A Master of PC Games Encounters True Buddhism
When Mizuki was nine years old, he was assailed by great waves of hardship. His mother divorced and got married again. He suddenly had a new father and brother. He changed schools twice. These rapid changes in his environment adversely affected his mind. Mizuki says, “As a child, I wondered why I was living.”
He leaned on a new religion when he was in high school. They said that the cause of misery and misfortune is evil spirits. They “drove away” his “evil spirits,” but nothing changed. He came to doubt this religion, which was not based on the truth, and quit following it.
He thought to himself, “If I devote myself to a path, I may start feeling that life is meaningful.” And so he started getting absorbed in PC games. He shut himself up in his room and spent 8 hours a day practicing PC games. His intensive effort made him one of the world’s top 5% of players in online fighting games. He even beat the world’s top third player in an online game, but he could not get to the very top however hard he tried. There was a great distance to the world champion.
A Maid Café Was Also Just One of the Logs in the Ocean
Soon he started job hunting. He didn’t want to say “Your company is my first choice” to companies he didn’t wish to be hired by, so he had a job interview only with one leading communications corporation. He talked enthusiastically about his experience at the interview and got hired. However, he wasn’t able to make friends with someone with whom he could share what was in his heart, and he spent his days feeling despondent.
One day a friend of his took him to a maid café in Akihabara. There he fell in love with a girl at first sight. “I have never seen such a pretty girl in this world!” he thought.
“To be with someone I love is the purpose of my life.” He started frequently spending his income on visits to the maid café. He told the girl that he loved her, but she flatly turned him down. He then dated another girl, but she had an affair with another man. He was finding no success in love.
He thought, “My future will be meaningless. Will I have to just endure it and carry on?” At a point when he had half-resigned himself to a life of emptiness, he found the Shinrankai website.
The Website That Caught His Eye
“I have looked at countless websites on religions. Most of them just emphasize worldly blessings or accounts of personal experiences, but only Shinrankai’s website has informative, instructive, and reliable content.”
He contacted Shinrankai at once and attended a Buddhist seminar. He heard that our life is compared to swimming and seeking out unstable floating objects in an ocean where we can see only sky and water. He thought, “This really is my life.”
Above all, he agreed with the idea that the root cause of suffering is ignorance of the purpose of life, and so decided to become a Shinran Follower. “Master Shinran teaches that through listening to Buddhism alone, our life that is so full of suffering will turn into a bright sea of joy. Hearing this, I thought I finally found the purpose of life. Now I enjoy listening to Buddhism and go to lectures every day.”
Source: The Buddhist Village Times #55 | 2015, A Master of PC Games Encounters True Buddhism
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