Waking the Buddha (15 page)

Japanese Buddhists saw the Latter Day of the Law as a guilty verdict against deluded humanity. From the vast sea of time, Shakyamuni had appeared as a savior, and for a brief period (the Former Day of the Law), deluded beings were able to attain freedom from suffering. But without the Buddha's enlightened presence to guide them, it was inevitable that they would revert to what they were before. During the Middle Day of the Law, the teachings would become overly formalized and therefore ineffective, and by the Latter Day, they wouldn't work at all.

Some of Nichiren's contemporaries put their faith in Amida Buddha, a savior who would cause them to be reborn in his heaven-like Pure Land. There, with the distractions, disasters, and defilements of the Latter Day removed, they would be able to quickly attain enlightenment. But there was no help for anyone in this world. The idea that one might turn the situation around, becoming a Buddha in this very lifetime, was almost unthinkable.

Until Nichiren.

Nichiren located Buddhahood in this body and this lifetime. There was no striving to get someplace else, no doctrine of escape from this world or its suffering, and along with that teaching came the obligation to make our peace with
this
world, not the next, and the mission to establish peace among human beings within it. As reinterpreted by Nichiren, the Latter Day of the Law became an age of kosen-rufu—a time when the teachings of the Lotus Sutra would be spread widely throughout the world.

Today, the Nichiren Buddhist teachings of the SGI have the potential to wake the Buddha, activating the enlightened potential of a struggling humanity and transforming an Age of Global Decline into an Age of Global Sustainability—an Age of Life in which one person's happiness would not be won at the expense of another's, and human progress would not be mortgaged against the degradation of the earth.

As a new model for religious faith, and for human activity in general, that reimagined Latter Day of the Law takes the long view, interpreting kosen-rufu in terms of the happiness of future generations. And those future generations of life wouldn't be limited to human generations but would include generation upon generation of plant and animal species with whom our lives are wholly interdependent. It would be an age in which the understanding of a Buddha, an Awakened One, and that of an ordinary human being were finally one in the same—an age lasting as long as ten thousand years.

That was the time frame traditionally assigned to the Latter Day of the Law. At five hundred years, the Former Day is relatively short. At one thousand, the Middle Day is scarcely longer. But the Latter Day goes on and on—its duration suggesting not so much a definite time period but rather an epoch, a period of stability in which the human presence on the planet is once more within the limits established for it by nature. An age when the Buddha and humanity itself become Awakened Ones—and the world is happy at last.