Recently I visited one of our members who was very ill and in the last phase of his life, Lui Kodama. Lui has been very kind and generous to OCBC over the years. For the past number of years, I have made oden for our festivals, both at Hanamatsuri and at the Obon Festival. Lui has personally raised all the daikon that I put into the oden. Daikon, a Japanese radish, is one of the main ingredients of oden. Without good daikon, you really can't make good oden. Lui would calculate when he needed to plant the daikon so that it would be harvested right at our festival time. He would plant several rows of daikon, and Paul Fujimoto, our hard-working member and friend of Lui's, would dig up the daikon, wash them and prepare them for me to make the oden.

While I was at Lui's, I came to find out that Lui made his own narazuke, which is a Japanese pickled vegetable. Narazuke has a unique flavor, and I knew basically how it was made, that it was soaked in a thick, brine-like paste, and that it takes time to make good narazuke. Until I visited Lui, I never knew how long it really took. I learned that it takes four years to make good narazuke. In Lui's garage, he has several big tubs of narazuke that are soaking in this paste-like brine. Each tub is at various stages of the brining process. I was shocked to learn that it takes four years to make narazuke. As a young child, I used to watch and help my Grandma make "tsukemono" of various kinds. She would make tsukemono from cucumbers, or napa cabbage, and it would soak in a tub in a salty, brine solution like the narazuke. However, most tsukemono is only soaked for maybe days, or in some cases, maybe weeks, but not years. I couldn't imagine having the kind of patience necessary to make narazuke. First you have to raise the vegetable, uri, which the narazuke is made with. Then you have to soak the uri in this brine for four years, and occasionally you have to stir it and even change the pasty, brine-like solution. It is really a mess to work with. Your hands get all slimy and sticky, and it resembles kids making mud pies.

The more I thought about the patience necessary to make narazuke, I thought about our own everyday life. Modern man is very short-term oriented. We want short-term profits, short-term contracts, short-term commitments, and short-term results. Kids start karate and expect to make black belt in a year or two. We learn the piano and expect to be an accomplished pianist in a couple of years. Instead of reading the whole book, we would rather read the condensed Cliff Notes version, or the Readers Digest version. Very few people learn an art or discipline that might take a lifetime to master.

Our attitude to religion is similar. We can't understand why it should take so long to learn about Buddhism. Can't we learn it all in an eight week course? How much can there be to learn, anyway?

We can't wait for the light to turn green. We can't wait for the car in front of us to speed up. We can 't wait for the pedestrians to hurry up and cross the street. We put something in the microwave and we can't hardly wait one minute for it to heat up.

Amidst this culture and society in which noone wants to wait for anyone or anything, there was a man who painstakingly took four years to make narazuke. What a lesson of life that is. If Lui can have the patience to make narazuke, then I should be able to at least wait for the light to turn green at an intersection. If Lui can take four years to make narazuke, I should be able to take four years to study the Larger Sutra. If Lui can take four years to soak and stir narazuke, I should be able to translate a book on Buddhism over the next four years. If Lui can wait patiently for four years to enjoy the narazuke that he has painstakingly make, I should be able to at least wait for the rice to finish cooking before eating dinner.

When I was in Japan, one of my teachers, Professor Sosuke Nishimoto, told me that he had a group of professor friends who studied Shinran Shonin's Kyogyoshinsho together, once a month. He said it took them ten years to read and study the text together. I asked Nishimoto Sensei what text did they study after they finished. He replied that after they finished the Kyogyoshinsho, they started back again on page one. He said that he and his friends were on the third or fourth reading of the text that they have been studying together for the last 30 or 40 years.

In this age of short term patience, we should have the patience of a Lui Kodama, to have the discipline to do something that takes a long time. We should nurture, develop our patience to work on something and not expect results in the short term. Just as Lui was able to savor and enjoy the delicious flavor of narazuke that had soaked for four years, so too, when we diligently and patiently listen to and study the teachings, we will be rewarded with a wonderful flavor of the Dharma that only comes to those who have patience and perseverance.

Namuamidabutsu,

Rev. Marvin Harada

Photo courtesy of http://www.senkyu.com