April 2012

Rissho Kosei-kai Holds Study Session on the Simple Life

The Committee for the Environmental Management System of Rissho Kosei-kai held a study session on April 3 on environmentally friendly lifestyles, at the Horin-kaku Guest Hall in Tokyo. Some 350 people attended, including headquarters officers and staff members.

The high point of the meeting was a speech by Ms. Nobuko Kawabata, a psychotherapist and writer, on the value of a simple lifestyle and the practice of danshari, a yoga-based method for removing clutter from one's life, originally proposed by the popular writer Hideko Yamashita. In Japanese, danshari is written with the three Chinese characters for "refusal" (dan), "disposal" (sha), and "separation" (ri). She explained the idea of dan and sha as rejecting and disposing of anything that is unnecessary or inappropriate in life. She explained that ri means to free oneself from attachment, thereby gaining spiritual freedom, and that danshari is the practice of reexamining the relationships between oneself and the things around one.

Rissho Kosei-kai has conducted environmentally friendly undertakings in a variety of places - at the headquarters, Dharma centers, and members' homes, in the light of the Buddhist teachings. In 2010 the organization was certified as meeting the international environmental standard ISO 14001. Reducing waste is one of Rissho Kosei-kai's concrete undertakings for environmental protection, which the organization is promoting under its environmental guidelines for 2012-14. The study sessions were one of the organization's undertakings for environmental protection.

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