What We Do

The question confused me, and back then, when I got confused, I got angry. 

“Man, I just told you how I am!” I burst out. The chatter in the room died down. 

Looking me over a moment, he ventured, “Hassan, besides your parents, has anyone ever asked you how you’re doing?”

Growing up in the Bronx, I saw violence every day—on local news or on the streets. If I was arrogant, standoffish, braggadocious and vain, it was because I’d learned it as a way to protect myself. I kept to myself, and if you tried to get in, I puffed up, trying to seem as big as possible, larger than whatever problem you thought I had. I didn’t need your help, didn’t need help, period. But the fact of the matter was, just two years before I encountered Buddhism, in my early 20s, in 1989, I’d tried to take my own life. 

I stuck with the practice for 12 years, and it changed me—slowly, slowly, opening my heart. It opened up my heart enough to let another person in—a young woman I met at my best friend’s wedding in 2001. We quickly got engaged, after which I slowly, slowly lost touch with the SGI. Losing touch with the practice, I lost touch with myself. Whomever my fiancee wanted me to be, I became, until she didn’t want any version of me. After she left I opened up my altar for the first time in years. Wiping the dust from the altar, candlesticks and bell, I realized that the state of my altar was the state of my life. 

Somehow word of the separation reached my district men’s leader, who reached out and asked me to join him on a round of home visits. 

“Don’t say nothing,” he told me, as I slumped in the passenger seat beside him. “Just watch what I do.” 

I remember the first visit clearly. “This is Hassan,” the men’s leader said. “Is it OK if he hangs out?” The guy shrugged.

“All right, then. What’s going on.” 

At the start, I could hardly follow the conversation—I couldn’t get my mind off my fiancee—ex-fiancee, now. But as the guy spoke, I realized he was opening up about a sizeable problem, a significant loss.

At the end, my men’s leader asked him if he wanted to chant five minutes. Sure, he said, why not. His butsudan, too, was dusty, but we didn’t mention that. At the end of our daimoku (we ended up, at his request, chanting nearly an hour), the guy looked different—rosier, energized—no small change. 

On the car ride to the next visit, I asked what was on my mind.

“We’re practicing Buddhism, right?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Well back there, you didn’t hardly mention it.” 

“Hassan,” he said, “Imagine you’ve lost something significant—imagine, for instance, that your parents had passed away. How would you feel?”

“I’d be upset.”

“You’d be inconsolable.” 

“I would.”

“Correct. Likely you wouldn’t be willing to hear about Buddhism—about anything at all—until you’d had the chance to talk to someone who’d listen.”

I thought about that exchange, years later, when in fact both my parents did pass away, one right after the other, in 2015. The grief was overwhelming, and I worried it would bring me back to square one, to losing touch with myself and the practice. It was my Soka family who kept checking in, listening, praying alongside me, who helped me to my feet. 

In 2018, when I was struggling badly to keep a steady job and on the verge of eviction, one of the women in my district took me aside. 

“Hassan,” she said, “do you want to exist, or do you want to live? You’ve got to chant to get the job. The one that will allow you to build. No more of these flyby jobs.”  

Chanting in this way, I continued to reach out and visit the men and young men in my district. Each time I did, I was able to rise a little further out of my grief. In 2019, a job opened up—and just in time. Just days before the pandemic hit, days before I would have been evicted from my apartment, I landed a steady job at a hospital. I kept up with this prayer, though, and in 2022, landed a job with a multinational electronics company, which has resolved all my housing issues and allowed me to more freely support the members of my district. 

This past June, my district had its largest discussion meeting ever. Beforehand, the young men’s leaders and I did a round of visits. Some of the young men we met were struggling with housing, others with work and others with heartbreak. Some with all three. 

Chanting ahead of time for the happiness of each, we met them with a high life condition and a simple question: How are you doing?

As you might imagine, “Ight” is a standard reply. But as we get to talking, it becomes clear that many young men are dealing with major challenges. They rarely speak about them because it’s rare that someone truly listens. 

One young man had his share of reservations—he’d been raised in another religion and had had a terrible experience. “In case you change your mind,” I said, and wrote down the details of our upcoming discussion meeting.  

To my surprise, he showed up. He’d lost my phone number but had kept the slip of paper. “Come on up!” we called. 

At that meeting, we talked about the importance of true friendship. At first, he was aloof, but as time went on, he warmed up. As we neared the end, he said suddenly, “Can I say something? I wasn’t going to come, but I’m glad that I did.” We waited for him to go on, but it seemed that was all he wanted to say.

“Why?” I asked. 

“I guess I feel… like I can be myself here,” he said, “and I haven’t found that anywhere else.”

Afterward, we hung around and talked. Because really, as Buddhists, that’s what we do. 

August 2, 2024, World Tribune, p. 5