"If you act with all your energy, your life will change"
This year I reached 69 years of age. My heart has been working both day and night, without stopping, for 70 years. This is a splendid thing.
It's already been ten years since this, but once while I was in the air in a plane over Siberia, I had a heart attack and my pulse stopped completely. I was dead. It so happened that there was a good doctor on board with us, and he gave me first aid, and thus he breathed life back into me. But I've experienced that particular half dead condition many times. Well, if I die then my life ends there, but obviously I am living, so I have today, and I can stand in front of you all.
The thing I wish to say here is that even when you are doing the same thing, depending on the way you do it you get completely different effects. One day is one day. The way that you live that one day is the most important concern. For me, looking at a life that somehow passes by and a life with a sense of something that makes it worth struggling for with your all -- everything turns out differently between the two. You all know what I mean in a vague and verbal way, perhaps. But in the daily actions of your life, when it comes to whether or not you live by that thought in your everyday actions, it seems to me that perhaps you don't. I am 69 now, and yesterday, I felt that anew. In words, I have known it for a long time now, but yesterday all anew, in a passion, I remembered the value of being alive.
I have been 35 years since we lost the war, and so this year it will be 33 years since I came home to Japan and started Shorinji Kempo. 33 years ago, I gave all my thinking to living in earnest. After losing in war I came home to burned out fields with nothing left standing, alone, and I started Shorinji Kempo. Today, 33 years later, multitudes of people have joined in and felt the value of living, taken pride, and found hope. This is a splendid thing.
Yet, the root of all this began with my beliefs and my actions, all from a single person 33 years ago. The greatest reason that this has succeeded to the point where it now circles the world, is that I really felt life's joy and pride in it, that I gave my life to it, and that I made serious and earnest efforts for it.
In comparison to me, you all are extremely young. Even if you start today, even at your age, I imagine you could each make out about as well as me. For the rest of your lives, try taking things on the way I have! You should be able to. This -- this is the difference between casually doing something and really giving it your all.
(1980 from a sermon at the Newly Established Branch Masters Study Session)
