The utter wickedness of the Nichiren Shoshu crane symbol -...(}
Bratcher's Sho Hondo: ''We were in awe as the 65 foot high Butsudan doors opened' 4-8-97
In 1888, Rudyard Kipling wrote a short story called “A Man Who Would
Be King”. It was about a couple of paramilitary adventurists out of
the British Army, who had decided to set up shop in Afghanistan and
become kings. Their plan was to offer their services to a local tribal
chief as mercenaries to defeat his neighbors and after amassing a
large enough kingdom, to betray him and take it over.
From the Wikipedia synopsis (slightly edited):
... Dravot and Carnehan succeeded in becoming kings: finding
... the Afghans, who turn out to be white ("so hairy and
... white and fair it was just shaking hands with old
... friends"), mustering an army, taking over villages, and
... dreaming of building a unified nation. These Afghans,
... who were pagans, not Moslems, acclaimed Dravot as a god
... (the son of Alexander the Great). They practiced a form
... of Masonic ritual and the adventurers knew Masonic
... secrets that only the oldest priest remembered.
... Their schemes were dashed when Dravot decided to marry
... an Afghan girl. Terrified at marrying a god, the girl
... bit Dravot when he tried to kiss her. Seeing him bleed,
... the priests cried that he was "Neither God nor Devil but
... a man!"
... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_King>
Things went south abruptly for the two after that. People don’t like
it when their Gods turn out to be flesh and blood. (The movie starring
Sean Connery as Dravot and Michael Caine as Carnehan is the finest
depiction of Kipling’s fiction on film.)
The real problem of Dravot and Carnehan was that they had not learned
the fine art of historical revisionism as perfected by the academy of
Shinto priests under the Tokugawa and the Meiji after them.
After the Meiji restored the Imperial family to “rule” as a front to
yet another military government (bakufu), and before their
experimentation with Western-style parliamentary administration of
political and bureaucratic affairs proceeded, they first had to
reconcile some public relations problems cropping up from the history
of the past 268 years of Tokugawa rule.
For the past few centuries, there had been a Shinto cult which had
been operating, but only for the elites: the royal family, the
important members of the court, the fudai and tozama daimyo lords who
headed all the major fiefs of the Tokugawa Shogunate and its allies,
and the high priests of the major and some minor schools of Buddhism
along with a selection of chief priests of important shrines.
The name of that cult was Sanno Ichijitsu (One Truth) Shinto. In that
very exclusive form of Shinto, the object of worship was a person, or
rather the ashes of a person: Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the
Tokugawa Shogunate. For hundreds of years, the emperor and important
members of the court and all the rest traveled during their Sankin
Kotai pilgrimages through Edo northwards to do tozan at an enormous
shrine at a place called Mt. Nikko to worship Ieyasu’s ashes.
Sanno Ichijitsu Shinto declared that not only was Ieyasu a god, but in
fact he was the avatar of God above all the gods, deities and Buddhas,
the original one and only (Jehovah-like). This particular Shinto had
been formulated by an ancient Tendai monk named Tenkai, continuing in
a long tradition of Dengyo’s followers of tailoring Buddhism by
inserting ever more inventive lies into the mouth of the founder
(Dengyo) to say whatever would please the emperor and now the
Shogunate by making them into divine figures (avatars of this or that
deity). Tenkai had made the final step, to make Ieyasu’s avatar
supreme over all, in the words of Dengyo, of course. Nichiren would
not have appreciated this: he had declared himself a follower of
Saicho, the personal name of Dengyo, who had brought the Lotus Sutra
to Japan, thereby saving the country.
Previously, Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had made the mistake of trying to
make their own divine cults the cult of all of the people, whereas
Tokugawa Iemitsu (Ieyasu’s grandson, seeking inherited divinity)
realized that an exclusive cult just for the elites would minimize the
effort while guaranteeing the same effect of reducing the threat of
attack, by subjugating the heads and letting the bodies (everyone else
down to the peasantry) practice their funeral Buddhism according to
their locale, under the heavily regulated umbrella of this new Shinto
embracing all of those temples as branches of a greater Honmatsu-ji
(temple hierarchy).
The wily Shogun Iemitsu had somehow grasped the principle that you
cannot defeat the things that you bow to in prayer. Put another way:
the practice of faith, however shallow or distorted, undermines the
ability to challenge that faith in a direct way.
There were those advisors to Iemitsu who counseled the eradication of
the imperial line, for complete safety (indeed, the later restoration
of the emperor system was the end of the Tokugawa). However, the
lessons of the history of this tactic were too bleak: during the
Muromachi era the Ashikaga Shogunate (just after the death of Nikko
Shonin and Nichimoku Shonin in the early 14th century) had started off
with the overthrow of emperor Go-Daigo by his former supporter
Ashikaga Takauji, and that had launched the Nanboku-cho period, 60
years of struggle between the Northern line of the Jimyoin-to emperor,
Go-Komyo enthroned by the Ashikaga at Kyoto, and the Southern line of
Go-Daigo at Yoshino.
Instead of taking that rash course, the method chosen by Iemitsu was
to continually undermine the Imperial authority and prestige at the
court in Kyoto and enhance that of his own family, holding court in
Edo. The imperial princes were made Shinto priests in the Ieyasu cult.
In 1619, Ieyasu’s granddaughter Kazuko was made the imperial consort.
In 1629, emperor Go-Mizunoo was forced to abdicate in favor of
Ieyasu’s 7-year-old great-granddaughter, the empress Meisho. This was
an astounding act of groveling imperial submission to Ieyasu’s
magnificence.
And then, inevitably, 268 years after the careful beginnings of the
Tokugawa, the light went out and they were overthrown by a revolution
launched far away from the controlled center of the realm, from the
furthest reaches of Japan.
The problem for those subsequent Meiji Shinto ‘historians’ of re-
framing the new narrative of history just past was: if the emperor was
a god descended from Amaterasu, and had merely handed power over to
the Tokugawa to be temporary custodians for the emperor and the court
… how to explain the absolute grinding and humiliating subjugation of
the imperial family and the court under the Tokugawa for 2 ½
centuries? (After all, God does not bleed.)
The course chosen was simple enough: since it was an elite cult, wipe
out all memory of it, and any trace of it in a thorough revision of
history. The most obvious remnants of that time are the shrine at Mt.
Nikko, and the Tokugawa-standardized mon-tsuki (round emblems
identifying the daimyo lords in their continuous passing through the
heart of the Kanto region to Edo and through to do tozan pilgrimage at
the Sanno Ichijitsu Shinto shrine).
How the crane emblem went from a tracking badge for the Fuji School
identification by agents and spies of the Tokugawa … to cover the
altar butsugu and the backing paper of Nichiren Shoshu Gohonzon is
anyone’s guess. Poison in a human body will congeal into the vesicles
of white blood cells as those white cells congeal into pustules rising
to the surface of the skin (if all the toxins that were consumed had
to be processed by the liver and kidneys, we probably would only live
to be fifteen). Maybe this is a similar effect, I don’t know.
Howsoever that may have come to pass, what is now clearly and
unambiguously known is the original source of this evil accretion. The
Nichiren Shoshu crane symbol is the Shinto badge worn by as many as
seven high priests of the Fuji School (all statue-worshippers from
Yobo-ji) during the 17th century on their way to do their Shinto tozan
worshipping the ashes of Ieyasu the God at the Sanno Ichijitsu Shinto
shrine at Mt. Nikko after passing through Edo. They were members of an
elite Shinto cult, which (it is assumed) we members of the SGI no
longer support.
That case is proven in the attached document, which has three forms.
The first version has highlights and underlines to help the reader
focus on this difficult material, the second version has underlines
for those who can’t stand my highlighting and the third version is
pristine text. The heart of the case evidence (in all three versions)
is shown in Appendix B6 starting from the bottom of page 91 to the
middle of page 97 and the whole of the case is laid out in Appendix
B8, pages 126-131. If you want to navigate the document by sections,
set Adobe Reader to view the navigation panels for bookmarks.
How events, external and internal, conspired to position the
successive high priests to stumble into a perfect sequence of errors
resulting in a catastrophe for the Fuji School will require reading
the whole thing. We are still inside that catastrophe, but the method
of permanent exit is near at hand.
I am not seeking to be refuted, because there is a mountain of
evidence supporting what is an irrefutable case.
_____________________________________________________________
The incomplete analysis (131 pages) is contained in a bookmarked Adobe
PDF file (turn on the bookmarks pane for ease of navigation through
the nine appendices), stored as a Google Doc. The title is:
Shinto Tsuru Shinmon - A Toynbee Analysis of the Fuji School
(Incomplete)
There are three versions of the file:
1. With underlines, bolding and highlights for ease of quick reading:
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B1xmnHkI0Z-dYjM0ZDg5NTMtZDNkNy00MDIxLWE1MjMtNTBiZDIwODBhNzIw&hl=en
2. With underlines only (if the highlighting bothers you):
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B1xmnHkI0Z-dNDc2ODU1ZGYtOGVmZS00MGI5LWE5ZmItOTllMmM5ZjVmNGM4&hl=en
3. Plain text (if you like it pristine):
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B1xmnHkI0Z-dOGI0M2U1YzUtN2ZmMC00OGIyLWI3ZjctMmYzMjhmMTk3ZmVm&hl=en
Google docs can't search these files, but you can download them and
search them in Adobe Reader.
Enjoy !
-Chas.
_________________________________________________
Reading from "The Entity of the Mystic Law", Writings of Nichiren
Daishonin, p. 421 ...
"Thus, in the Lotus Sutra the Buddha employed three cycles of
preaching in accordance with the respective understanding of those of
superior, intermediate, or inferior capacity. For people of superior
capacity, the renge, or lotus, that is the name of the Law was taught.
But, for people of intermediate or inferior capacity, the lotus was
used as a metaphor or symbol. As long as one understands that the word
is being used both as a name for the Law itself and as a metaphor,
depending upon which of the three groups of people is being addressed,
then there should be no reason to argue over it."
This passage of commentary means that the supreme principle [that is
the Mystic Law] was originally without a name. When the sage was
observing the principle and assigning names to all things, he
perceived that there is this wonderful single Law [myoho] that
simultaneously possesses both cause and effect [renge], and he named
it Myohorenge. This single Law that is Myohorenge encompasses within
it all the phenomena comprising the Ten Worlds and the three thousand
realms, and is lacking in none of them. Anyone who practices this Law
will obtain both the cause and the effect of Buddhahood
simultaneously.