I am by no means a scholar of religion. But in the play, Inherit the Wind, the character representing Clarence Darrow asks in frustration of the character representing William Jennings Bryan, “Do you ever think about what you think about?” This is in response to “Bryan’s” refusal to critically examine his own religious presuppositions. I post this article simply as a token of “thinking about what I think about” – in this case, the current state of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism in America. In reading books and on websites, and in viewing online videos, it seems to me that the essentials of Shin are being largely ignored, to the detriment of Shin itself.
“Seems to me” that there are some very basic Shin truths that cannot be excluded without mutilating the teachings of Masters Shinran and Rennyo – and the heart of Jodo Shinshu. An informal, incomplete list of essentials might consist of points such as:
Amida is a real Buddha.
This means that Amida is not a mere symbol for “Life” or “Cosmos” or “Enlightenment” – although, of course, Amida does symbolize all these, and more. It doesn’t mean that Amida is/has a body like the risen Christ, or wears fabrics or a gold crown, or answers petitionary prayer or physically intervenes in the material world. Instead, it means that Amida is a transcendent Existent/Non-Existent (recalling that a Buddha is no longer a human person in any usual sense – and not even a being by samsaric standards), exercising Other-Power from a Dharma realm that is foreign to the samsaric realm, the Pure Land. Simply put, Amida is neither a god nor a guy. Amida is a Buddha, who eons ago, transformed from living as the monk Dharmakara, to being the Vow-promising-and-bestowing Bodhisattva, who now as a trascendental Buddha, issues the Call and answers it in us.
The Pure Land is real.
The Pure Land is real, but not material. It, like Amida, is a transcendent factor which is inconceivable to samsaric beings, who can only describe it by analogy and metaphor – both obviously imperfect means. The Pure Land does not, in Jodo Shinshu, correspond to the Christian Heaven. The Christian Heaven is a goal to which the Christian aspires, where s/he will dwell eternally. Not so the Pure Land, and this is a very important point.
Like all schools of Mahayana Buddhism, Jodo Shinshu teaches that the aspirant’s ultimate goal is Buddhahood. However, Jodo Shinshu adherents differ from both the Mahayana and the Theravada, by claiming that Buddhahood is not attained in the samsaric life, but rather in the Pure Land, by Amida’s Other-Power. But note that Shin’s goal is not eternal life in the Pure Land. The goal is Buddhahood. The Pure Land, however one wishes to conceive it, is only a way station, the final step in progress toward Buddhahood. The Pure Land means non-dual alignment of the adherent with Amida Buddha; the Pure Land is the process (not the “place”) by which Buddhahood is finally realized. Once Buddhahood is realized, the aspirant-now-a-Buddha doesn’t “stay” there eternally. Rather, the newly-born aspirant-Buddha acquires the unimaginable freedom of a Buddha, and goes on to function as a Buddha, or if s/he wishes, return to samsara one final time for the benefit of all beings. Thus the Pure Land is not Heaven, but much more like a combined education, rehabilitation and enlightenment way station, which – as in the parable of the boat when it reaches the far shore – is to be abandoned.
The Nembutsu is real Other-Power and Shinjin is Other-Power faith.
This point is simple and elementary, even easy. Shin teaches that Amida issues the Call, and we gratefully respond to it with the Nembutsu. Shin also teaches that our response is not derived from, or an expression of, self-power. If it was, then it would be we who save and enlighten ourselves (as in the “Path of the Sages” forms of Buddhism), thus vitiating Amida’s working as well as our need for it. The simplest image of this process that I know is: Amida calls; we echo the call via the Nembutsu; which itself is Amida’s working, because we are utterly incapable of good works or storing up merit. The Call and its Echo are one process of Amida’s activity for our well-being. Even our Shinjin, our deep entrusting, is Amida’s creation, since we are incapable of it ourselves.
= = = = =
When teachers stray from such basics, they are no longer teaching Jodo Shinshu. I say this in no way as a fundamentalist, but simply as a purist, and an adherent to the deliberately designed-to-be-simply-understood teachings of Shinran. The teaching is both simple – and mind-boggling to the point of being, in Shinran’s own words, inconceivable. Inconceivability is built into Shin, whether teachers and sanghas like it or not. Shin is not philosophy or science. Shin is a means of being “embraced, never to be let go” by Amida in this samsaric world, and then to finally attain Buddhahood during a temporary stay in the Pure Land.
In all too many of the online Shin sermons, Amida, Shinjin and the Pure Land are rarely mentioned. Instead, there is a lot of talk about anger management, family values, appreciation of the journey of a grain of rice from the field to our plate, and many other trivial and/or important subjects, but no reiteration of Shin essentials and no commentary on Shinran and Rennyo. And there is so often a puzzled pondering over why Jodo Shinshu is losing people to other religions or to no religion at all. The answer is easy: teachers are not teaching Shin, but rather some kind of bromidical “Buddhism is for relaxation and feeling good and being tolerant” – without any reference to, or explanation of, the reasons we are 1. Buddhists and 2. why we are Shin Buddhists.
It strikes me that post-modern theology is so frightened of the object of its study that it is unwilling to turn an attentive eye to what the transcendent traditions really teach. Thus, both eyes averted, many so-called Dharma teachers shun the transcendent Amida, the real Buddha who is the wellspring of their work and the activator of their salvation and enlightenment. Instead they turn their eyes inward, to a bloodless idol of their own creation. They have the stage, the lighting, the props, the seating and the audience. But they don’t have the play itself, or at least not the one that is billed. No wonder, then, if audiences are dwindling. No wonder at all.
After explicating the unremitting, unrelenting nature of samsara, the realm of suffering and iron-bound material causation, the Buddha then uttered what are perhaps the most important spiritual words in history:
“There is, O monks, an Unborn, an Unbecome, an Unmade, an Unconditioned; if, O monks, there were not here this Unborn, Unbecome, Unmade, Unconditioned, there would not here be an escape from the born, the become, the made, the conditioned. But because there is an Unborn,…therefore there is an escape from the born….” (Udana 8,3)
First the Buddha laid out samsara as it functions in its rawest, undomesticated worst. So bad is the samsaric state, said Shakyamuni Buddha, that no sane person would wish to be re-born into it. Following up on that diagnosis, Shakyamuni devised methods for escaping rebirth, and he shared these methods with his disciples … as a means of “escape” from the conditioned realm.
But Shakyamuni went beyond methods. He changed the course of religion, and the parameters of his samsaric diagnosis, by declaring a new truth, based on his own experience of Bodhi and Dharma:
The samsaric realm is not the only realm.
There is another, more real realm, in which chains of material and psychic causation, birth, conditioning, and becoming do not apply, because they do not exist.
Before declaring this great “Unborn”, the Buddha’s description of reality was little different from the standard materialist picture that is our cultural inheritance and as painted by the “new” atheists, including their dismissal of a (puportedly) good creator deity relative to the obvious waste and suffering entailed in evolution and biological existence generally.
After declaring the Unborn, the Buddha’s former description of reality was burst asunder: because there is a transcendent realm, and this realm:
* is not causational; nor does it come into being/dissolve into non-being, as do things in the samsaric realm
* is more real than samsara, in that it changes samsaric beings, even while in samsara, into unborn, unconditioned beings
* is “here”
This last factor is crucial. The Buddha was not preaching the Unconditioned/Unborn realm or state as a future “pie in the sky” reward for meditation done well or life lived rightly. On the contrary, the Unconditioned, though transcendent, is also immanent. Like Jesus’ preaching that the Kingdom of Heaven is both celestial/transcendent, but also earthly/immanent, so too is the Buddha’s Unconditioned/Unborn both “here” and “more than here”.
Thus does the Buddha’s teaching of the Unconditioned shatter samsara’s grip, even while holding to the “solidity” of samsara’s form. Nirvana and the Unconditioned are here in the midst of samsara. The Unborn’s immanence is samsara’s defeat. The Unborn’s transcendence anchors it safely in the “realm beyond” samsara.
For Jodo Shinshu adherents, the Unborn has a name: Amida Buddha. Amida is transcendent in the Pure Land realm, but immanent in the samsaric realm. Amida sounds the Call from the Unconditioned realm, and answers it, in us, here in the conditioned realm.
When Shakyamuni Buddha became enlightened, it was only after his self-effort ceased, and transcendent “Dharma-Power” descended on him. For Shin adherents, Dharma-Power … is Other-Power … is Amida Buddha. When the Buddha became enlightened, he compared his condition to the “coolness” one feels after a fever abates. Shin adherents describe their sense of relief derived (from being “cooled” by Amida’s Other-Power) as having received “a raft from the Other Shore”.
The raft from the Other Shore is Jodo Shinshu’s metaphor for the present activity of the Uncondtioned, Unborn reality – the immanent/transcendent realm which the Buddha described in his greatest religious statement – which Shin adherents call Amida Buddha.
One of the first questions that arises when one claims an Ultimate Reality which is transcendent to the material universe is, “What does your God do?” In the West, we are accustomed to the notion of a deity who is quite active: first, God creates the universe, then proceeds to intervene more or less miraculously in creation, and to make special revelations ot, and for, select individuals and peoples. My form of panentheism has a God who “does” nothing in regard to the physical world. Amida (or the Ultimate Reality, Ground of Being, the Dharmakaya, the Tao, the Buddha-Mind, the Buddha-Nature) does a kind of salvific “work”, but that work is purely spiritual. God/Amida does not intervene, for example, in answer to prayer. And why should we have such an expectation? God/Amida is not a creator. Therefore the Ultimate Reality cannot be praised for the good in the world, or blamed for the world’s ills – for the simple reason that God is not responsible for a universe that God, in the first place, did not create. If we define God in Amidist-Shin terms, it is simply not God’s nature to create.
Not that Amida’s work is not unfolding in the universe. It’s a matter of perceiving that Amida’s work is “in” but not “of” the world. It has worldly effects, but that is because the work takes place within the sentient beings who are themselves, at least temporarily, part of the material universe. God’s “workshop” is “located” within the heart of sentient beings, in their spiritual subjectivity. As Meister Eckhart used to say, “God is known in the soul”, and so neither God nor the soul are properties of matter. Sometimes matter can be used as a symbol of divinity – e.g., the stereotyped pictures of sunsets, of rays of light streaming through clouds, any number of images of natural beauty, etc., are commonly used as “God-signs”. Sometimes matter can symbolically convey the idea of divinity, in the sense that the Psalmist sang, “The heavens and the earth are full of the glory of the Lord”. The universe can “stand in” for God, but unlike the pantheistic view, the world is not itself God.
Since God/Amida’s activity does not concern bodies, but the spirit, it is the realm of spirit to which we must look in order to see the nature of the divine work. God changes souls, not bodies – or minds, either – if by “mind” we think of our standard mentality.
The earliest Christian claim of spiritual transformation involves metanoia. Commonly translated as “repentance”, metanoia’s actual meaning can be found in the Greek of the word itself: meta means “beyond”; noia derives from nuous,” the mind”. The original Hebrew term means “to return to one’s source in the sacred”. Hence spiritual transformation involves going beyond one’s mind (or at least one’s current attitude and perception of things), by returning to one’s living roots in the divine. This applies generally to the transformative core of most religions.
For salvation, our current mind must be transcended. Usually this transcendence turns out to be so utterly “beyond” - so transcendent of normative definitions of “mind” – that sages have frequently said, “Enlightenment is not a state of mind”. And this is the core of what God, Amida, Ultimate Reality “does”, i.e., “It” sees to the final salvation of beings – not worlds or bodies or societies, but rather the spiritual essence of sentient beings. In Shin Buddhism, “Amida saves” in a quite different way than any other salvific figure “saves”.
Amida’s salvific gift is not defined by, nor dependent upon (say), an atoning death by torture; a fulfillment of prophecy, a revealed law, code, or sacred book; membership in a “chosen” or “elect” group; believing “one, true and only” dogmas; a rigidly demanding rule of behavior; prayer; avoidance or forgiveness of sins, whether venial or mortal; an apocalyptic gathering up of the faithful; a sacramental system; a set of rituals; a sacrificial system; devotion to a God or gods (recall that Amida is not God by any Abrahamic definition; thus even devotion to Amida is not salvific); and finally – and this is crucial – by any human act, including the act of faith itself. This last point is essential to understanding the non-intervening God’s “action” as regards salvation.
Shin/Jodo Shinshu holds that humankind, especially modern humanity, is utterly degraded and incapable of salvation by any act whatsoever. This differs from Christian salvation theory which holds that humanity is depraved due to sin, and/or has an inherited “sin nature”. In Buddhism, at least in its Mahayanist expressions – including Shin – the basic human problem is not sin, but ignorance. Not ignorance of factual or even moral matters, but ignorance of one’s own Buddha Nature. This state of ignorance is not ascribed to sin or to sin’s consequences. Rather, it is the normal state of the ego estranged from knowledge of, and actively living, the Dharma. Thus, transformative religion aims to transcend the ego and its “mind”. This is Amida’s role. Sentient beings’ egos are transformed not (as in most other forms of Buddhism) by self-effort (meditation, contemplation, visualization, etc.).
These venerable methods Shin calls “the difficult Path” or “the Path of the Sages”. For Shin, however, most human beings are no longer capable of attaining salvation or Enlightenment through self-power. For Shin, salvation and Enlightenment are the utterly free gift of Amida Buddha. Amida’s action is pure tiriki, or “Other Power”. It cannot be earned, strived for, attained, prayed for, or grasped. It can only be received. Paradoxically, we have already received it. But Shin consists in offering to sentient beings the conscious discovery of Amida’s grace, followed by the conscious expression of joy and gratitude that is the natural consequence of that discovery. This is a Buddhistic parallel to the conclusion reached by the controversial evangelist Rob Bell in his book, Love Wins. By doing away with the traditional Christian concept of Hell, Rob Bell embraces universal salvation in a manner quite similar to that of Shin Buddhism.
So the second question in relation to the God who “does” nothing is, “Well, then – what do we do?” Although Shin holds that there is absolutely nothing that we can do toward our salvation and Enlightenment, there are some things that we can do that flow naturally from our experience of Amida’s grace. Some of these are:
Deep Listening: we “hear” the Dharma and the Buddhist texts more deeply than ever; and as recipients of the knowledge of Amida Buddha, we now hear them in the light of Amida’s grace. This practice of profound listening even to “hearing” the daily sounds of human speech and environmental sounds, because as already mentioned, the world sometimes acts as a “stand-in” for divinity and thus for Shin Buddhists, as an occasional “stand in” for Amida’s own presence.
Grateful Meditation and Mindfulness: Although we have nothing salvific to attain through meditation and mindfulness, still as a practical matter, cultivating both states is physically, mentally, and spiritually healthy. We meditate to cultivate calm and mindfulness. This results in a clearer seeing and understanding of Amida’s work, of our innate depravity as well as our innate decency… and of all the other therapeutic things operative generally in Buddhist meditation, including the ego’s problematic nature. The only difference is that we do not meditate to attain salvation or Enlightenment – for the simple reason that Amida is already dominant in those areas.
Recitation of the Nembutsu: this is the recitation of the words, orally or mentally: “Namu Amida Butsu”. The phrase compacts several meanings which express that the devotee is approaching Amida from his/her ignorant, degraded human side; it acknowledges that even the grace to voice the Nembutsu is supplied by Amida, from Amida’s “side”; and that the devotee is gratefully acknowledging the reception of Amida’s grace as it unfolds within the devotee.
The Nembutsu is not a petitionary prayer. It is an expression of gratitude. Reciting it does not earn merit or grace. Nor does it save or confer Enlightenment. Only Amida does those things; all those things have already been taken care of … and all without human effort. Self-power is futile. Other-Power – expressed in Amida’s saving activity – is all-powerful. This is why it is said that the light of Amida’s grace is “Unimpeded”. Even in Christianity, “the Light” can be impeded. As John’s Gospel says, Jesus’ “light shone in the darkness, but the darkness grasped it not”. Amida’s light penetrates every corner of the cosmos wherever sentient beings are to be found. The “darkness” will grasp Amida’s Light – and thus be darkness no longer… because, ultimately, no “darkness” is sufficiently dense to prevent the dissemination of Amida’s penetrating light.
So for me, Jodo Shinshu is a workable faith, with its non-creating, non-intervening Ultimate Reality – a real but transcendent Other, whose realm of activity is the hidden workshop of the human soul. It requires no intervening, law-giving, miracle-working creator-deity. It only offers a spiritual Ultimate which acts on sentient beings from inside, which for me is more than enough, for the simple, daily experience of myself as a sentient being who is “on the inside, looking out”, but who now also experiences Amida’s subtle grace “on the inside”.
For anyone wishing to read a short, lean, wise explication of Amida and Jodo Shinshu I can highly recommend:
The Call of the Infinite, by John Paraskevopoulos. Sophia Perennis, San Rafael, California: 2009.
The other day I was explaining to a friend why I don’t believe in a Creator – although I do believe in a “god” which is Ultimate Reality. I am no philosopher (as this article will surely demonstrate), but these are my reasons, as cogently as I can put them.
I am a panentheist – not to be confused with pantheist. Pantheism sees the world as God, and/or God as the world. Panentheism, on the other hand, sees the world as existing “in” God; that is, panentheism sees God as an all-embracing Sprit, which contains everything, and in which/by which everything is contained. God is “here” (immanent) and “more than here” (transcendent). God’s existence and enfolding presence, however, do not necessarily imply that God is a Creat0r. Quite the contrary.
There are plenty of cosmological models that do not require a beginning in time for the universe; that is, the universe could always have existed. For theology, such models negate the need for a First Cause – a cause which, in most Western religious expressions, is usually personified as both a deity and a creator. This of course is not a problem, since theology then simply suggests that, in regard to the eternal universe model, there exists a creator-god who has been creating the universe for as long as the universe has been emanating from that god; the universe being a continous, eternal outpouring from the continuous creative activity of an eternal creator. If the universe is eternal, then fine – so is its creator and “his” creative activity. But not all theological models demand that God be a creator. And this, in fact, is my position.
First, it seems to me that the notion of a creator is derived from the making of artifacts by human beings, an idea I first encountered as a youth when reading Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud. My personal take on this concept is that, relatively early, human beings came to realize that they had been born into world of pre-structured “stuff”. It probably wasn’t long before this realization got entangled with the realization that human beings are also prolific producers of “stuff”, via their countless artifacts. From this resulted the natural (but possibly incorrect) deduction that the pre-formed, “given stuff” of our environment must be some type of artifact, made and shaped by an invisible, non-human agency – which, however, shared several important properties with human beings. Hence the birth of a god or gods who functioned as a creator, or perhaps, a council of creators.
One obvious flaw to this, of course, is the gradual disappearance of “the God of the gaps” in the face of our ever-growing knowledge about how “stuff” works. Gods as supernatural explanatory causes and factors have been removed from our cosmologies, with the Creator being pushed further and further back, until one can say with Julian Huxley that “operationally, God is becoming more and more to look like the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire Cat” (probably not an exact quote, but the idea is plain). My views take the idea to its final conclusion, namely, that God does not have any relation at all to the function or state of the universe – either as a creator or an intervener … and that this idea of a non-operational deity is true, conforms to the mystical core of many traditions, and goes some way toward explaining how, although God is real, we continue to suffer as we do. It addresses not only the existence, but – more importantly – the persistence of evil in a world which, after all, turns out never to have been God’s making or a result of God’s “plans”.
Before proceding, I’ll mention the terrific importance the Creator-Deity has in the thinking of Creationists and Intelligent Design theorists. Most, but not all, of these people are less convinced of the Creator’s existence from a study of how the universe works, than from a literalistic belief in the biblical account of creation. Their firm belief – that a 5,000year old, pre-scientific creation myth of one particular ancient Semitic people could actually give a factual account of cosmic/world origins – is the crushing burden with which they have saddled themselves (and which they wish to foist onto the US’s public education system). They must believe in a Creator because their sacred book – literally interpreted – says they must. Obviously, appeals to science, plausibility, and reason are mostly wasted when trying to engage with these people. Worse, let’s look at what the existence of a creator might mean.
Let’s dispense with the Creationist deity right away: Yahweh, the creator-deity of a Bronze Age tribe -and of modern fundamentalists – as described in their scriptures, has many good qualities (for example, the Prophets with their message of social responsibility) and many inexcusably bad qualities. Unfortunately, the bad qualities dominate, particularly if one chooses to believe that this often destructive, crazy, vengeful, insecure, warlike, megalomaniac, arrogant, dishonest, murdering deity really exists and is really the source of the world and of human beings. If that was really the case, then for humankind all is lost. Thankfully, there is no evidence for Yahweh’s objective existence; and even if there were, people of good will would rightfully reject this deity on moral grounds alone. So let’s dismiss Yahweh as a significant creator figure. (Naturally, I delete from this equation all of the good, decent, educated, progressive Jews and Christians – they usually understand Yahweh and his scriptures analogically and metaphorically – a far cry from the literalist, fundamentalist Creationists and ID position.)
One can only deduce any Creator’s nature from the nature of “his” creation. The Buddha called this world samsara, a “wheel of birth and death” in which suffering and loss predominate. Buddha gets no argument from me. Now: what kind of creator would create an indifferent universe, much less a universe that inflicts suffering on sentient beings? The answer is obvious. This of course does not mean that there is no creator/designer. But it does strongly imply that such a being is unconcerned with creatures to the extent that “It” must be seen as blind, unware, indifferent, hostile, or even cruel.
So my position is that, for lack of evidence, it is unlikely that a Creator exists. But, if I am wrong in this surmise, the alternative seems far worse than is the case of no Creator. A Creator who is cruel or uncaring is, from my perspective, positively worse than no Creator. And again, if I am wrong, and a Creator does exist, perhaps in one of the several forms we have become familiar with: as an ancient alien or team of aliens; a hacker or hackers working from other dimensions; a universe-creating technology (whether or not actively maintained by living beings) whose infinitely ancient purpose it is to create multitudes of worlds. It doesn’t matter. In no case are these “first” causes God, and in no case do they display the concern for the world that most religions claim for God. If they exist, they remain aloof, indifferent, hostile, or cruel. (Now, of course, a creator-god could exist, and be indifferent and cruel, but I reject this depiction because it does not conform to most God-definitions extant in theology, religions, and mystical literature.
So: I do not believe in a Creator; or - if a Creator exists – I want nothing to do with It.
And yet: I do believe in a God that is real, but Who (or Which) is not a creator or an intervener, a God by nature transcendent to the world, yet mysteriously “in” the world by reason of embracing the world in Its own divine Presence. As a devotee of the Buddhist sect of Jodo Shinshu or Shin Buddhism, I give to this transcendent entity the name “Amida Buddha”.
In Part 2 of this essay, I would like to explore Amida as Ultimate Reality, Infinite Wisdom and Compassion, and Unimpeded Light … as well as the dynamics of a “theistic” spirituality in which there is really no God, no Creator, and no intervention: certainly an oddity from the general Western perspective that thinks of religion and spirituality in Abrahamic-creatorist categories.
I have become weary and sickened by the increasingly strident Christian-bashing that has become prevalent in modern society.
It is as if secularists and other non-Christians wish, consciously or unconsciously, to create “the new Jew”, a pilloried social leper upon whom it is considered healthy, wholesome, and even dutiful to heap scorn and ostracism. My sense of respect diminishes when people whom I might otherwise admire – and those whom I grudgingly respect even while wildly diverging from their thinking – when they play the “evil Christians” card. It is really so beneath them, but paradoxically, for these mostly bright folks, their prejudices seem to be reflexive and mostly unconscious. Seems that it’s time for some reflection and consciousness-raising.
Most of us have this tendency to revile “an Other”, in the process elevating ourselves, but danger flags should start flying when the media and other expectedly responsible, rational sources typically and as a matter of course begin a program of social bashing . A fishy stench is very much in the air when this kind of thing occurs, and sensitive, conscientious noses will scent it out.
So these are my feelings:
I was raised by Christians, fed, sheltered, educated and loved by Christians. – a huge number of us can say this, so it is the height of arrogance and selective amnesia to behave as if Christians are some foreign, exotic – and evil – species whom our daughters must never marry. I myself was a Christian for some 28 years. I therefore feel that this new wave of “anti-Christianism” is as mean and nasty as it it unjustified and disturbing.
A truism must be invoked here: Christians are people. As with most other people, they live in society with more or less success, with more or less helpfulness. They are people. They ought not to be vilified or ostracised – except for anti-social behavior that would result in anyone else being marginalized. Discernment in this area is crucial, as is recognizing the huge spectrum of belief in Christianity, for example, the unbridgeable gap that exists between emergent Christianity, liturgical Christianity, “biblical”/evangelical Christianity on the one hand, and fundamentalist Christianity on the other. Only when these inter-religious differences are known and recognized can an observer make any claim to fairness and objectivity. It takes a little homework. But so does any worthwhile effort to keep a society aligned with justice.
The following is a link to an article – a Buddhist appraisal of some local Christians, written by an ordained priest of the Jodo Shinshu (“Shin”) sect:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/01/14/the-christians-i-know/
It makes beneficial reading for those who wish to be socially apt, realistic, and compassionate – that is, for those whose conscience rebels at participating in the creation of any “new Jews”, be they Christian or otherwise.
A friend of mine recently noted that any government or social policy that is not for the common good partakes in sociopathology. This principle is supported by most religions and is found in Buddhism. I’d like to briefly cite an essay that treats exactly this issue. Written in wartime, it condemns Japan’s support of war with Russia (1904-1905), especially the misuse of religion in that effort. The author also condemns the ill-use that the “haves” direct toward the “have nots”. The specific religious context is that of Jodo Shinshu or Shin Buddhism, with its centrality of Amida Buddha and its belief in Amida’s “Pure Land”, where the faithful are posthumously transformed into bodhisattvas, or “helpful Buddhas”. Aptly, the essay is entitled, My Socialism.
I do not feel that socialism is a theory, but rather a kind of practice… I think we need to reform the social system rapidly and change the social structure completely from the ground up… I consider socialism to be related much more deeply to religion than to politics. In proceeding to reform society, we have to, first of all, begin from our own spirituality.
I consider [the Pure Land] to be the place in which socialism is truly practiced. If Amida is endowed with the thirty-two [holy distinguishing] marks, the novice bodhisattvas who gather [in the Pure Land] are also endowed with the thirty-two marks… [This is how] socialism is practiced in this Land of Bliss.
We have never heard that beings in the Land of Bliss have attacked other lands. Nor have we ever heard that they have started a great war for the sake of justice. Hence I am against war. I do not feel that a person of the Land of Bliss should take part in warfare.
The essayist’s words are certainly an example of “engaged Buddhism”, concerned for the welfare of all and willing to restructure society along principles of compassion rather than wealth-accumulation, greed, and war. In words that could have been written today, the author deplores the gap between rich and poor and its accompanying sociopathology:
We live in a country where the common people in general are sacrificed for the fame, peerage and medals of one small group of people. It is a society in which the common people in general must suffer for the sake of a small number of speculators. Are not the poor treated like animals at the hands of the wealthy? There are people who cry out in hunger; there are women who sell their honor out of poverty; there are children who are soaked by the rain. Rich people and government officials find pleasure in treating them like toys, oppressing them and engaging them in hard labor…
The external stimuli being like this, our subjective faculties are replete with ambition. This is truly the world of defilement, a world of suffering, a dark night. Human nature is being slaughtered by the devil.
Yet Amida Buddha continues his call to us, and this compassion itself should prompt us toward a spiritual socialism.
Our thoughts cannot but change completely: “I will do what the Buddha wishes me to do, practise what he wishes me to practise and make the Buddha’s will my own will, I will become what the Tathagata tells me to become.” This is the time of great determination!
The only thing I wish to accomplish through my great energy and human labour is progress and community life. We labour in order to produce and we cultivate our minds so that we can attain the Way. But look at what’s happening! We cannot help but lament when we hear that religious functionaries are praying to gods and buddhas for victory. Indeed, a feeling of pity arises in my heart and I am sorry for them.
…we must proceed from the spiritual realm and completely change the social system from the ground up. I am firmly convinced that this is what socialism means.
So in Jodo Shinshu there is a blueprint for social equality based on spiritual principles of compassion and wisdom for a life (in Marcus Borg’s words) centered in Spirit rather than in culture, a challenge to beat swords into ploughshares, to make war no more, and to never again rejoice at an enemy’s destruction, principles also rooted in the bible and enjoined in such texts as:
Proverbs 22:22-23: Rob not the poor, because they are poor; neither oppress the afflicted at the city entrance: for the Lord will plead their cause, and spoil the soul of those that spoiled them.
Proverbs 24:17-18: Rejoice not when thine enemy falls,, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles, lest the Lord see it,, and it displease him…
[The My Socialism esssay written by Takagi Kenmyo, cited in Beyond Meditation: Expressions of Japanese Shin Buddhist Spirituality, ed. Michael Pye, Equinox Publishing, Oakville CT: 2011.]
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (2003), directed by Ki-Duk Kim. South Korea.
This beautifully photographed and exquisitely paced film tells the story of a young monk, raised from childhood by an older monk/priest, in a floating shrine on a mountain lake. The film relates the wisdom of the elder monk and the follies of his young disciple, who has an affair with and impregnates a woman, leaves the shrine and who, like the New Testament’s Prodigal Son, finally returns full of world-sin. His old Master tries to rehabilitate his young charge. By the film’s end, we are to understand that the young monk has finally achieved inner peace, if not Enlightenment. Unfortunately, the film’s ending - spoilers ahead – does not support any sense of lasting merit for the protagonist’s attainments.
We are introduced to the young monk as a child, one of whose major amusements is tormenting various small animals that he encounters in a waterfall-fed stone basin. In this pond, the child finds a fish, a frog, and a snake, to whom he ties stones fastened with string. The little boy giggles as he watches the creatures wriggle off and struggle with their burdens. However, while this is taking place, his Master, like a tutelary spirit, is watching the boy from a short distance. When the boy returns to the floating shrine and falls asleep for the night, the elder monk ties a heavy stone to the child’s back. The next morning, the old monk directs the boy, carrying his heavy load, back to the waterfall pond. There the boy seeks out the three animals he has wounded. The fish and the snake are dead; he finds the frog and unties the string and the stone, setting the frog free. He has begun to understand, through the imposed discipline of carrying his own stone, the suffering he has inflicted on the innocent.
The film continues, depicting the young monk’s trials and his difficult period of readjustment after returning to the shrine. At one point he is presented with a little boy – his own son, whom he must raise, as he was raised, in the floating shrine. Toward the end of the film, the young monk ties a heavy rock to himself and drags a statue of what appears to be Kwan-Yin (female Buddha of compassion) to the top of a high hill that overlooks the lake and the shrine. By taking on this discipline – imposed on him from without when a child - as an adult, the monk affirms the value of compassionate understanding, as well as his Master’s truth of vision. One might think that the film would end here on a triumphal note of a soul rescued from egoic attachment to this illusionary samsaric world. But no: the film continues on for a few minutes, a time frame in which its affirmative message is questioned, if not overturned.
The whole thrust of the film is that the young monk learns that just as he has placed senseless, tormenting burdens on animals, so too he has placed burdens on other sentient beings, including himself.
His solitary pulling the stone up the mountain carrying Kwan-Yin reiterates the stone-pulling discipline that the old monk imposed on the monk as a child. This time, it shows his own adult, mature, ultimate agreement with his Master’s principle that it is wrong to torment beings, and it symbolizes his acknowledgement of guilt. But in the film’s final minutes, the young monk’s own little boy is shown exhibiting exactly the same cruelty that his father had committed as a child so many years before. This is sickening to watch, and even worse to reflect upon.
This is what makes the film’s message unclear and the film itself a “downer”. Our young monk has spent a lifetime trying to learn compassion and the disavowal of power. Then, his own son hastens to duplicate his father’s worst behaviors. Only this time, when the son misbehaves, unlike the case of his father (who had the old monk as mentor), the little boy does not even have the advantage of his Dad following him around to monitor and correct his misbehavior.
Thus the ending scenario is even worse than its original presentation: our young monk had a guiding mentor who knew of, and corrected, his bad behavior. But, as filmed, it is clear that now the young monk’s son has no one watching out for him. This is unmistakably the meaning: had he chosen, in filming the little boy’s father-duplicating misadventures with innocent animals, the director could – as with the earlier scenario where the old monk monitors the young monk – easily have planted our young monk in the near background, the father checking up on his son. This explicit absence of adult-and/or Enlightened watchfulness and supervision in this second, final and significant scenario is glaring and can only be intentional. The director is clearly depicting the unfolding of samsara in the little boy’s life, but this time, without even a glimmer of future redemption. The viewer is unaccountably left with a feeling of “what’s the use?”
Among other things, Buddhism concerns itself with transcending the attachments and cruelties of egoic life. Spring’s final message, on the contrary, almost seems a capitulation to ego, attachment, and cruelty as eternal givens just barely, if at all, subject to human mitigation. It states that our condition of evil and ignorance – samsara – lives on, despite the hard lessons and best efforts of our young monk; despite the self-mastery of someone who has understood samsara’s illusional nature and is now raising his own little boy as a monk. Some might find this statement to simply be a pragmatic depiction of samsara’s prevalence. However, that interpretation does not make much sense in view of all that has gone before it in terms of suffering, guilt, struggle, seeking and attainment.
It is essential to realize – which the film fails to do – that the core Buddhist message is also that samsara can be depotentiated. Instead of expressing the hopeful Buddhist message that cruelty and self-power can be transcended, Spring’s climax practically rubs our nose in samsara, saying in essence: “See? Samsaric ignorance repeats itself in all generations.” At this point we may justifiably ask: So? We sat through this long movie just to hear that cliched bit of common knowledge? Then why the huge build up of expectation and hopefulness, of struggle and inner peace sought/inner peace found?
In many reviews and on many websites Spring is advertised as some kind of classic Buddhist film, but I feel that this is not the case at all. Buddha said, “I teach suffering… AND the END of suffering.” This film mostly portrays the first half of Buddha’s dictum, leaving the human condition in a perpetual state of suffering, ignorance, and cruelty, while virtually ignoring the liberating second half which concerns liberation. Buddha taught that the Dharma was for all, and was the single Law that mitigates samsara. But Spring seems to severely limit the universal thrust of Buddha’s intent by the way in which it depicts the “next generation” – in the person of the young monk’s child – as continuing on in an almost genetic line of cruelty.
“Narrow is the Way” seems to be Kim’s message – a way much narrower than the Buddha ever implied. If director Kim wants us to think that all will be well because after all the little boy is our young monk’s son and is being raised as a monk, he needs to think again. Our young monk himself was raised in a holy manner and still threw his life to the winds, even with Master-mentoring. But Spring’s final moments quite deliberately show the young monk’s child alone in the grotto, without a hint of fatherly-Masterly supervision… a dark unfolding with an even darker implication. And that is what makes this movie a downer.
In critiquing any subject, it is essential to know what one is criticising. That is, one must not attack straw men: one must critique a subject for what it is, rather than what one imagines it to be. Most fundamentalist criticisms of Buddhism usually fall into this fallacy of misidentification. The misidentification is frequently fueled by ignorance and by preconceived biases learned from particular demoninational statements and creeds. In this article I would like to refute some commonly-held misidentifications and misconceptions by which many biblical literalists attempt to condemn Buddhism.
1. True religion is based on revelation. Buddhism has no revelation and is therefore a false religion.
My first response begins with an objection to the notion of divine revelation. One’s personal revelation(s) may be invaluable to oneself, but of little use and meaning to others (unless of course revelation can somehow be a shared experience). The issue centers around the question, How can one test another’s private revelation? How do we decide between a true, valid revelation and the rantings of a hallucinating, delusional person? How can we tell a real revelation from an outright, manipulative lie? How do we know that God has revealed truth to one person, while another person is making an equally sincere claim to divine inspiration?
Moreover, in Buddhism’s favor, the Buddha taught that the experience of religious truth is open to all, not merely to selected “favorite children” of a particular deity. The experience of truth in Buddhism is not the result of accepting anyone’s revelation nor is it a consequence of belief in a set of doctrines based on a revelation. Instead, Buddhism claims that spiritual truth is based on the seeker’s own experiences, which are gained through a variety of contemplative/meditative methods. Faith is not a requirement in Buddhism. Rather, Buddhism invites the seeker to “try this”: complete the spiritual injunction, perform the meditative experiment, and share the conclusions with others who have also adequately performed these steps. Since faith is not a spiritual requirement for Buddhism, Buddhism does not depend on anyone’s belief-claims, or on anyone’s puported revelations, or on any divinely-inspired texts.
Therefore, the objection that Buddhism is a false system because it does not depend on revelation is really something of a back-handed compliment: “belief-in” has been supplanted with direct experience and hands-on testing.
2. True religion claims the reality of an Absolute and offers a means of connecting with that Absolute. Buddhism claims no Absolute and therefore is not a true religion.
This objection is simply false, and a misidentification of what Buddhism really claims. There is Buddhist Absolute, namely, the Dharma. Buddha conceived of the Dharma as a universal law, the understanding of which is the highest spiritual goal. Under this law are subsumed all other Buddhist truth claims. Moreover, especially in Mahayana Buddhism, the Absolute goes by many names and descriptions, such as the Buddha Nature, Sunyata, the Plenum-Void, the Buddha Mind, the Dharmakaya, etc.
Buddhism claims that correct action and meditation lead to direct experience of the Ultimate within oneself. Further, Buddhism claims that correct understanding and practice actually result in the observable and experiencable embodiment of the Absolute in people and therefore in the world. Like the Christian Kingdom of God, the Buddhist Absolute is “here, but more than here”, it is “within us”, and the arhats, Boddhisattvas, and Buddhas “incarnate” the Ultimate in a way not dissimilar from the way that Christianity claims that Jesus embodied God and the Spirit. Therefore the claim that Buddhism has no Absolute, and no means of reaching the Absolute, is false.
3. The Buddha was a sinful human being who left his wife and family for the sake of his own spiritual benefit, and later, his missionary career.
My main objection here is that Christianity – even fundamentalist Christianity – claims that experience of God or the Spirit is “the pearl of great price” for which many sacrifices are called for and many social expectations are overturned. Did Buddha leave his family? So did Jesus, who also said that his followers must “hate” their families, and who expanded the definition of family to include anyone who obeys God (“Who are my mother and my brothers? Those who obey God,” Jesus said… in the presence of his mother and his brothers). Did Buddha recommend celibacy? So did Jesus, who said that the highest service to God’s Kingdom is to make a eunuch of oneself. Saint Paul in an important sense echoes this sentiment when he damns marriage with the faint praise: “It is better to marry than to burn [with lust].”
Fundamentalistists who condemn Buddhist celibacy and monasticism do so without reference to their own Christian tradition’s counsels along the same lines. Here a fatal lack of self-inquiry, if not hypocrisy, raises its ugly head.
4. True religion must claim universality. However, Buddhism does not claim that it is for all people. Therefore, Buddhism is a false religion.
It is true that the Buddha limited his own experience of the Dharma to his own teaching and meditative practices, yet he never denied that the Dharma is available to all. After all, the Dharma is an absolute and would not be likely to be limited to a single human being or religious order or contemplative practice. What Buddha claimed was that the spiritual injunctions worked for him – and for his followers who successfully performed them. The experimental nature of Buddha’s injunctions can be summarized, as previously mentioned, “Try this. If ‘this’ doesn’t work, then try something else, and test your own experience against what I am teaching.”
The injunction’s experimental nature therefore makes the Buddha’s attitude relativistic toward method, but not toward the absolute Dharma underlying his – and all authentic teachers’ – methods. Therefore the objection that Buddhism’s claims are not universal is a partial truth at best, because while the methodology may be relativistic, the truth-claim is universal, just as the Dharma is universal.
5. Buddhism claims that the universe is eternal, and is therefore an atheistic system.
Simply illogical:
Atheism is the denial of God’s existence or reality, not simply the denial of a Creator-deity.
Theism is the affirmation of God’s existence or reality, not limited to statements about a Creator-deity: that depends on the religious system invoked.
Along with many “new” atheists, fundamentalists’ view of God is narrowly focused on God as a Creator. If God as a Creator is refuted or denied (they think), then God generally defined is also denied. This limited “God must be a Creator or God is unreal” view makes colorful, if grotesque, bedfellows of fundamentalists and atheists.
The problem is that “God” has many more definitions and functions than “His” narrow fundamentalistic, “biblical” consignment to the role of Creator. Granted, if God as a Creator is refuted or denied, then obviously, “God” is deleted. That is, God’s definition as a Creator is deleted. God’s other definitions and functions, however, remain untouched. Therefore, to claim that the universe is eternal, is probably to deny the existence of a Creator. But it is not to deny the existence of God.
Moreover, it should be noted that several of the interpretations and meanings applied in Buddhism to Nirvana, the state of Bodhi, Buddha Nature and Buddha Mind, etc., are actually functionally equivalent to several important (“non-Creatorist”) God-definitions in Western faith and mysticism.
That fundamentalist critics of Buddhism seem mostly unaware of these two major God-issues speaks volumes about the bias and ignorance with which they approach the subject.
6. Buddhism is negative and fatalistic because the Buddha claimed that life is suffering.
This objection is simply a result of laziness. The briefest exposure to Buddhism exhibits the fact that the Buddha said, “I teach suffering, and the end of suffering.” Fundamentalist critics’ inability or unwillingness to read the rest of the sentence beyond the comma is as baffling as it is intellectually suspect.
7. Buddhist prayer is illogical because it attempts to change fatalistic karma.
Fundamentalists may see Buddhists standing or kneeling with their malas in hand, chanting and/or reciting verses, and they come to the conclusion that Buddhists pray. This is mostly a false conclusion. Only a relatively little-educate minority of Buddhists pray to Buddha, or his manifold manifestations, as to a g0d. There is no Creator in Buddhism, so even this petitionary, supplicative form of prayer is usually a request for merit, not for miracles. It approximates the type of prayer that devotees in some Catholic countries direct to their saints.
Instead of prayer,, Buddhists practice meditation, some of which takes the outward appearance of Western, theistic prayer. But instead of attempting to engage the will of a sky-father-Creator, Buddhist meditators seek to focus their mind; to cultivate peacefulness, compassion, and calm; to better understand the teachings; and to accumulate merit, which is said to impact their karmic “debt”. Common sense dictates that a dept that can be modified, influenced, worked off or shortened cannot at the same time be termed absolute and defined fatalistically or deterministically. Therefore the claim that a belief in karma is necessarily fatalistic is false when objectively observed in its actual Buddhistic philosophy, interpretation, and practice.
8. Buddhism is a religion of despair and negativity because its highest goal is Nirvana, the extinction of the self in nothingness.
The Buddha did not describe Bodhi as a zombie-like state of living death. On the contrary, he invoked it as a living, calm, alert, witnessing kind of consciousness, a kind of still center of perception at the “hub” of the bodily/egoic/samsaric “wheel”. The Buddha taught a life centered in this non-egoic awareness.
Moreover, Jesus himself taught the death of self and described the path to godliness as a daily taking up of one’s cross. He also said that to find oneself, one must lose oneself. And, to cite New Testament scholar Marcus Borg, Jesus taught a life centered in this spiritual mode of dying-to-self - for the purpose of rooting oneself in Spirit rather than in culture (or in any other “samsaric” set of values).
So again in this case we can observe that fundamentalist objections to Buddhism are based on a combination of ignorance and a definite, sometimes glaring, lack of self-questioning.
Finally, Jesus said that we are to remove the log from our own eye before we dare to remove the speck from another’s eye. Fundamentalist condemners of Buddhism would do well to follow their Lord’s injunction.
Shinran’s Gospel of Pure Grace, by Alfred Bloom: 1965, Association for Asian Studies: Ann Arbor, Michigan: Eighth Printing, 1991.
I have many nice things to say about this classic of Shin Buddhism, and scarcely know where to begin, so I will simply discuss the book thematically, in chapter order.
Dr. Bloom sensibly begins his Prologue with a brief biography of Shinran, concentrating on Shinran’s conversion to the Pure Land sect as taught by his master Honen. This Bloom calls Shinran’s “period of discovery”:
“It symbolized the rejection of the decadent, aristocratic, confusing religion of the time… Shinran long remembered the event and in the epilogue of his work Kyogyoshinsho he stated,
‘But I…Shinran, in the year 1201, abandoned the difficult practices and took refuge in the Original Vow.’”
(I always find it heartening in studying religions to have origins pinpointed so sharply…)
Bloom next moves on to describe Shinran’s exposure to the Pure Land scriptures and to the teachings of the lineage’s great sages, “the Seven Patriarchs”, especially those disseminated by Patriarch Master T’an-luan. Concerning this teaching, which was to figure so largely in Shinran’s later re-interpretation of Honen’s theories (Blogger’s italics) Bloom writes:
“We can rephrase T’an-luan’s view to point out more clearly the fallacy he saw in the self power approach to enlightenment. The self power attitude is based essentially on a dualistic view of reality. The devotee believes that through religious practices he can build a bridge to infinity, i.e., to purify himself to the degree that he can attain unity with ultimate reality. Relying on his virtue, he may manifest arrogance and pride. Although he claims to be doing away with ego-clingings, he is actually cultivating them. The Other Power attitude is based on non-dualism. Pure Land devotees believe that they stand on, or in, infinity and whatever concrete efforts they make to reach the goal are really efforts in which infinity itself participates.”
Shin sees ultimate reality as a compassionate, providential “Other Power” that provides grace without human effort; and views the human participation in it as non-dualistic.
Borrowing G.R. Lewis’s (Sensei of Buddhist Faith Fellowship of Connecticut), Shin seen in this light might be interpreted as a form of panentheism – the universe as viewed as existing “in” the divine. Of course since Buddhism contains no deity in the Western sense, Lewis suggests the term “panenDharmism” (which could be further refined as “panenAmidism”) to describe the universal presence of Amida Buddha’s Vow and grace.
Just because this omnipresence and omni-sufficiency of Amida’s grace renders self-effort toward salvation useless, Shinran happily took up T’an-luan’s view that the self-effort theory of the “Holy Path” schools of traditional Buddhism ought to evaporate in the radiant heat of Amida Buddha’s impenetrable light.
Bloom notes that Amida’s omnipresent, life-bestowing “Name” is “never separate or apart from beings, but intertwined in their existence…as the manifestation of faith in mind, word, or deed… what is spoken of as apparently existing objectively [Amida, grace, "the divine"]… is, in reality, to be discovered within one’s consciousness.”
Because of this insight, Shinran was necessarily opposed to self-power practices, even as they occasionally survived in Pure Land schools:
“What [interested] him was the attitude of devotees who engaged in the performances of religious exercises. To him it seemed that these individuals believed that somehow they were doing a good act and that this good act was the basis of their salvation. He perceived that such persons were in error from two points of view. On the one hand they failed to take seriously the depravity of beings, and on the other hand, they did not recognize the true meaning of the need for Buddha’s assistance in attaining salvation… from this standpoint, it can readily be seen that religiously there can be no such thing as a ‘good deed.’”
Bloom summarizes:
“Within Shinran’s interpretation there are two aspects that are coordinated. On the one hand, he saw a great gulf between mortal life and the Buddha which was impossible to span from the side of beings. On the other hand, the fundamental unity that he saw between mortals and the Buddha…Shinran claimed came completely from the side of the Buddha through the gift of faith as the transfer of [Amida Buddha's] qualities of mind. In other words, it was by the Buddha’s act of compassion that one attains Buddha nature.”
This may sound familiar to Western readers, particularly Christians:
“This new way of life which grew out of Shinran’s thought has sometimes been termed ‘naturalism’ The Japanese term for it is Kono Mama, and perhaps the words of the Christian hymn, ‘Just as I am’ depict the sentiment behind the term. Because one is accepted as he is by the compassionate Buddha, one can take life just as it is, as one finds it, and in the midst of this life find the ultimate reality.”
Bloom emphasises Shinran’s insistence that salvation and participation in Amida’s pure realm is a facet of our life lived in the present world, not simply the devotee’s final goal. Shinran envisioned being embraced by Amida as supplying “entrance into the company of the truly assured” of gaining spiritual enlightenment, which is also “the stage of nonretrogression” (the stage of no longer returning into the paths of evil birth or karma). Since Amida alone saves beings, and there is nothing that beings can do to save themselves, their primary response to Amida’s grace is gratitude. It is in gratitude that saved beings pray and chant the Nembutsu or “Namu Amida Butsu“. This is Shin’s chief practice, and like all of Shin’s few practices, the Nembutsu is not a means of salvation. Rather, it is a means of expressing gratitude for salvation. Bloom notes that Shinran kept this ancient Pure Land practice, but changed its meaning from a salvation-granting “work” to an “other power” expression of gratefulness.
Additionally, the Nembutusu functions to remind those who practice it of Amida’s grace, of their participation in it now as well as in the future, and it helps them to recall, and center themselves in, the spiritual reality which is Amida. (As the New Testament scholar Marcus J. Borg has said, a major part of the spiritual life is paying attention to our relationship with God, in a similar way that we (ought to) pay attention to our other relationships. Shin Buddhism’s Nembutsu can be seen as a powerful means of “recollection” in the religious sense of the word.)
Shinran seems not to have denied spiritual “birth” and at least a modicum of helpful spiritual practice to those outside the circle of his novel “Way”: He maintained in fact that there are two such births, but that the new Way’s”third” birth is the highest and most complete. Bloom charts Shinran’s three “births” as:
1. “Birth under the twin Shal trees,” these trees being the ones under which the historical Buddha was said to have died in India. Shin regarded this traditional path of practice and spiritual destiny as a birth in a transformed state or “land”, but as only a temporary or provisional path. It has the merit of appealing to certain “striving” kinds of seekers; and it arouses their desire for enlightenment.
2. The “Incomprehensible Birth,” namely, the birth resulting from Pure Land self-power practice of Nembutsu recitation which Shinran kept but transformed into a thanksgiving to Other (Amida) Power. Shinran called this the birth in the “Palace of Doubt” (doubt in the complete power of Amida to save), or the “Embryo Palace” (embryonic because the devotee’s faith has not yet matured into the Other Power mode). Yet - since after all this birth is based nevertheless on Amida Buddha’s “Name” – Shinran grants that this birth is wonderful and mysterious – in fact it is “the incomprehensible birth.”
3. The “Most Incomprehensible Birth,” the birth resulting from absolute abandoning of self power practices wherever they exist in any-and-all forms of Buddhism, including Pure Land. Bloom explains that this mode of rebirth “refers to the entrance into the company of the truly assured in this life and birth ultimately in the True Recompense Land where Nirvana is experienced”.
To conclude this post: At 106 pages, Bloom’s book is a pithy and succinct primer of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism as well as a streamlined introduction to Shinran and his place in Japanese religion, as well as his implications for global spirituality. I experienced only two negatives in reading this publication:
1. On one page, Bloom seems to indicate that he views Amida Buddha as a mere symbol of one’s subjective process of salvation and enlightenment. Yet on other pages Bloom indicates that Amida Buddha is a real, dynamic spiritual force, if not a personality or a deity. So I am not sure just how Bloom envisions the “panendharmic” implications of Shin. In addition Bloom shows no awareness that this exact issue – whether Amida is an objective “Something” somehow working within human subjectivity or a mere symbol of a purely internal psycho-spiritual process – is a question currently being hotly debated in Shin communities. However, the book was first published in 1965, perhaps before the debate got into full swing. Perhaps editions subsequent to my 1991 copy have been updated to include the debate.
2. The edition I own has some unfortunate typos, suspect grammar and a lack of gender-sensitive language – all of which could easily be corrected in a revised edition.
I highly recommend Shinran’s Gospel of Pure Grace for all students of religion, but especially for Buddhists who may have little familiarity with Jodo Shinshu and its central teacher, Shinran Shonin.
Filed under: Jodo Shinshu, panentheism, religion, spirituality | Tags: Jodo Shinshu panentheism religion spirituality
While Buddhism generally rejects the notion of a personal creator god or gods, still its descriptions of ultimate reality do not exclude the concept of a divine or godlike Absolute, as the following citation suggests:
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Our final ignorance is to imagine that our final destiny is conceivable. All we can know is that it is a condition behond the reach of any psychophysical state still tethered to an “I”… The Buddha would venture only one affirmative characterization. “Bliss, yes bliss, my friends, is nirvana.”
Is nirvana God? When answered in the negative, this question has led to opposite conclusions… The dispute requires that we take a quick look at what the word “God” means… Defined in this sense [i.e., a personal god], nirvana is not God. The Buddha did not consider it personal because personality requires definition, which nirvana excludes it. And though he did not expressly deny creation, he clearly exempted nirvana from responsibility for it. Finally, the Buddha left no room for supernatural intervention in the natural causal processes he saw governing the world. If absence of a personal Creator-God is atheism, Budhdism is atheistic.
There is a second meaning of God, however, which (to distinguish it from the first) has been called the Godhead. The idea of personality is not part of this concept, which appears in mystical traditions throughout the world. When the Buddha declared, “There is O monks, an Unborn, neither become nor created nor formed. Were there not, there would be no deliverance from the formed, the made, the compounded,” he seemed to be speaking in this tradition. Impressed by similarities between nirvana and the Godhead, Edward Conze has compiled from Budhdist texts a series of attributes that apply to both. We are told that
Nirvana is permanent, stable, imperishable, immovable, ageless, deathless, unborn, and unbecome, that it is power, bliss and happiness, the secure refuge, the shelter, and the place of unassailable safety; that it is the real Truth and the supreme Reality; that it is the Good, the supreme goal and the one and only consummation of our life, the eternal, hidden and incomprehensible Peace.
We may conclude with Conze that nirvana is not God defined as personal creator, but that it stands sufficiently close to the concept of God as Godhead to warrant the linkage in that sense.
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(Huston Smith & Philip Novak: Buddhism: a Concise Introduction. Harper Collins: NY, 2003, pp. 53-54)
