When the Cart Doesn't Come: Chanting, Unanswered Prayers and Karma | Nichiren Buddhism

2 days ago

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Is it me?

An old cart waiting and a white ox watching — An old cart waiting

Sooner or later, every one of us chants for something and doesn’t get it.

The job goes to someone else. The marriage ends anyway. The scan comes back bad. We chanted hard. We chanted with our whole heart. And it didn’t happen.

Then a little voice shows up in our head and asks the cruelest question: What did I do wrong? Am I broken?

Most of us are too scared or embarrassed to ask that question out loud. We just carry it around.

So let’s say it here, and let’s answer it.

When we chant for something and don’t get it, nothing has been proved about us. Chanting works. It works by changing the one who chants, and that change is real. But we’re one cause among many, and the practice never promised that every cause would happen. The Buddha himself refused to treat bad fortune as a verdict. We should refuse it too.

Asking Is Fine

First, let’s clear something up. Chanting for what we want isn’t a lesser practice. It isn’t selfish. It isn’t “bad Buddhism.”

The tradition even has a name for it. It’s the first of the Four Siddhantas, or the Four Aims, the worldly level of teaching. The Dharma meets us right where we live: in our hopes, our fears, our bills and our bodies. My book The Living Sound goes into detail on this, so I’ll keep it short here.

The Lotus Sutra tells a story about it. A house is on fire. The children inside are busy playing and won’t come out. So their father calls to them. “Come out! I have carts for you out here. Goat carts, deer carts, ox carts, just what you’ve always wanted.” The children run out to get their toys, and they’re saved. There’s a twist to this story, more on that in a bit.

Their wanting didn’t trap them. Their wanting is what got them out of the house.

So yes, chant for the job. Chant for the healing. Chant for your kid. Ask for the cart.

The real question isn’t whether we’re allowed to ask. It’s what happens when the cart doesn’t come.

Chanting Changes the One Who Chants

Let’s be honest about how chanting works, because that’s where the hope is.

The Buddha was blunt about wishing. Long life, good looks, happiness, a good name, a heavenly rebirth: everyone wants these things. But they don’t come from prayers or wishes, he said. If they did, who would be without them? Or as my mom used to say, “if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.”

That sounds like bad news for chanting. It isn’t. It’s the key.

The Buddha also said that intention is karma. Our intention isn’t a wish we mail off to the universe. It’s a real cause. In my essay on consciousness, I argued that the mind isn’t a separate thing sitting outside the world, sending it requests. It arises with everything else. So our focused mind is one of the conditions the world is made of. Change that condition, and what arises changes too.

Here’s what that looks like in real life. A calmer mind sees more options. A steadier person walks into the interview differently. We notice the door that was open the whole time. We finally make the phone call we’ve been putting off. We sit with the diagnosis instead of running from it. And because we’re never separate from the people and places around us, when we change, our world changes with us. Our tradition calls this esho funi: life and its environment are not two.

That isn’t magic. It’s better than magic, because it’s real.

But notice what it doesn’t promise. It doesn’t promise that every other condition will step aside. The economy, the hiring manager, the virus and the cells in our bodies are conditions too. Our chanting is a real force in the room. It’s never the only one.

The Trap: “You Didn’t Chant Enough”

Here’s where good people get hurt.

If chanting works, and our prayer wasn’t answered, then something must be wrong with us. We didn’t chant enough. We didn’t believe enough. It must be our karma. Victim blaming.

This trap isn’t only Buddhist. The Secret, a best-seller from 2006, taught that our thoughts attract what happens to us. Think rich, get rich. The dark side came free of charge: if you got sick, you must have attracted it. The prosperity gospel in American Christianity says much the same thing. Faith brings health and wealth, so if you’re poor or sick, your faith must be weak.

The historian Kate Bowler wrote the history of the prosperity gospel in a book called Blessed. Then she was diagnosed with stage four cancer. She found herself living inside the very idea she’d studied. Her next book’s title says it all: Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved.

We Nichiren Buddhists have our own version. Many of us came up in communities that shared benefit stories every week. Someone chanted for a parking space and got one. Those stories can be sweet. But a steady diet of them sends a quiet message to the people whose prayer went unanswered. The message is: it’s you.

It isn’t you.

The Buddha Said No to Blame

The Buddha heard this question too. A wandering seeker named Sivaka came to him with a popular teaching of the day. Some teachers claimed that everything a person feels, pleasant or painful, comes from what they did in the past. Everything is karma. It’s a tidy answer. It explains everything, which should have been the first warning.

The Buddha said no. Some of what we feel, he said, comes from bile. Some comes from phlegm. Some from wind, and some from all three at once. Some comes from a change of season. Some from our own carelessness. Some from being attacked by someone else. And some, yes, comes from karma. That’s eight causes. Karma is only one of them, and it’s the last one on the list.

Bile, phlegm and wind were the medicine of his day. Swap in genes, germs and bad luck, and the point hasn’t aged a day.

Anyone who says it’s all karma, the Buddha told Sivaka, has gone past what they can know for themselves. They’ve gone past what everyone in the world knows to be true.

That’s a remarkable thing for the teacher of karma to say.

Our own Nichiren Buddhism lineage says the same. Zhiyi, the great Chinese teacher of the Lotus Sutra, listed six causes of illness. Karma was the last of the six. Nichiren quoted Zhiyi’s list in a letter about curing illness. I wrote about this in “Original Fear,” and the conclusion there holds here too: no culprit, no blame.

The flu isn’t a judgment. The layoff isn’t a sentence. The tumor isn’t a bill come due.

What the Practice Promises

So what does the practice promise?

It doesn’t promise that every condition will bend. It promises that we’ll be changed. And it promises that the changed person will meet whatever comes from a different place: steadier, clearer and less alone.

The worldly level of teaching is where we start. We ask for the cart. But the deepest level, the one the tradition calls ultimate, is there the whole time. The Daimoku works on all four levels at once. When the cart doesn’t come, the ultimate is what’s still holding us.

Go back to the burning house for a moment. Here’s the part of the story people forget. The children asked for goat carts and deer carts and ox carts. They didn’t get them. Their father gave each of them something far better: a great cart covered in jewels, pulled by a white ox. They didn’t get what they asked for. They got something better, and they got out of the fire.

So here’s what we’ve seen. Asking is fine. Chanting works, by changing the one who chants. That change is real, but we’re one cause among many. The trap is believing that an unanswered prayer is a verdict on us. The Buddha refused that trap.

When the cart doesn’t come, nothing has been proved about us. Keep chanting. Not because it makes the world obey, but because it keeps changing us. And a changed heart is how anyone walks out of a burning house.

Namu Myoho Renge Kyo