President’s Monthly Message

Nurturing the Future

Nichiko Niwano
President, Rissho Kosei-kai

What Is Making Society “Crude and Harsh”?

Although this may be coming out of the blue, I would like to ask you a question. If there were three mandarin oranges in front of you right now, and two people were supposed to share them, how would you divide them?

I read the following anecdote in a book. One day at school, a teacher handed three mandarin oranges to two students and asked, “How would you divide them?” One of the students answered, “I would make an offering of one orange to the Buddha, and then give one to each of us.” The teacher responded with a flat-out rejection of this idea: “What are you talking about? Divide them into one and a half oranges for each of you.”

Of course, the teacher’s response is the correct answer for an arithmetic problem. But Daigaku Hanaoka (1909–88), a children’s book author, mentioned this anecdote in a conversation with Tasuku Yoshioka (1915–2000), an expert on children’s culture. Hanaoka emphasized the importance of cultivating religious sentiment in early childhood education, saying that the lack of reverence for an existence that exceeds human knowledge is a major cause of this world becoming so crude and harsh that people do not have enough breathing space to refresh their minds.

I read, in a book written by Kazuo Murakami (1936–2021), a well-known authority on genetic engineering, that recently some mothers in Japan have requested that their children not be made to say, itadakimasu, “I gratefully receive,” before eating their school lunches. The mothers say that the reason for this is that they are paying for school lunches.

However, as everyone knows, “‘I gratefully receive’ is a phrase that expresses our gratitude and awareness that each time we eat something, we are ‘receiving’ life from other living beings that support our own lives” (Kazuo Murakami). This phrase expresses our gratitude to nature, which supports all life, to God and the Buddha, and to the many people whose efforts have brought food to our tables. In other words, it is an expression of the mind of reverence.

Surely I am not alone in worrying that the minds and attitudes of parents and adults who forget this, and focus narrowly on utility and efficiency, will greatly influence the minds of those responsible for the next generation of humanity.

The Future Is the Here and Now

However, this is what I think. In Japan, many people visit Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples in the New Year’s season, visit their family’s graves at the spring and autumn equinoxes, and put their hands together reverently in welcoming home the spirits of their ancestors during the Ullambana Festival. Furthermore, considering the fact that Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism (based on the Analects) have permeated Japan and that Japanese people have also been able to accept Western customs, we have carved out our history by accepting, learning from, and harmonizing these many different kinds of teachings that cultivate our positive emotions.

This not only applies to Japan, of course; every country has a religious culture that reveres the sacred. In other words, all human beings are endowed with the mind of reverence. And if this is the case, it is important that we help people who have forgotten this to regain the mind of reverence, and to show children how parents and adults practice it in their daily lives by revering and paying homage to sacred things. One valuable opportunity to do so is daily sutra recitation.

This is because the present is the starting point for the future. When we are, here and now, refining our minds and making every effort to practice what we can, we are nurturing the minds of our children and grandchildren who shoulder responsibility for the next generation, which in turn is nurturing a future in which everyone can believe in each other’s buddha nature. From a different perspective, this means that the more we grow and improve upon ourselves, the more we are building a brighter future.

In fact, when it comes to early childhood education, there is no better education than the daily practice of parents placing their hands together reverently before the gods and the buddhas and creating a home full of harmony and peace of mind. Similarly, experts talk about the importance of prenatal care because the mother’s sense of wellbeing has a positive effect on the fetus and helps deepen the bond between parent and child.

Therefore, in this sense of building and maintaining peace in our homes, we should again reflect upon the meanings of the three phrases “thank you,” “I gratefully receive this food” (spoken before a meal), and “I have gratefully received this food” (spoken after a meal) and make a point of habitually and sincerely saying them every day. After all, parents and adults who do so become good role models, who nourish and nurture the minds of those who will live in the future.