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=== On Funerals ===
'''A:''' Don’t be ridiculous. What good would it do to have priests like that perform the final rites over us? Today I attended the private funeral of a certain eminent archbishop. A certain head priest who had betrayed his teacher while the latter was still alive acted as officiant. Arrayed in a gold-brocade kesa, with a procession of similarly dressed priests behind him, he recited sutras and chanted the ''daimoku'' as he performed the final rites. If my teacher had been able to speak from within the jeweled ''stūpa'', what would he have said?<ref>The deceased “teacher” was Honda Nisshō 本多日生 (1867–1931), the influential Nichiren Buddhist leader under whom Seno’o had studied and with whom he had long been associated before his break with Nichirenism. Honda’s death in March 1931 thus occurred at precisely the moment of Seno’o’s turn toward Revitalized Buddhism. Seno’o’s discomfort at the elaborate funeral rites of his former teacher underscores both the personal and institutional dimensions of that break. The jeweled stūpa (hōtō 宝塔) alludes to chapter 11 of the Lotus Sutra, in which a magnificent stūpa emerges from the earth containing the Buddha Prabhūtaratna (J. Tahō Nyorai).</ref> I could do nothing but weep. There they were in a main hall beautifully decorated with donations—unearned income contributed by the bourgeoisie—a group of seemingly castrated priests banging away on their old-fashioned gongs, interminably reciting ''dhāraṇī''s whose meaning no one could understand, and putting on an air of solemnity. For someone who sincerely mourns his teacher and is resolved to bring that teacher’s aspirations to life in a new age, how could a ''dhāraṇī''-style funeral like that possibly be satisfying? No doubt such forms once possessed value appropriate to their age,…

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…but today, from beginning to end, they are nothing but anachronisms. They are like beer left sitting for days, with sediment collecting in it. In the end, that is what happens when a funeral has lost its spirit.

'''B:''' Then what sort of form do you propose replacing it with?

'''A:''' Are you so worried about the form of the funeral that you can’t attain buddhahood? As long as the movement itself is genuinely alive and substantial, I believe forms appropriate to the age will arise naturally in the course of the movement. Look at how solemn a makeshift burial on the battlefield can be. Think, too, how deeply moving Yamasen’s funeral was.<ref>“Yamasen” was the familiar name of Yamamoto Senji 山本宣治 (1889–1929), a biologist, birth-control advocate, socialist politician, and labor activist assassinated by a right-wing nationalist in 1929. His funeral and memorial processions became major public events for the Japanese left.</ref> The point is that appropriate forms arise in proportion to the intensity of one’s commitment to justice in life. So I don’t think we need to calculate the form of a funeral in advance. The essential thing is to adopt a simple, spiritual form appropriate to the modern age; beyond that, we can proceed as circumstances require.

'''B:''' But a funeral does adorn the end of a person’s life....

'''A:''' The end isn’t something you decorate once you’ve reached it. To put it strongly, think of a funeral as little more than disposing of used coffee grounds. What matters is rebuilding each living day into a life of justice and love. Isn’t that what Nichiren meant when he said, “A hundred years of practice in the Pure Land does not equal the merit of a single day in this defiled world”?<ref>“A hundred years of practice in the Pure Land does not equal the merit of a single day in this defiled world.” Nichiren, Hōon-shō 報恩抄 (“On Repaying Debts of Gratitude,” 1276).</ref> To think of a funeral as a ceremony that “adorns the end” is itself a variant of bourgeois ideology: people donate or contribute some percentage of wealth accumulated through sinful exploitation and imagine that this constitutes admirable faith and atonement. ''Why be calculating funeral arrangements before the banner has even been raised? Those advancing arm in arm in the march of justice should already be prepared to leave their corpses by the roadside. Would the dead not prefer the tearful offering of a single comrade to the hymns of a thousand people without heart? “Let the dead bury their dead!”''<ref>Matthew 8:22; cf. Luke 9:60.</ref> The fundamental ideology of our Revitalized Buddhist movement must be the resolve to embody the Buddhist spirit in actual life—a resolve that will make even our funerals bleed tears.

'''B:''' I understand. Then will you go on to explain the relationship between reform of the economic system and the Revitalized Buddhist movement?