Good morning. Bloom your own way, at your very best. This is Yukihiro Shima of Oubaitori.com. This is the 1,138th morning of chanting 10,000 Daimoku.
Yesterday was the final day of our 2026 summer camp with the grandchildren. On that last day, something happened that I will not forget. My father is 95. One of his great-grandchildren had never met him. Yesterday, we brought them together.
A 95-year-old, and the great-grandchildren who met him
Four of my grandchildren came with us. We have seven in all. To them, my father is their great-grandfather.
Four generations in one room. When you think about it, that does not happen often.
Once they were all seated, I said to them: ask your Jiji’s father anything you like. We are doing a question corner now. That was all it took. Something switched on in the children.
“Where were you born?” — the question that opened the door
What food do you like. What color do you like. The questions were what you would expect from children. Then the one who started first grade this spring asked his great-grandfather this:
“Where were you born?”
That one question switched something on in my father. Where he was born. What kind of school he went to. And the day he was sent away as a detchi kozō, a live-in apprentice boy. Out of 95 years of memory, the words he wanted to pass on came pouring out.
The room was small, so I stepped outside and talked with my second son. Around my father were my wife, my daughters and the grandchildren. I listened from outside the circle.
They did not understand. They were connected anyway.
A first grader would not know what an apprentice boy was. Not one of the children understood the meaning of that word.
A line was drawn anyway. Their great-grandfather said, in his own voice, where his life began. A great-grandchild heard it with his own ears. Nobody can erase that now. Yesterday, the history of this family was tied one knot deeper.
Daimoku and faith are the same, I believe. However precious a thing is, if it is not passed along, it ends there. And even when the meaning is not understood, if they see us praying, hear our voices and spend the time with us, the seed stays. Passing on faith is not teaching. It is connecting. Yesterday I experienced that again.
I want to leave proof of this faith for descendants a thousand years from now. I say this often. The first step of those thousand years may have been one question, between a man of 95 and a boy of six.
Let’s Daimoku!
Thank you for being with me today.
🙏 From Yukihiro Shima — Oubaitori.com
Bloom your own way, at your very best.
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