The Strait of Hormuz — a waterway barely twenty miles across — held the world's economy hostage this week. Saudi Aramco warned that fuel could run “critically low” by summer if the shipping lanes stay disrupted. In Washington, a resolution to restrain a strike on Iran tied 212–212 and failed. The headlines were oil and votes. The older question underneath: what does fear do to a people — and what should be done with it?
Look how small the thing is that frightens us. Twenty miles of water, and the markets tremble. I wrote once — Aaeen-e-naw se darna, tarz-e-kuhan pe arna — to fear the new order, to cling stubbornly to the old; that, I said, is the hard pass in the life of nations. Here is the verse made into a week. A whole civilisation clinging to one channel of one old fuel, because to build past it is work, and fear is easier than work. A people that can be held hostage by a strait has mislaid its khudi — its selfhood. The waterway is narrow. The fear is narrower.
And yet I would not answer that fear with a stronger blow. Nichiren lived through earthquakes, plague and looming invasion, and the treatise he wrote was called On Establishing the Correct Teaching for the Peace of the Land — peace of the land, he insisted, begins in the heart of a single person. We are not separate from our world; the crisis that looks so brittle out there is reporting the state of things in here. A sword answered by a sword only lengthens the winter. The courage this week asks for is the unglamorous kind — to stay at the table when walking away would feel like strength.
Do not let dialogue become the old comfort in a new coat. I spent my life against the sweet resignation I heard even in Hafiz — the lullaby that tells a people to sleep. I gave Lenin a speech in the divine court against Europe's machine of profit and war; I was no worshipper of force. But talk is courage only when talk is the harder thing. The cowardice this week is not in negotiating. It is in clinging — to the old fuel, the old enemy, the old fear — and calling the clinging prudence.
Then we agree — because real dialogue is the harder thing, not the softer one. It is the falcon's path, not the valley's. Nichiren also wrote, to a grieving believer, four plain words: winter always turns to spring. Not by waiting — by the causes a person makes. A great human revolution in a single individual, carried far enough, changes the destiny of a nation, and of all humankind. The strait will not be widened by fleets. It is widened, strangely, one awakened person at a time — each who refuses to hand their courage to a headline.
Two lamps, one week. Iqbal: do not fear the new. Ikeda: do not fear the winter. Between them, the same instruction — move.