Introduction

2017. Holy shit, what a year. It began with Donald Trump replacing Barack Obama in the White House intending to make America great again. The New England Patriots had the greatest comeback in football history, let alone Super Bowl history, against the Atlanta Falcons with former Boston College quarterback Matt Ryan. They were down by 25 points; the actual score is hard to say without feeling like I’m running it into the ground. That was almost halfway through in the third quarter, a total of twenty-three minutes and thirty-one seconds left in regulation and this one, wait for it . . . was the first Super Bowl to go into overtime. It was the fifty-first Super Bowl, Roman numerals LI. Patriots CEO Robert Kraft, after the game, said that it was “unequivocally the sweetest.”

Why was this unequivocally the sweetest? For one, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was suspended for the first four games over “Deflategate,” the supposed scandal in 2015 that honestly was just a bullshit charge over two PSI in a football. A little karmic revenge because Brady—TB12—was thirty-nine at the time and had four fewer games on Ryan. Second was the probability of being down 25 points with a 0.3 per cent chance of winning in the third quarter and overcoming those odds. Third, this was Brady’s seventh appearance and the Patriots’ ninth appearance overall and fifth Super Bowl championship, effectively completing TB12’s very own Infinity Gauntlet. The Patriots had won two years prior in Super Bowl XLIX (49) against the Seattle Seahawks and former New England coach Pete Carroll.

What other big sporting event happened? The Chicago Cubs won the World Series, breaking their 107-year drought. Their president of baseball operations was Theo Epstein, who greatly contributed to ending the Red Sox’ 86-year drought. The Cubs ace was former Red Sox pitcher John Lester, cancer survivor. The connections to Boston were via Epstein, general manager Jed Hoyer, and players John Lester, John Lackey, David Ross. The “Hard Luck” playoff losses and a bullshit curse. In 2003 Cubs fans must have felt cursed when a fan interfered in game 6 of the National League Championship Series. The Red Sox curse hit them that year when Grady Little left Pedro in an inning too long and The Yankees crushed their souls in Game seven of the American League Championship Series. These strange coincidences, or karmic connections, are intriguing to me, and as a practicing Buddhist I find that nothing is “coincidence” but is the cosmic phenomenon of cause and effect.

Sports is a great training for life—a place to learn the value of teamwork, usually as a youth. In sports, you have a winner and a loser—cut and dried. There are multitudes of statistics to quantify any activity players do that is considered valuable. There is only one champion per league every year. To non–sports fans, winning a Super Bowl might not seem like much—just an overhyped sporting event. But it’s really beneficial for the whole region the team is in. The playoff run leading up to the event injects a certain energy into both teams’ hometowns. Then comes the elation of winning or the heartbreak of defeat. In Boston we have experienced all of it, but 2017 was something else. Buddhism is about winning and losing, and it’s up to YOU when and how much to compete. Now that you know you’re a Buddha, you can start making causes to experience the winning in your daily life.

In Do Your Job, Part 2, a film about the Patriots’ journey to Super Bowl LI, Pats general manager Bill Belichick emphasizes how they would put in over 120 practices, 120 causes. A major cause they made was the third two-point conversion play that the Patriots worked on during the playoffs. In the Super Bowl they needed that third two-point package because they needed every play to make history. You actually can see the direct causes the Patriots are putting in, and if they do lose, it’s Bill Belichick saying he needs to coach better, Tom Brady saying he needs to execute better; they take personal responsibility for what they can be responsible for. During Super Bowl LI, Julian Edelman says during halftime, “It’s going to be a great story,” with full confidence that they were going to win. It wasn’t just him—nobody on the Patriots’ side was panicking. They had a certain serenity about them; they tapped into their Buddha nature and played like they had turned on “God mode,” and they did their job and won the game. It took a ton of great plays, including our own miracle Edelman catch, to win the coin toss in overtime. The Patriots handled it with incredible patience, and Bill Belichick’s Buddhahood was beaming.

Bakataro

There is a diehard fan, a somewhat fictionalized character representation called Bakataro. It means “foolish idiot” in Japanese and is loosely based on this author. We will call him Bakatari—“asshole” in Japanese—when he’s doing some especially dumb shit. Some of the people he meets and interacts with in this work are real, and some have had their names changed twice. All names have been generated by a random name generator that’s why some may not fit the character, some are named after fruits and vegetables, if I could use emoji’s I would. Nothing is fabricated, but Bakataro is a fictionalized representation of me. Got it? Cool. There is I, the author, and Bakataro/Bakatari, my foolish alter ego. I’m not trying to get anyone indicted, and I’m not trying to shame anyone. If anything, it’s Bakatari who is a shameless fucking animal but has something to tell you all. Bakataro’s mom, Mamasan, is from Japan, and his father, Brownie, is from Carver, Massachusetts. Brownie’s family has four relatives who came to North America on the Mayflower. Mamasan’s uncle Masao Koga was a very famous composer in Japan. Bakataro feels like he should be dead and has only survived to tell you this story and change the Karma of America and the world like his family has done since the beginning.

Shameful honesty: Bakataro was at home freaking out. He’d sent his guest home in the third quarter, he was so pissed off. He was also high AF speedballing fentanyl and cocaine at the time, and this game was killing his buzz. His friend from high school, Robert “Bobby” Perry—we’ll call him BP—had been hanging out for the Super Bowl, and they had a gram and a half of coke and three grams of fentanyl—not even heroin mixed with fentanyl but fentanyl with just some kind of cut on it. Baka didn’t really like shooting up; it was too much work and the risk too great. At the time, February 2017, he was a raging drug addict, having snorted coke for more than twenty years and indulged an opiate addiction on and off—more on than off—for the last decade. Why is he revealing this? Wasn’t this supposed to be about Buddhism and Boston? This guy’s a fucking mess. Well, no doubt he was at the time, and he had no idea of the train wreck to come. He didn’t care about the causes he was instigating and was not paying attention to the effects that were manifesting. It was great to see the Patriots win such a great game. That was the joy in his life, week to week, chasing drugs and watching sports while Boston was winning games. Like any other drug addict or alcoholic, he had to hit the proverbial rock bottom before anything would change.

The high of winning a Super Bowl wears off after the parade, right? Things were looking good for Boston sports after the SB. The Red Sox traded for Chris Sale, a top-of-the-rotation ace pitcher, so the prospect of baseball was looking good, and the Celtics were winning too. Bakatari was a high-functioning drug addict, so he thought. February 28th, he fell asleep at the wheel and split a telephone pole and crashed into a tree. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was saved by his airbag. He only got a couple stitches above is eyebrow. He was driving a 2007 Ford F150. The Wareham Fire Department used the jaws of life to cut him out. The truck was totaled, and he is still thankful he didn’t hurt anyone else. If he ever gets into acting and needs to cry on demand, he’ll just think about this and what might have happened. Dangerous shit look at all the people getting run over and hit and runs. You will learn the specifics of how fucked up he is as we go on—this is about Buddhism, I promise, and how to turn bad actions—bad causes—into something positive. I am certainly not minimizing what causes he was making; that was a bad situation. The very next day he totaled his roommate’s car by putting her 2009 Toyota Matrix on top of a guardrail.

Yes, he totaled her car the very next day. He was on his way to Taunton to meet his buddy BP to hook up because he couldn’t the day before. He remembers Sunshine, the roommate, talking on the phone and reminding him to buckle up. A minute later, getting on route 495 off Route 28 in Wareham, he was on top of a guardrail screaming what the fuck happened. Massachusetts State Police showed up, and he couldn’t explain why he hit the guardrail. He had no recollection. They took his driver’s license for being an immediate threat. The police brought him home instead of the hospital. He didn’t feel like he was injured, but he was angry. He yelled to Sunshine, “I’m sorry, I did it again and ruined your car.” Then he tried killing himself by taping a plastic bag over his head. It sounds like a weak attempt, but he probably would have hung himself if Sunshine hadn’t called the police. He had practiced tying nooses and had one in his closet.

The Wareham police responded quickly, and one of the policemen was officer Chris Conner, a former classmate whom Baka played high school sports with, football and track—glory days. Bakatari felt oddly comforted by having somebody that he knew talk him out of whatever he was doing and get him to Tobey Hospital—“coincidently,” where he was born. He was mean, swearing at everyone, including the poor nurses. His world seemed to collapse in on him, and he couldn’t see anything beyond dying. He was restrained and given some shot in the belly and woke up completely disorientated at Arbor Fuller hospital in the psychiatric unit.

So, yeah, totaling two vehicles back to back and waking up in a psych hospital, what did he do? What about his job? He worked for a company called Sketchy-Etchy as a Class-A Tool and Die Maker. Impressed? He’d worked for this company since January 1997, and it was a well-paying , technically skilled position. Fortunately, this episode was covered under the Family Medical Leave Act, and from the psych ward he entered the rehab part of the hospital. He was out of work for roughly three weeks.

He had been having trouble at work partly because of his drug problem, along with twenty years of accumulated Karm and baggage. He had gastric sleevectomy in 2015 when had weighed 305 pounds with drug problems, and one time he had felt like he experienced a heart attack during a five-day cocaine binge. He lost 125 pounds and felt like a different person but still had all this accumulated Karma built up at work over the course of the last score. You see what I did there? Score . . . twenty years at work . . . Boston sports. We are gonna be using puns and (hopefully) sharp wit to keep this guy’s degenerate life entertaining. Coworkers who would refer to him as “Fat Asshole” arranged his keyboard keys to read “Fat Loser” and glued the buttons on his calculator several times—typical asshole pranks, bullying. He can’t say it was completely undeserved. He’d started there at an entry-level position and worked his way up; he could do anything on a computer better than anyone in the room, and toes might have been stepped on. Bakataro wasn’t the smartest guy in the room, but he certainly acted like it. Yes, some were way better than him on miller or lathe—they were seasoned tradesmen—but he was the only one who could use Solidworks, print on the 3-D printer, and run the three-axis miller; he could learn to use any software in hours. When you are at the top of your game, “haters gonna hate”—look no further than the shade thrown at Tom Brady and the Patriots. To be honest, Bakataro loved the hate thrown at him because, to his mind, it meant he was doing the right thing, and he used it as fuel not only to win but to run up the score.

He’s not trying to cry victim here. Buddhism teaches that your environment is a reflection of you. Why was his environment such shit then? It’s hard to see your own behavior without actually looking at yourself. We’ll be learning about that by discussing the Nichiren school of Buddhism. It was founded by Nichiren Daishonin, a thirteenth-century monk. He also created the Gohonzon, a scroll that practicing Buddhists keep in our home in its own box, called a Butsudan. We recite two chapters of the Lotus Sutra and chant in front of it twice a day. This is our daily practice of Gongyo. Nichiren created the Daimoku of the Lotus Sutra, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, literally translated as “devotion to the mystic law of cause and effect through sound.” The Lotus Sutra was written by the historical Buddha, Siddhartha, and in this sutra, it is revealed that everyone has the Buddha nature within them; they just need to unlock it. To help learn the modern strategy of the Lotus Sutra, Bakataro belongs to the Soka Gakkai International, a movement led by Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, who is his mentor or coach, if you will.

In the summer of 2017, the Boston Bruins fired their coach, Claude Julian, the greatest Bruins coach I had ever witnessed. He coached the hockey team to their first Stanley Cup victory in thirty years in 2012 but then lost to the Chicago Blackhawks in the finals two years later. This was a proven coach, a winner, but the narrative was that the players “tuned him out,” that he’d “lost the locker room.” I would wonder, “WTF, these guys are professional athletes, they are getting paid millions of dollars. Why aren’t they playing hard? This coach—did he forget how to coach?” This was the same story as the Red Sox tuning out Terry Franconia, the guy who won two world series for Boston. The players need accountability too. Every player must win their individual battles for the team to succeed. In the same way, Bakataro had Dr. Ikeda, president of the Soka Gakkai movement, in his life but had tuned him out, and it was only after some serious self-reflection that Bakataro could see the similarity in his life—the chaos and disorder. He was fired on August 1, 2017. He’d gone into the hospital on March first and got fired on August first, five months to the day after he went into the hospital. Totaled two cars, got fired. Yeah, this was looking like rock bottom, but in reality, everything was becoming clear, and it was the best thing that could have happened to him.

As they say, everything happens for a reason. He was fired for rolling his eyes at the vice president of human relations at Sketchy-Etchy. He had been free of opiates and coke since March and was really trying hard to turn his life around. He was going to counseling, but work had been a struggle without drugs. Then everything became a battle—trying to collect unemployment, going to court to fight the driving-to-endanger and negligent-driving charges, trying to get his license back from the “immediate threat” confiscation—every step was painful and challenging. He was stuck at home with no job and no car but was drug free. That is, he was on Suboxone, an opioid blocker, and was a medical marijuana patient, so when I say “drug free” I mean the hard stuff. He started chanting in front of his Gohonzon, reflecting on his life and how he, nobody else, caused it to be such a mess.

He could see the parallels in his life and in Boston sports. Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, or NMRK (I’m gonna use Twitter shorthand k thx), is tattooed down the center of his back enveloped by a Green Dragon. His right arm is covered in Lotus symbolism. There was no escape from it; he had to face his Karma and how he got here and how he could turn it around. Fuck it, he’s half Japanese and had lived a gangster lifestyle, he’s proud of his heritage, fucking rock that shit. He has been making progress. “A little bit forward with every turn, that’s how a drill works!” said Stan Marsh as Toolshed in South Park: The Fractured but Whole. As a machinist/toolmaker, I love that bit. (Get it? Bit! lolololol, okay okay.)

It could always be worse. Bakatari could easily be dead. He knows this is the right thing. His buddy BP, whose father is Baka’s lawyer, fucking gets an infection in his brain from shooting up in his neck and dies. Seriously, his best friend died because the veins in his arms were junk so he’d shoot directly into his neck. DO NOT DO THIS, PLEASE! He didn’t die of an overdose, but it was junk that killed him. Bakataro counts his fortunes and knows how lucky he is and does not want to waste this opportunity and share what he knows about Buddhism.

Everything happens for a reason, right? He was hoping, when he got fired in August, that he could go to the beach and hang out. The weather was never any good for the beach, and he could never get hold of Bobby. He’s sorry he couldn’t reach him, but BP knew what he was doing; he was a grown man. His oldest daughter graduated high school this year, and BP was getting high. He would say he was sick and tired of being sick and tired and doing the dope dance, but he passed before he could do anything about it. BP no longer has the choice to change his Karma, but he still will be a Bodhisattva, or one who teaches, because I hope to use his example to teach people to NOT SHOOT UP IN THE NECK. Everyone is responsible for their own actions. That’s it. Whatever circumstances he might have been experiencing, he created. Whatever Bakataro is experiencing, he created. Reality is cruel and harsh sometimes; accept it and try your best.

Instead of feeling sorry for himself, Baka was appreciative and thankful every day because he knew it could always be worse. Sitting at home all day, he would listen to WEEI, where radio hosts Kirk and Callahan would talk to Tom Brady (TB12), and Dale Arnold, Michael Holley, and Rich Keefe on the “Dale, Holley and Keefe” show would talk to Coach Bill Belichick (BB). The Pats lost to the Chiefs and Panthers and started the season 2–2. One topic that would come up was how they could put a loss in the “rearview mirror” and just move on, and their answers were basically that you just have to do it. Wide receiver Julian Edelman got hurt in preseason and was going to be out for the year. They just stoically dealt with it and moved on. There was no living in the past.

We cannot replace our lost friends, of course, and I’m not trying to say they are in the rearview and forgotten, but I was inspired to share this because BB’s comments seemed like a very Buddhist type of approach, or at least was close enough that these connections became evident. Baka started to see the Buddha of Belichick, but it was so much more—the karmic connections of Boston throughout history. From 2001 when the Patriots won their first Super Bowl—the same year, unfortunately, that the terror attacks of 9/11 happened—the New England Patriots, a symbol of independence from the founding of our great country, were the champions. In 2013 came the Boston Marathon bombing. Big Papi David Ortiz famously said, “This is our fucking city!” Which gives me goosebumps when I hear that. Again, a tragedy may have galvanized the team, and they won the World Series. All the way back to the original Boston Massacre that galvanized the colonies, pretty much, these connections through time are there. It’s true. Buddhism is about truth and the search for the cause, scientific in a way. Actual proof exists. I intend to show these truths and give everyone who can read this the opportunity to show proof in their own lives. This whole project, and what I experienced in 2017, blows my mind, and hopefully will open others’ minds as well.

There is so much turmoil in society, and it is ridiculous how social media has invaded and taken hold in our lives. Bakataro is an “eighties” kid born in ’76. A VCR was a luxury, and being able to watch a movie at home when I was a youngster was quite a treat. Wow, I sound like an old man—a witness to this technological revolution going on. Now people are clamoring for the truth. “Fake news” is a thing and comes from the highest office in government. On October 8, 2017, Vice President Mike Pence tweeted a picture of himself and his wife at a Colts game that he proceeded to walk out of in disgust because some San Francisco 49ers took a knee during the National Anthem. Except the picture was from a game three years earlier. Why lie? Why not just take a quick one at the current game? The VP had told the traveling press to stay in the plane because they weren’t staying long; he knew he was going to stage this protest. President Donald Trump said that those “sonsabitches should be fired” for expressing something in a peaceful, nonviolent way. The President is attacking players for exercising their freedom of speech, he attacks the media as dishonest for spreading fake news, but then his VP does a bullshit stunt like that.

It was a political maneuver at a sporting event, on Peyton Manning day at Lucas Oil Stadium. There have been attacks on freedom of speech, the press, assembly. There have been “white nationalist” marches, basically open racists, having rallies and losing their jobs for participating. I get it: don’t support Nazis. But what if it were a gay pride parade instead of “national” pride? Imagine gay people losing their jobs because someone “outed” them at a parade; probably never happened right? The alt-right group—the fringe online group—helped elect the president through Pepe the Frog and other clever memes spread through Facebook. On April 19, 2017, there was supposed to be a white nationalist rally in Boston, but it never manifested. Maybe fifty people showed up for it, and they were looking for protection from the police because there were thousands of counter-protesters. Boston is not the racist city it has the reputation for. There is so much division in this country, and it is being exploited by anyone who can to create problems that they can profit from. There is so much bullshit being fed to everyone, how can you see what’s real? Simplify and look within.

I apologize for throwing so much out there: Bakatari the drug addict, the Patriots and Bill Belichick, Marathon bombing, the president, Buddhism. This is the most amazingly deep philosophy that encompasses all phenomena in the universe, but simple and practical enough to use in your daily life to become happy in the worst of circumstances. I want to be able to communicate in a way people will understand. Not only in the New England area, but everyone everywhere can unlock their Buddha nature and examine life in a new way. This is a bold step in ending this opioid crisis. I hope to be relatable but realize Bakatari is a pretty greasy dude. He was nine when the Red Sox blew it—not just Bill Buckner. He’d lived on Cape Cod for forty years, a proud Masshole. He is fucked in the head and has his problems, but who doesn’t, really? He might not be able to solve all his problems, but now he’s trying like hell, and all he really wants to do is help somebody recover from their addiction so they can help solve their own problems. There are too many victims of this opioid epidemic—not just the person who ODs but their family. I have a unique perspective, and I hope you will enjoy my presentation.

I want to first explain Buddhism, from the historical Buddha to the philosophy’s discoveries and realizations through time, to what makes the Lotus Sutra so powerful and how to unlock your hidden potential. I’ll talk about the nature of a Buddha’s behavior and the similarities to Jesus Christ and his words and actions—not miracles, words and actions. I want to share my mentor Daisaku Ikeda and his words of how his mentor Josei Toda and his mentor Tsunesaburu Makiguchi stood up to the Japanese imperialist government, which could have similarities to today’s political climate. I’ll share Mamasan’s struggle to raise four kids on her own, using Buddhism to escape the domestic violence of Bakataro’s father. It’s never too late to make a change, to start making good decisions. I’ll explain Bakataro’s fucked-up life, with brutal honesty. I want credibility; this is about truth. I’ll try to teach you how to free yourself from the sufferings of birth, aging, sickness, and death. Nam Myoho Renge Kyo is amazing.

I’ll give you the tools and show you how Bakataro has used them. What you do from there is up to you. I’ll tell you my goal is to end the opiate crisis in New England. I’m forty now. Imagine wiping out heroin use in twenty-five years! I’d die satisfied, and maybe it would lay the groundwork to end the crisis worldwide. That’s a big window, but it’s a huge job. Tom Brady wants to play until he is forty-five; his window is much shorter. If you set your goals really high, even if you fall short you might still accomplish more than you thought you would. I know Bakataro screwed up a ton, but from this moment onward that’s his focus. I can write this. Hopefully this was a decent introduction and the start of something incredible. Thank you, Ikeda Sensei!