This was a great article, thanks so much for sharing. As a buddhist who started in Tibetan Vajrayana as a teenager and has ended up chanting NMRK in the SGI, I can appreciate that faith, like human beings, adapts to its time and surroundings. While personal gain and financial enrichment and the like have infected almost every faith there is on earth (we are all fallible to some extent) the through line of an ever-narrowing compression of practice makes sense on the pursuit of enlightenment. And, while study is essential in any pursuit of the mind, the mind is sometimes our biggest adversary.

Here is what I wrestled with for years, and I think it’s worth sharing because I suspect some of you have wrestled with it too.

Every Buddhist tradition agrees that all living beings possess Buddha nature. The Lotus Sutra’s parable of the Jewel in the Robe says it plainly: you already have a priceless jewel sewn into your clothing. You always have. You just don’t know it’s there. Enlightenment isn’t something you earn or achieve. It’s something you already are.

So if that’s true — if the jewel is already there — why is it so hard to find? And this is where I kept getting stuck. Because the tool we use to look for the jewel is the same tool that hides it from us. Our consciousness. Our thinking, analyzing, questioning mind. The very thing that makes us human is also the thing that stands between us and what every tradition says is our birthright. Each school of Buddhism is, in its own way, a set of gymnastics designed to get the mind out of its own way. Zen tries to crash it with paradox. Tibetan practice tries to transmute its energy. Pure Land tries to exhaust it into surrender. And each one works, for some people, some of the time. But the fundamental problem remains: you cannot use the mind to escape the mind.

This is the contradiction I brought with me to Nichiren Buddhism. And to be honest, I found the same contradiction here, stated more plainly. We say that a single sincere recitation of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo contains the entirety of Buddhahood within it. And I believe that. But we also say: don’t stop chanting. Keep going. Practice daily. Because your delusions will reassert themselves by tomorrow morning.

So which is it? Is one moment enough, or isn’t it?

The contradiction dissolves when you stop thinking of practice as a means to an end and start seeing it as living itself. Each breath you take is a complete act. No single breath is insufficient. But you keep breathing — not because the last breath failed, but because you’re alive and that’s what living things do. Each moment of chanting or meditating, each act of compassion, each time you turn toward someone else’s suffering instead of away from it — that’s not a step on the path to enlightenment. It is enlightenment, expressed through action.

Kierkegaard wrote that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Perhaps that’s why Pure Land buddhists seek this fundamental meaning at the time of death, that that is when enlightenment will reveal itself. But remember the jewel? It’s right there, any moment you honestly reach for it.

Thank you again for this fantastic perspective on the trajectory of this universal search for truth!

For readers from outside the Buddhist context, it's worth noting that the above comment is written from an entirely Mahāyāna perspective. For example, it isn't true that "every Buddhist tradition agrees that all living beings possess Buddha nature," that's a very specifically Mahāyāna idea that arose centuries after the death of the mendicant Gotama who is known as the Buddha.

The concept of "religion" as it is meant in the modern context is only a few centuries old, as is the idea of "Buddhism", but to the extent that we can think of the teachings of the Buddha as a religion, it's probably most helpful to think of Mahāyāna and Theravāda as different "religions." I frankly think that the Vajrayāna subset of Mahāyāna probably is best thought of as a different "religion" as well, but it's not my area and I wouldn't suggest anyone take my thoughts on that topic with any great heft.