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Myosenji Temple
Silver Spring, MD

by Matthew Lancaster

On December 15th I attended the December Oko at Myosenji Temple in Silver Spring, MD. The Myosenji Temple is a Nichiren Shoshu Temple, a sect of Buddhism I was not familiar with before attending. The gentleman I spoke with on the phone recommended I review the information on their website and attend either their Monthly Oko given by the Chief Priest or Memorial service, I choose to attend the Monthly Oko for December. After becoming lost several times I was able to locate the temple for the service. 

Nichiren Shoshu Buddhists follow Buddha’s teachings from the Lotus Sutra and believe it to be the only true path to Buddha. They believe that Buddha renounced his early teachings as not being the true path. Additionally, they believe in the “Orthodox Transmission of Buddhism” to a Nichiren Daishien a boy born in 1222 during the time of Mapo (present day) ago in a fishing village in Japan. Nichiren wrote the The Gohonzon of Honmon, which was passed on, to Nikken Shoshu. Moreover, at Shoshu death he passed supreme meaning onto one priest, which has continued for over 60 generations. The Priest who this knowledge is passed to is known as the High Priest and is located in the Head Temple at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan. Each of the local temples each is assigned a Chief Priest who is appointed by the High Priest 

I found the temple much more ornate than the small country church I grew up in. There were several figures near the Altar that I did not recognize. The Altar itself was much more detailed than what I had expected and I found the church to have a strange sweet smell, inscents maybe? The ceremony contained meditation, which I believe I missed due to DC traffic signs, or the lack thereof, a reading of a passages I thought was the teachings, and chanting of what I believe was the monthly Gosho. My understanding is a good deal of the sermon was from letters and their replies expounding on their major focuses of the religion. From my understanding these seem to focus on much the same points our lectures and readings had pointed out as the foundation of Buddhism. These included giving to Buddha (the temple, I believe) visiting the temple frequently, doing your daily chants, and several others that I did not understand at the time. Additionally there were several “stories” which pointed out how temporal the world is and how we all need each other and should work together. To me the teachings seemed to follow a similar path to the Thanksgiving sermon at my home church, although with a bit more ceremony to it. 

I found the ceremony to be very interesting, although I did find myself wishing I had a greater understand of some of the readings, and chants. Quite honestly I felt much like I did at Catholic Weddings were I did not know what all the replies that the congregation would repeat. Overall, I found this experience to be enlightening and once relaxed I was able to grasp most of the teachings. 

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