Koji Takeuchi was born in Japan and began his search for truth in his teens. On a meditation course he had his enlightenment experience in which he saw “the absolute perfection and beauty intrinsic in all things and all beings, the essence of Life.” He joined a Zen monastery, but eventually rejected its harsh discipline and tough regime. His travels finally took him to England where he now has a Pure Land meditation centre and Japanese garden. To the dismay of many more traditional Buddhists he gave himself the title Buddha Maitreya.
His condemnation of egoism, however, sat uneasily with his personal assertion of being right when all others are wrong, especially combined with the sale of videos and CDs
He asks which religion has brought happiness and peace, replying that none of them has and that nothing has changed. Consequently each is a proven waste of time and useless as none has brought self-realisation. His professed mission is to change the world and human consciousness, claiming his teaching to be the purest, simplest and most direct: the way of Oneness. There was much more detail and explanation given but there was also a great deal of repetition of similar points, which could have been considerably condensed and which made for difficulty in isolating the central point.
Truth is revealed in silence and stillness, and so the session moved into the first of two periods of meditation. He explained the significance of hand positions and collectively we adopted them in the guided sequences. Other moments were less tranquil. The backing music for his songs used soothing saxophone and woodwind, but his voice was weak and his hand-waving in a shaking gesture as though conducting himself was at the very least distracting and mostly uncomfortably embarrassing. HIs recitations of Haiku he had written were often interjected with explanations and while they may well have met the criteria in their original Japanese, the strict syllabic form in English was lost, although they did relate to the traditional themes of nature and the seasons.
The session was interesting if somewhat long at three and half hours. For some it may have provided the starting point for a spiritual journey and for others another stage in their quest. His condemnation of egoism, however, sat uneasily with his personal assertion of being right when all others are wrong, especially combined with the sale of videos and CDs and in the context of Buddhism which sees many paths to truth.
