The Efficacy of Yearning

An Unexpected Convergence

This morning I listened to the January 20th episode of Jeff Warren's Mind Bod Adventure Pod, featuring John Philip Newell and Cami Twilling. By the end, I found myself sitting in stillness, stunned by recognition. What began as a pleasant listen became something else entirely—a moment when different streams of wisdom suddenly revealed themselves as tributaries of the same underground river.

I'd been working on The Living Sound for months, immersed in Nichiren's teachings, the Lotus Sutra's Chapter Sixteen, the nature of devotion and awakening. And here was John Philip Newell, speaking from the Celtic Christian tradition, articulating insights that resonated with the Dharma in ways I hadn't anticipated. Not as surface similarities, but as deep structural parallels—different languages describing the same fundamental reality.

The Efficacy of Desire

The heart of Newell's discussion centered on a phrase from Simone Weil, the young French Jewish philosopher who died tragically before the end of World War II. Weil wrote about "the efficacy of desire"—the idea that getting in touch with the deepest yearnings of our soul is efficacious, that it actively brings about what we long for. Desire, in Weil's understanding, is not passive wishfulness but a kind of spiritual magnetism. When we touch our deepest yearning and allow it to rise into consciousness, we participate in its fulfillment.

This stopped me cold.

Because immediately, unbidden, these verses from the Lotus Sutra's Chapter Sixteen rose in my mind:

Gen kai e ren bo,

All who cherish and long for me,

Ni sho katsu go shin,

Look up with thirsting hearts.

Shu jo ki shin buku,

At last, when living beings humbly believe,

Shichi jiki i nyu nan,

Are upright in character and gentle and flexible in mind,

Is' shin yoku ken butsu,

And wish with all their hearts to see the Buddha

Fu ji shaku shin myo,

Even at the cost of their lives,

Ji ga gyu shu so,

Then I and all the Sangha

Ku shutsu Ryo ju sen.

Appear together on Divine Eagle Peak.

These verses describe the very mechanism Weil was naming. The Buddha appears not when summoned by elaborate ritual or doctrinal correctness, but when beings yearn with their whole hearts—when they look up with "thirsting hearts," when they "wish with all their hearts to see the Buddha." The yearning itself is the condition for revelation. Desire and its fulfillment are not separate movements but a single arising.

Nichiren's Single-Minded Longing

What makes this convergence even more striking is how Nichiren—the 13th-century Japanese Buddhist reformer whose teachings form the foundation of my practice—understood these exact verses. In his letter to Gijo-bo, Nichiren wrote about the verse "single-mindedly desiring to see the Buddha, not hesitating even if it costs them their lives." For Nichiren, this was not metaphor. This passage became the key that unlocked his entire realization.

He explained it with characteristic boldness:

"Single" of "single-mindedly" means the one pure way, and "mind" means all phenomena... "single" stands for myo, or mystic, "mind" for ho, or law, "desiring" for ren, or lotus, "see" for ge, or flower, and "Buddha" for kyo, or sutra. In propagating these five characters, practitioners should "not hesitate even if it costs them their lives."

In other words, the deepest aspiration expressed in the Lotus Sutra—the wholehearted wish to see the Buddha—is identical with the Sacred Title itself. To chant Namu Myoho Renge Kyo is to enact that very yearning. The sound we make is not a petition directed outward but the voice of our own buddha-nature calling to itself.

And here's where Weil's "efficacy of desire" and Nichiren's understanding become one teaching: the yearning is not preparation for awakening. The yearning is awakening expressing itself through us. When we chant with that quality of single-minded longing—Namu—we're not reaching toward something distant. We're giving voice to what is already present, already responsive, already here.

Namu: The Movement of Longing

This brought me back to something I'd written about Namu in The Living Sound. The syllable means devotion, surrender, the act of taking refuge. But more than that, it expresses a specific quality of heart. As I put it in the manuscript:

Namu is an active, expressive word, a movement of the heart. Namu bends forward with longing, opening the gate. Yet in that very opening, we discover we have already arrived. This is the paradox of refuge in the Lotus Sutra tradition: there is no gap between the act of entrusting and the reality entrusted to. The moment we turn toward the Dharma, we discover it was never separate from us.

Namu bends forward with longing. This is Weil's efficacy of desire made sonic. This is the "thirsting heart" of Chapter Sixteen given voice. Namu is not supplication but recognition—the sound of awakening remembering itself through us.

What Newell was describing in Celtic terms—the soul's yearning for light, for the divine presence woven through creation—Nichiren expressed through the physics of sound and consciousness. Different vocabularies, identical realization: desire and fulfillment are not cause and effect but the inhale and exhale of a single breath.

The Thin Place and the Place of Awakening

Newell spoke beautifully about Iona, the Scottish island that has been a pilgrimage site for centuries. He quoted George MacLeod's description of it as a "thin place"—where the separation between time and eternity, between the divine and human, becomes translucent. MacLeod emphasized that this doesn't mean other places are "thick," but rather that on Iona we more readily access the light that is present everywhere.

People step onto the island and weep. Something in them recognizes what Jung called "the salt sea of life's origins" stirring again. Carl Jung said when we weep, something primal flows. The sixth-century monk Columba, who established the Christian community on Iona, taught his monks to "pray until the tears come"—to pray until they touched that deep flow.

This concept of the thin place resonates directly with what Nichiren called the Place of Awakening—one of the Three Great Secret Dharmas. Any place where we chant with sincerity becomes consecrated space. Not because we import holiness into it, but because sincere practice reveals the awakening that was always already present. As I wrote: "Anywhere we chant becomes the Place of Awakening in the moment we open our heart—Namu."

Iona is thin not because it's more sacred than other places, but because the accumulated practice there—centuries of pilgrims arriving with open hearts—has worn the veil thin. Similarly, the place where we chant becomes thin through our own sincerity. Sacred space is not found; it's activated through devotion.

The Search and the Return

Newell's book is called The Great Search, and much of the podcast explored what it means to be a spiritual seeker in exile from inherited religious structures. He spoke movingly about relinquishing his ordination as a Presbyterian minister because he could no longer reconcile his deepening sense of Earth's sacredness with the imperial Christianity of creeds and doctrines.

Yet he emphasized that even from the wilderness, he maintains relationship and love with the temple—with the family and tradition that formed him. The prophetic voice, he said, has value only if it can keep speaking with love for those still within the four walls.

This too struck a chord. My own path has led me outside organized Nichiren institutions. I founded Myokan-ji Temple and the Two Buddhas Meditation Community independently, teaching from the tradition but not bound by its sectarian interpretations. Like Newell, I've had to ask: what are the yearnings not being deeply addressed within inherited structures? And how can we honor tradition while speaking truth about where it falls short?

Newell's answer—that we're searching for the deep yearnings of the human soul, and that getting in touch with these yearnings helps bring about what we're longing for—perfectly describes what I understand the Odaimoku practice to be. We're not chanting to become enlightened. We're chanting as the enlightened voice of reality expressing itself through ordinary, confused, yearning human beings.

The search is not for something absent. The search is the remembering of what was never lost.

Light as the Common Language

One more parallel struck me deeply. Newell spoke about Edwin Muir, the Scottish poet whose autobiography reads "like an autobiography of the human soul." Muir's first memory was lying in a cradle watching a beam of light enter his bedroom. He described it as a moment before time had begun—a glimpse of eternity woven through the temporal.

Newell's co-guest, Cami Twilling, shared her own childhood memory of lying on the carpet in a sunbeam while everyone else was busy with dinner. Just being. Nothing going on upstairs. Pure presence.

"That's so naturally human," Jeff Warren responded, noting how children instinctively seek calm and quiet, often hiding this contemplative impulse from adults who might not understand.

This reminded me immediately of the passage in The Living Sound about the "single moment of consciousness" that Nichiren describes—the ichinen that "cannot be grasped by concepts or language." Muir watching light. Twilling lying in light. Both touching what Nichiren called myo—the wondrous, mysterious nature of awareness itself, which is "neither existent nor nonexistent" yet exhibits the qualities of both.

Light is not a metaphor. It's the most direct language reality speaks. When Muir saw "immortal shining" in every human being and life form, he was touching the same truth that Zhiyi articulated through ichinen sanzen: every moment contains all possible states of awakening and delusion, all realms, all conditions. The light doesn't need to be imported. It needs to be recognized.

And recognition happens through yearning. Through desire turned conscious. Through Namu—the heart bending forward, opening the gate, discovering it was always already open.

The Sound That Gathers

Near the end of the podcast, Newell described what happens during pilgrimage weeks on Iona. They don't over-program. Being on the island itself is significant. Early morning meditation together. Teaching. Shared meals from the earth. And always this sense of being strengthened to re-engage with the world's darkness and struggle.

"It's not about staying on Iona," he said. "It's about being strengthened to re-engage."

This is the rhythm of practice: withdraw and return. Fill the cup, pour it out. Chant in the morning, carry that resonance into the day. The pilgrimage is not escape but renewal—what Jeff Warren called "the afterglow" that trails off as time goes, requiring us to return regularly rather than relying on long stints.

I thought about my morning practice. Thirty minutes before the Gohonzon. The voice steadying, the breath lengthening, the nervous system shifting toward safety and presence. Then stepping out into Oakland, into teaching, into the complexity of being human in these times. The chant doesn't remove me from the world. It clarifies my participation in it.

Newell spoke of his pilgrimages as "accessing wisdom and spiritual practice in order to be stronger for the work of compassionate action." This is exactly what Nichiren taught about the bodhisattva path. We don't chant to become enlightened and then help others. We chant as bodhisattvas—enacting the vow that has always been our deepest nature.

As I wrote in The Living Sound: "When we chant Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, we take refuge in the Wondrous Dharma. But we also offer the Wondrous Dharma—to ourselves, to all beings seen and unseen, to the world that aches for clarity. The chant moves in both directions simultaneously: receiving and giving, inhaling and exhaling, opening to awakening and sharing that awakening without reservation."

Conclusion: The Underground River

What moved me most about this podcast was not finding similarities—though those are plentiful—but discovering that different spiritual traditions, when taken to their depths, converge on the same insight: reality responds to sincere yearning.

Simone Weil named it the efficacy of desire.

Chapter Sixteen of the Lotus Sutra shows the Buddha appearing when beings yearn with thirsting hearts.

Nichiren taught that single-minded devotion—Namu—is itself the Buddha's voice.

Newell speaks of thin places where the veil between divine and human becomes translucent.

Muir saw immortal light shining in all beings.

Cami Twilling lay in a sunbeam before she knew what meditation was.

All of them touching the same truth: awakening is not distant. It's not reserved for the spiritually accomplished. It's present wherever sincere longing opens the heart.

The practice is simple. Seven syllables. One breath. The movement of Namu—devotion bending forward, discovering it has already arrived.

This is what I heard in Jeff Warren's podcast this morning. This is what I've been trying to articulate in The Living Sound. Different words, different traditions, the same underground river flowing.

And perhaps that's the point of pilgrimage, of practice, of yearning itself: not to go somewhere else, but to recognize we're already standing in the thin place. The light has always been here. The Buddha has always been appearing on Eagle Peak. We just needed to look up with thirsting hearts.

Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.

The sound that gathers.

The yearning that fulfills itself.

The voice of reality singing to itself through us