4th Week - Tuesday (290108) Dan Shibu Meeting.

Nothing much happened in the office today. There was no snow and the weather was not as good as yesterday. Even managed to spare some time to study jap during the evening time in office! And all of a sudden, I am determined to learn more Kanji and went to print out 579 characters to be studied over the next four and a half months. The reason for this is that most of the words that the Japanese use are in Kanji and I am in a handicap when it comes to reading them and hence the motivation to study and learn more.

At 9.15pm, Kuroda-san called and drove me to Kotake's house for meeting. I was surprised as I told them last Sunday that I would go there on my own as I need to familiarise my area better.
During the meeting, as usual, I communicated with them in broken japanese. They were laughing most of the time cause Kuroda-san would ask me questions in english and I would answer him back in Japanese. But when other members spoke too fast and I don understand, Kuroda-san would always translate for me. =)

And this is what we discussed for today, a Gosho passage:

Conversation between a Sage and an Unenlightened Man (The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, vol. 1 p. 131)

"Therefore, if you recite these words of the daimoku once, then the Buddha nature of all living beings will be summoned and gather around you. At that time the three bodies of the Dharma nature within you - the Dharma body, the reward body, and the manifested body - will be drawn forth and become manifest. This is called attaining Buddhahood. To illustrate, when a caged bird sings, the many birds flying in the sky all gather around it at once; seeing this, the bird in the cage strives to get out."

I was very touched as when I read out the japanese version of it, all the members would read it slowly with me. And then we would read the english version slowly together too. We would then discussed about this passage and Kuroda-san would ask me qns on it. I answered in english and he would then translate to the rest in jap. Haha!

Next, I brought with me our SSA times with the 40th anniversary issue and introduced to them our GD and explained to them roughly this event and the structure of SSA. They were amused at our newspaper having english on one side and chinese on the other. :)
After this, we also discussed the difficulties in doing Shakubuku in our respective countries and shared an overview of the experiences we faced. They also encouraged me to go Tokyo to see Sensei live in person and that Soka U graduation would be a great opportunity...
Time passes every fast and it was already 10.45pm. We daimoku 3 times and left Kotake, with the next meeting on this Friday, which is a DanShibu daimokukai.