![]() ![]() One kneels before the Gohonzon and chants the phrase “nam-myoho-renge-kyo” repeatedly, sometimes for hours, every day, along with other select phrases from a book called The Liturgy of Nichiren Shoshu, entirely in Japanese. I was born to parents devoted to Sokka Gakkai Buddhism the centerpiece of this religion is a scroll with Japanese lettering called the Gohonzon. In many ways, my life has been a continual and sometimes exhausting confrontation with this question. ![]() ![]() The answer here may save your life or leave you without a dime, but the question, as far as I can tell, is something like: “what is faith?” The more basic question - what does it mean to know that we stand on a rock hurtling in apparent blindness through a cosmos that may or may not have intrinsic order or intelligence - remains unresolved everyone can answer for themselves, but usually - save for cult leaders and social justice avatars - only for themselves.Īs Alex Trebek has taught us for 35 years (strangely, without any Papal wardrobe at all), sometimes you have to start with the answer and trace it back to the question to understand what you’re actually posing to the universe. But at the door he once more threw down the gauntlet, where it would lie untouched by the Church for 359 years, muttering over his shoulder “ eppur si muove”:ģ59 years was how long the Vatican took to officially declare Galileo correct in 1992 they acknowledged that the Earth is not the literal center of the universe. Apocrypha, never less than dramatic, tells us that he then turned in stony silence to leave. He was not eager to martyr himself and agreed to recant. A Papal-led Inquisition, worn down from nearly two decades of trying to bureaucratically snuff the astronomer’s view that the Earth revolves around the Sun, finally called an open court in 1633 and threatened him with torture outright unless he ceased all heresy and remained silent. The most famed quote attributed to Galileo may or may not have ever escaped his lips, but it endures because, like other apocrypha, something rooted gut-deep in the human imagination, as primal as cave paintings, tells us that he should have said it. An inquiry into faith’s actuality, design and use(s) ![]()
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