When I was a freshman in college, here at SUNY Albany, I met Nick Witkowski, the first real Buddhist I had ever encountered. I sought him out one evening to really sit me down and explain Buddhism to me. To my surprise, there were all these different kinds of Buddhism, and some that even said that others were wrong. His sect, for example, believed that their way of practicing Buddhism was the only true way to enlightenment. This threw me off. As a recent escapee from the Christian church, I was looking for something that I felt was more democratic, liberal, and less dogmatic. It seemed to me that Buddhism should be the one religion that let me do whatever I wanted. After all, it was about my own life.

Nick wrote down Nam Myoho Renge Kyo on a sheet of paper and showed me how to chant it. It all seemed very esoteric, but I was willing to try absolutely anything. That's the interesting thing about really suffering: even if the medicine is weird looking, if someone tells you it works, you'll take it.

However, I was a tough patient. I chanted for ten minutes here, ten minutes a couple weeks later, and whenever the idea struck me, but I just didn't believe in it enough to make it a daily practice. I felt there were no changes in my life. Nick said that I had to chant regularly. I told him I would but I never did. This lasted for three years, as I suffered through multiple bouts of depression, which affected my grades, friendships, self esteem and hopefulness until my life became a tiny little room in which I lived, with fearsome shadows lurking on the walls.

When I graduated college, I felt like I had made it through a battle, and the scars appeared in the form of my inconsistent grades, the extra 30 pounds I had gained, and a colossal lack of direction. I moved home for six months to work and try to figure out what I was doing with my life. This period was one of the most important I have ever had. As an 'adult', I really forced myself to treat my life differently. I started running at a local track, I started really working on my relationships with my family and I started reading Emerson. I read all his essays, the most important being self-reliance. I was still under the impression that chanting was a form a 'meditation' done to relax me, but this worked in getting me to chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo more and more often along with lots of other forms of 'relaxation'. Because I didn't really believe in Karma, I couldn't understand Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, as anything more than, for example, chanting, Om Mani Padme Hum, or one of the other Mahayana chants. This continued for the next year, as I moved to Oregon to work on a youth hostel, as I traveled across country for two months, as I lived in Brooklyn and worked on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for five month. I learned many great lessons about my life, about striving to survive, about working hard, about having confidence, but I never really focused on my chanting. If I did it, it was for a couple minutes once in a great while. I had basically given up on really being happy and having hope for humanity. I reasoned this through my extensive reading of literature and sociology and literary theory and art theory- as did the girl I was living with in Brooklyn. We used intellectual terms describing the decay of society to explain our own ennui and dissatisfaction. It made perfect sense. To go for what you want is to possibly fall into a role set for you by the media, and to deny yourself of the things you want is to brainwash yourself.

During May, Nick graduated college and came home to live in the city. We had never lost contact, but he had veered off his path as well, and now that a certain part of him life was over, he was ready to reassert what he had grown up knowing: that Nichiren's Buddhism works. It just works. Immediately he asked me if I wanted to go to a meeting with him. Just being around Nick and his family was enough for e to realize how miserable I was and that there was, after all this suffering, actually something I could do about it. The first meeting I went to was wonderful, the people were smiling and kind, but real.

I went home and chanted for a good hour. Half-way through I started crying and rocking back and forth, feeling such sorrow and pity for all the pain I had put myself through in the previous years. I chanted daily for the next couple of weeks, always continuing on whenever I felt like I really wanted to stop, because I knew that was when the break through was going to come.

I started my masters degree that fall, back at SUNY Albany and I kept chanting, although more sporadically. Near the end of the semester I started doing gongyo. Still, after all this, I wasn�t sure exactly what it was that chanting was doing, or if my benefits were really due to chanting. I had received a fellowship, I had given a great poetry reading at the Lion Heart, I had chanted to gain the courage to over come a rivalry that had sprung up between me and a fellow grad student. But it was during Christmas break, just three months ago, when I flew down to Queens to stay with Nick and really see how important it is to embrace the practice, that I really, finally said "Yes, this is the only life-philosophy for me. this is how I will live my life."

And from there I started chanting at least one hour every day. And for about a month I was completely blissful. And then I started digging really deep and it got harder and harder to chant and I cried a lot and I felt years and years of negativity welling up inside of me and flowing out like tides. Make no mistake, real practice is an act of purgation. You will have to really look at everything you've done to make yourself and others suffer. But the endless amounts of goodness and happiness it will bring to your life are worth it. Really, it's the only way to live. I believe in karma now, there's no other way I can explain the deep and fundamental changes going on in my life right now. Things shifting so far below the surface that I can't even see them until I'm suddenly aware that I'm not where I was last week. That's what it comes down to. Chanting doesn't brainwash you or put a mask on you. It makes you more you. And the happiness you feel is real, it's not based on illusion of who we will be, or where we'll go after we die, or how much more 'spiritual' I am than you, or vice-versa. Nothing I have ever encountered in all my travels, and in studying four forms of Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity or Wicca had really made so many permanent changes in people's lives. This is why, even practices like Zen, which I used to practice, are considered highly dangerous. It's not because it'll kill you. It's because it won't make you truly happy. And in fact, seeing as how it is only a provisional teaching, those who study it only, are more likely to be dissuaded from studying the lotus sutras and chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. In many ways, I find the sects of Buddhism closest to Nichiren's to be more dangerous for people's happiness than completely different religions. For example, my friend, Kristina, is Eastern Orthodox, but I have got her chanting, because it does not interfere with her faith. However, how do you remain a Tibetan Buddhist chanting "Om a Hum Vajra Guru Padme Siddhe Hum" while, intervaly chanting "Nam Myoho Renge Kyo" ?

But let me stress that out Buddhism is not out to eradicate other religions. I truly believe that buddhahood can be reached by any human, practicing any religion. The question, knows the way the world is today, and the current flavor of human thought, the rituals and concepts behind our Buddhism really make sense to a lot of people. And we're getting there one person at a time. Ultimately, it is not economics or legislation, or politics that is going to bring about world peace and the happiness of every human being. When I was in tenth grade, the final essay question on my English exam was; what is more important, order or freedom? Even then, I knew that freedom was more important, but that it could not truly come without a kind of order that each human's imposes on themselves, due to the high values of each. However, I ended my essay by saying that I had no idea if this could come about. But I do now: every individual must be truly happy. There is no stopping until that is accomplished.

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