constitutes immoral homosexual practise for example, including that it’s OK to think about it as long as you don’t intend to ever do it, which strikes me as a hypocritical and also mentally unhealthy position to adopt (sic not intended).  In deference to my readers, however, we will let that drop, as I know some of you don’t like to think about it, and I wouldn’t want you to waste any more time writing hate mail on my account.

No religious leader in history has ever held any opinion about ‘women on women’, because religious leaders are usually male and can’t really imagine it. Being completely outside society’s scope is one of the advantages of being a member of the weaker sex.

I always expect religious leaders to oppose war, on the basis that most religions disapprove of war and killing, or expressly forbid it. Buddhism doesn’t actually ban killing, it just reminds us that every cause has an effect, so we mustn’t expect to get away with it. Christianity, however, is absolutely straight about this, as Jesus was against violence in all its forms, even though his country was occupied by a foreign army (the Romans). He bad Peter to put up his sword and not save him, and refused even to defend himself with words at his trial. So I always expect Christian Bishops and so on to oppose wars, but they never do. I can’t think of a Pope or an Archbishop who disagreed with his country about war, and how can this be?

As in the case of scams, perhaps, people are astonishingly able to deceive themselves when they think they themselves will profit, evben when they still consider themselves to be part of a faith which says the opposite. The clearest example of this in recent perhaps is our very own Tony Blair, responsible personally for more wars than any other Prime Minister in British history, yet professing to hold deep Christian faith. His conscience nevertheless must have led him to convert to Catholicism after he left office.

 I suppose that, rather than spouting rules at us which they themselves may or may not give us a good example of, a true religious leader would probably be someone who encourages us to be ourselves, to have the clarity and courage to think clearly about how to live our own life, for ourselves and others, according to our understanding, and to take care of our own life, our family, and our community.

 So, with the best of intentions, may I remind you to beware of scams, my dearest reader, and gargle daily.

1207 words

Jill Rees

17 November 2008 

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Sunday, November 16th, 2008
– TO MY FRIENDS –
It is important that our leaders,
as leaders of kosen-rufu,
always try to be cheerful and in high spirits and
continue to advance enthusiastically and energetically.
Brimming with a challenging spirit,
let’s do our utmost to support our fellow members’
development and happiness.

Isn’t that so true? Whenever I feel I can’t be bothered to chant, or when that certain something is STILL unresolved, that is when I remember things Rhona said or think of what Roger has achieved, then I know I just carry on chanting. Yes it’s definitely leaders’ ability to harness benefit and to remain happy and cheerful, not to let anything defeat them, demonstrating their strong faith, that keeps me going.

So if you’re sitting in grim misery, refusing to answer the phone or reply to members’ emails and wondering why it never works for you, back to faith practise and study. Doesn’t matter how long you’ve been practising, only today matters!

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naim1

A translation exists in this blog - do a search.

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Yes deep down we know what is right for our life, but old habits die hard, and we may find ourselves doing the same old thing that never got us anywhere.

Buddhism is life itself. It is being in the heart of things, being ‘out there’, communicating, helping, caring about people. SGI members are largely over represented in the caring professions, and this happens because our practise motivates us to try to change things for the better. In fact, our vow as Buddhists is to ‘enable all people to be happy’, so this tends to be how we live our lives. It is being connected to other people, taking care of them when they need it, encouraging, being ready with that smile and that word of praise that will give others the strength they need to get through every challenge.

Even if they never find out we are Buddhists, people will say, I can rely on that person, when I needed them, they were there. So many times do we experience someone coming up to us out of the blue and thanking us for some little word of encouragement, when we were the ONLY person who did so. ‘When everyone had given up on me,’ they say, ‘You still believed I would get through it.’

Of course, it helps if a person has the practise of chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo themselves, and the time may come when we feel it is right to tell them about the practise and to encourage them to chant, but that is a decision each individual makes for themselves.

Basing everything on our practise of chanting, we take ACTION, and this action is helping and supporting others.

A Japanese friend suggested I chant that no child ever has an accident in my area. I did so, and the council put up a series of crossings which we had been campaigning for for over 20 years without success! So far so good here, and I am surrounded by lovely children, old friends who have moved nearer recently, helpful neighbours and so on. Kosen Rufu, peace through the practise, is precisely this: having a super life in a super environment.

The leader in SGI encourages and praises, thinks of you and sends you encouraaging messages at just the right moment. We can encourage people to study, to chant twice a day if they want to have the full benefit of this practise, tell them about Nichiren and repeat apt words from our President and Mentor Daisaku Ikeda. We can advise them to go to their Gohonzon and chant with a postivie attitude that victory is assured, and that they can find the best way to resolve their problems and ambitions. But we cannot tell them what to do.

If you, as a leader in SGI,  are suffering terribly, loafing around jobless and depressed, find yourself friendless and bored, or feel short of money or down on your luck, you need to get back to the Gohonzon with the correct attitude. As a leader, you MUST be happy and have benefit. You must shine with the glory of being a lion king or queen and a disciple of Sensei.

"A genuine leader of our movement is someone who takes the initiative, goes
out and meets people, tells them about our noble cause, and makes new
friends and allies."*

If that isn’t you, faith practise and study my friend. Become someone we can rely on.

*Daisaku Ikeda 
SGI Newsletter No. 7663, 23RD SOKA GAKKAI HEADQUARTERS LEADERS MEETING—PART
4 [OF 4]
Expanding Our Ties of Friendship, from the Nov. 3rd, 2008, issue of the
Seikyo Shimbun, translated Nov. 14th, 2008

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At this time of year the wind and the rain make you pull your warm winter coat closer round your shivering body, layered as it is with vest, shirt, cardigan, waistcoat, jacket and outer coat. Men chase their runaway scarves across the street and women battle with wind-wrung umbrellas. On the news, a family were trapped in their car overnight and had to be rescued from flood water by life raft, and the rain shows no sign of abating.  As the nights draw in, and daylight weakly peeks down at us for only a few hours in the middle of the day, we wonder if we will survive the long winter months to come.

Last week this all ended as we celebrated Carnival. Bridgwater Carnival is the third largest in the world, after Notting Hill and Rio, and people come from all the Continents to see it. Visitors this year include people from as far afield as Canada and Australia, from Brazil and from Africa. One young Ugandan visitor Sam Kiggundu from Kampala, who runs his own Media Studio helping youngsters in Uganda to learn media skills, tells us the Carnival is shown on TV back home.

150,000 people visited this year to watch the 150 carts parade through the town centre. Normally, the battle is against the elements, as cold blasts from the north east drive us back into to shelter of our homes for warming mugs of tea caressed between ungloved hands, before braving the storm once more. This year, however, luck was with us. The wind died down, the moon came out bright and clear. We crowded eight deep along the side of the route, eating hotdogs from the stands, sweets, smoking cigarettes and youngster sucking on throat lozenges, risen from their sick beds where they spent the week battling against the extremely common cold.

The atmosphere was friendly and warm, with chatting, laughter among families; streams of teenagers marching Indian style single file up the street then back down the street again, in the hope of bumping into friends. Men turned up carrying freshly bought beer, and neighbours huddled in darkened first floor windows to get a good view from the warmth of their bedrooms.  Late but welcome, the show began.

Started 406 years ago to celebrate Guy Fawkes night, Carnival is the hub of town life. Almost every local family is part of a Carnival club, bound by a fierce loyalty. The process of raising money to build your club’s themed cart begins as soon as last year’s procession ends.  Taking a theme, perhaps Pirates of the Caribbean, Ghost Riders, Cleopatra, Showtime or Vampires, a moving illuminated float is built. Some 22,000 light bulbs, illuminating moving parts, swirl and twist in the spotlight and people in costume dance or pose on the trailers, pulled along by tractors, huge generators bringing up the rear. Children take part in the dancing and miming to the thunderous pop music backing the action, held on by belts and clipped tightly to the float.

Roads into town close in the late afternoon, and traffic stops. Local families harry down the streets carrying survival gear and accompanied by excited children snuggled up in variety woollen hats and thick anoraks. Strategically placed stepladders help families to see over the heads of the 150,000 others who come to see the spectacle. relatives from Canada, friends from London, spies from other Carnivals to be held later in the area, Granddad and Grandma come over for the day, new boyfriends and new babies, all crowd in to this small town to see the world-famous show.  

It started in 1605, when Guy Fawkes plot to blow up Parliament was foiled in Westminster. Protestants in the West Country felt more keenly than anyone how lucky they were, and wanted to celebrate extravagantly by encouraging all local people to parade colourful themed carts through the town.

Bridgwater in particular, was the town who provided most of the manpower for the doomed Monmouth Rebellion a generation later in 1685, and this still open wound has made the celebration of freedom even more enthusiastic.

During the Monmouth Rebellion, when Bridgwater residents joined the forces of the ill-starred Duke of Monmouth to fight the King across a nearby field, local men were slaughtered in the battle, or subsequently deported to the West Indies to work as slaves and exiles. Others were hanged by Judge Jeffries, known as ‘The Hanging Judge’ and no doubt had they been able to fit them all on the scaffold they would have.

To this day, the local area is not allowed to have a Cathedral city, or a university, or any regional power to rival the Queen’s. It is even said that when her Majesty rode through the town on the train recently, she pulled the blinds down as the train passed through Bridgwater. It is still a town of rebels, and Carnival is an excuse to let off steam about an unforgotten and unforgiven past, and, it has to be said, an unrepentant past. Bridgwater folks are wild!

When the floats have finally run through town, townsfolk gather in the centre with long poles, the end of which are laden with gunpowder, and do a kind of strange dance with the lit poles. This is known as ‘squibbing’ and is a Bridgwater speciality. Squibbing is part of the ‘adult’ element of Carnival. It takes place late at night and only those who have survived the cold, often with the aid of shelter in a pub as the evening went on remain to take part. 170 squibs were lit this year, held inside lines of burning oil along the High Street.

Traditionally Carnival was held on the Thursday nearest Bonfire Night, when Guy Fawkes defeat is officially celebrated in the country, and ‘Black Friday’, the day after Carnival, the town remained closed for ‘recovery’, i.e. many ‘tails of the dog’ and daylight drunken episodes as pubs remained open but shops and banks were closed.  Now however Carnival is held on Friday, and on Saturday night, the town field holds the firework display. Bangs and blasts send dogs scurrying under kitchen tables.

Thousands of pounds are raised during the night, with most of the money going to local charities such as BIBIC, which looks after disabled children. For the next few days, floats crawl home down the local roads, and are dismantled and displays stored for next year. Tractors and trailers are returned to the fields, and life gradually returns to normal. Clubs get together in their local pub to debrief after the show. Did they do well? What went wrong? Why was the winner better than them?  Over a pint, plans begin for 2009.

Armed with bright images of light still burning in the backs of our eyes, with memories of blasts from the fireworks and heat from the squibbing and the fires on which lovingly-made effigies of Guy Fawkes, sometimes made up to resemble unpopular politicians and dignitaries, are set alight, we settle into the rest of the long, dark, cold and drawn out winter, believing that maybe, just maybe, we will survive until celebrations begin again with Christmas and the New Year.  

1,209 words

© Jill Rees

11^th November 2008

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Daisaku Ikeda, President of Soka Gakkai International Lay Buddhist Organisation, gives an interesting interview for these Nepal lovers - enjoy here

http://www.tricycle.com/interview/faith-revolution?page=0%2C0

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So the Doghouse news is on the one hand a proud moment for dogs, as Barack decides he MUST have a dog, however one of our furry friends has of course let the side down by biting a journalist, yes George Bush’s dog Barney has shown his true

colours as a total ‘mutt’ as the Great Obama calls them. View the sad report here

For the rest of us however, victory is sweet. Obama’s main issue now is what kind of dog to get. It seems his little puppy Malia is allergic to doggie fur, so only one true breed would be wise, the Bearded Collie of course! We have woolie fur, so much so that some of our owners trim us in the spring and knit woolly jumpers for fishermen, for our fur is waterproof.

Thanks to all the dogs in our pack who ran with us in the streets of America and made us proud to be faithful and free. It has been a hard 8 years being hang-dog and woe-begone but now my friends, knowing Barack will have an honest and loving advisor through his long evenings of global decision making is reassuring.

We could remind him that our ears are sensitive and we don’t like big bangs, like guns and bombs, so stopping this human noise-making activity would be a great step forward. Especially leave our pakistani brothers alone as they aren’t even officially in a war. WOOF WOOF GRRRRRR US Air Force!!!!!

We could also enjoy clarification from China about how humans should behave towards dogs.

And we’d like to make sure all owners keep up our worming and flea-prevention, as well as all our vaccinations, so that no dog should die unnecessarily of preventable disease.

It goes without saying that all dogs should have the right to a loving home, and to food and clean water.

In turn, we dogs will accept that humans run everything, and we will run and fetch stuff and let them pet us.

Thanks to all our doggie readers.Here’s a Bark for Barack tee-shirt offer.

Happy New Universe, fellow earth-creatures.

George the dog. US elections. signing off.

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 Don’t leave him standing out in the cold. Nothing is certain, however many votes are in, every single vote matters, so Ameicans if you care, go and queue, get out there and vote.

From the rest of the world (staying up all night) we’re counting on you!

Please get out and vote America. 

Love from The World

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In the last 2 weeks, US planes have bombed towns in Pakistan, claiming that there are ‘Al Qaida’ forces hidden among the locals. These ‘terrorists’ have crossed from Afghanistan where the US troops are, rather astonishingly perhaps, legitimately at war.

The Afghanistan question, as it happens, was a second invasion led by Bush’n’Blair, sanctioned somewhat reluctantly by the United Nations Security Council, whose Headquarters are in New York.  From the point of view of the TV-watching public, Tony Blair persuaded us that we had to get in there and enable women to liberate themselves from the headscarf.

To date, despite several towns being annihilated and innumerable civilian deaths, not one woman seems to have taken off the headscarf.  In fact in Turkey, where women are required by law to remove the headscarf at work, they endlessly protest the right to keep it on!

Putting details and civilian deaths to one side, the reason for the war in Afghanistan is that the brains behind 9/11, Osama Bin Laden, is supposed to be holed up in a cave in the Afghani desert, and the Afghani and Pakistani people refuse to blow his cover.

Osama Bin Laden disguised as God  

Bin Laden’s group, ‘Al Qaida’ then, led by a man in a cave, seems to have long arms, stretching as it does from Pakistan on the Indian subcontinent to Western Sahara on the Atlantic coast of Africa. A recent shooting on the main highway in Mauritania was blamed on Al Qaida factions ‘trained in Algeria’. (Clue – Algeria produces oil). The perpetrators turned out to be a group of local unemployed lads who were in a gang, had just left one of their grandfathers’ house where they had been staying. A tragic, but straightforward murder, and the police quickly caught the criminals. This didn’t stop the US Press having a field day.

There, in the Sahel, on the edge of the vast sands where men can hide, ancient peoples travel and trade with their camels, anarchic and ill-fit to our CCC-TV eye all-seeing world.  Driving through the area myself, I saw buildings disguised as local Arab and Berber hangars and habitations. You could tell they were false because they all stood in line, and were clean and modern. A good place to store tanks, I thought to myself. Then I saw a sign hammered sardonically by the road: ‘Baghdad 2’. I was surprised to find US troops slinking around the desert, until I heard about the money that had been pumped into Mauritania.

Between the shifting sand –dunes, hidden somewhere between the oil wells and water holes, lies the Algerian border. Algeria is one of the fastest economically enriching nations of the world, because of its oil reserves. The CIA constantly insinuates that there are ‘Al Qaida’ forces in Algeria, hiding in the desert, ignoring experts on the area such as Jeremy Keenan, who accuse the Americans of muck-raking in fact, the people of the western Sahara loath Al Qaida and all things Arabic, having been invaded by the ruthless Arab Empire in the 7^th century. Memories are long in the desert, and I would be surprised to see a Berber or a Touareg who is sympathetic to an Arab cause. But then, I didn’t think the Arabs who rule Mauritania would be snuggling so closely to George Bush either, so who am I to judge?

My question is: who are these ‘Al Qaida’ groups who keep popping up everywhere? Let’s look at the evidence.

Bearded and robed, ruling with seemingly infinite power over the entire world, threatening to destroy whole swathes of civilisation because of its decadence and sin. It rules its earth mission from an invisible and untraceable cave in the desert, communicating with men through the disembodied technology of radio and video broadcast.  

To my mind, reports about the ‘Axis of Evil’ and the ‘Terror’  bear astonishing resemblances to the Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where God couldn’t put up with human beings seeking only pleasure, wealth and material treasures, instead of the more spiritual treasures of the heart, any longer.

Global capitalists surely have forsaken religious and moral tenets. The West is under siege again from that mysterious condemnation from the desert. Worst of all, it feels as if it is true, as we pile our hard earned taxes into saving the big banks. (Does anyone else want a tee-shirt blazing ‘Marx was right’, selling like hot cakes on ebay?)

Instead of the Lord himself booming out in righteous indignations against our folly from the desert wastes, we have bin Laden’s crackly videotaped messages, his word of damnation the technological version of God. Once again, man has invented God in his own image, the image of his guilt. Oh but look what we are thinking we look like deep down!

Could it be that the leaders of the West, men who claim to be Christian in the main, yet clearly fail to act on the morals so clearly stated in their religion, have subconsciously created a terrorising, punishing all-powerful wrathful being that they are at the mercy of, but is, in reality, the echo of their own ragged conscience?

‘I am a jealous God’, says the voice George Bush and Tony Blair both claim to hear on those long dark nights of indecision, ‘You cannot worship both global greed and worship me’. In their masochistic (some have said homoerotic) obsession, the cause of the ‘war on terror’ is not some Oxbridge dropout from a wealthy family weakly lying on his sickbed in some peasant’s hut, but the terror which is the conscience of the real evil men of the present time.

As George Bush exits centre stage, with Blair already gone, we can only reflect that we are well rid of them, and hope that Obama, who understands Africa, can make more sense out of the world, for all our sakes.

980 words

 Jill Rees

04 November 2008

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