Orlando Bloom on Buddhism, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo and Daisaku Ikeda.

Hello, I'm Orlando Bloom. I'm an actor, I'm a father and I'm a practicing member of the SGI since I was 16. I was living in London and I was sort of racing through life. I was very inquisitive, very excited and full of the youthful vigor for life, which I still have, fortunately, because I still have my practice. My exams were coming upon me and for one of my exams I had to paint and draw. I was doing a sculpture exam and I'd given up painting and drawing at a younger age because I was challenged by one of my earlier teachers and I was not encouraged in a way that, so I had given up painting and drawing and as the exam for sculpture approached, I was told by my teacher that I had to have a 15-hour still life drawing exam, a 15-hour oil painting exam and a 15-hour sculpture exam. They were all going to work together and I had to have paintings and drawings to back up each one of my pieces of art, my sculptures that I had made. I had two months to prep this and David came into my life, my best friend, and so I went every weekend for about two months and I would be in the other room painting. He set me up with an easel and he was sort of teaching me and I would hear him in the other room, and one day I just walked into the other room and I said, so what do you do? And he said, well, I'm chanting that you're going to be very successful in your exams and that you're going to have a very successful life. And I said, well, will it help? And he said, yeah. And I said, great. So I got down on my knees and I began to chant and that was my first time, my first encounter with the practice and I then used my daimoku. I was going through this exam. I had a 15-hour oil painting exam. I remember painting a whale bone and a lemon and I would look at this whale bone and lemon and I had these oil paints out and I'd be painting it and I'd be like, at one point I would look at it and go, what am I doing? I'd nip to the toilet with my beads, sit and bash my beads and chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, come back to the painting and be like, oh, okay, carry on with it. Needless to say, I got, you know, I got, actually I got one of the highest grades and they asked if they could keep my work because they wanted to keep it as an example of the highest grade for the next year and I was like, wow. So there was actual proof for me and I must say I had this opportunity that was presented to me kind of out of the blue, you know, in a really remarkable way, to have a meeting with Daisaku Ikeda, with Sensei, and I was like, wow. My first encounter with Sensei was obviously through many of the daily guidance writings. It was one of those aha moments of wow, this is, you know, meeting my mentor, meeting somebody who I've looked up to so much, you know, and had been studying and reading around, was obviously a dream really and something that I had never imagined and couldn't quite fathom actually. I was like, why me? Why? How? And that of course spoke to all of the things in my life about, you know, overcoming the obstacles of being good enough, you know, feeling good enough for life, feeling good enough to have an encounter like that. It sort of struck me a bit like a thunderbolt and I bounded off the bus and gave Sensei the biggest hug and he returned the hug and then he held me by the shoulders and he clasped his hands around my cheeks and he sort of, sort of, he sort of woke me up to this moment of we're seeing each other. And I remember I shared a poem that I had written. I gave him a poem that I'd written for him and I thought about, you know, how I sort of saw my life and how throughout these years of really unusual circumstances of being a young actor who was really notable and was really thrust into the public eye without the tools to know how to cope often and how grateful I was for the practice to have been an anchor for me through those years and through that period. And I shared this poem with him and I remember his seamless interpreter, who was as if she wasn't there at all, said, he responded and he said, those sound like my words. And I said, well, they probably are. And he was quite sort of strict. He was like, those sound like my words. Then I was like, well, yeah, they probably are because I've just been reading everything and studying you. And, you know, that's been a big part of my life. And he was quite strict and I was quite shocked. And at the same time, grateful and realized in that moment. And I think as many of the moments of our encounter sort of did sort of slowly settle, that it was about authenticity. Sensei's heart and his spirit was just so authentic and it was so true. It was a really encouraging moment of embrace your own authenticity. And I never forget that. And I recall that Sensei was encouraging me to take the challenge every day to win. And life is an eternal battle for our success and victory. And I think that as members of the SGI, I recognize more than ever the importance of starting that engine every morning with Daimoku and embracing the day with the optimism and possibility that Daimoku gives me. That feeling of anything is possible and total victory is the goal. It's about being yourself and the best version, the most authentic version of yourself, warts and all, really. Because only by excavating through Daimoku and really looking at your life, can you reveal the best version of yourself and have that path of victory continue to present itself.