At the weekend I was chatting with one of my friends who is from a Jodo and Shin background but spent 3 years as a Shingon monk when he was a young man before dropping out of training. During his time as a Shingon trainee he received lectures on Vasubandhu’s Yuishiki writings from a self-effacing man who used to enter the room and simply begin lecturing from the text, without the use of commentaries or notes.
Several decades later my friend’s interest in the Pure Land faith of his parents was re-awakened and he took to reading Vasubandhu again. This led him to pick up a book by Rijin Yasuda; a disciple of Soga Ryojin. Opening the jacket he saw the author’s picture and recognised the humble priest whose lectures he had attended all those years ago.
A Google search reveals various titbits about Rijin Yasuda, but I would welcome hearing any detail from those who know of his work.
I’m only going to have intermittent web access this weekend so please be patient with the comment moderation. I hope that the delay in publishing your messages won’t disrupt our discussion too much. I’m really appreciating all your thoughts.
If you haven’t already come across them do check out the lyrical blogs of nembutsu-sha Jerry Bolick, ‘Meditations from the Slow Lane‘, and zazen-sha Ben Howard ‘One Time, One Meeting‘.
Oh, and I’m trying an experiment of putting links and news in brief in the sidebar via Twitter.
I thought it was worth bumping this discussion and making it a post so as to hopefully get some input from some more of you out there:
Kyōshin: In any path we need some (?aesthetic) affinity to water our faith and give it creativity and energy. On the otherhand though there is no guarantee that such affinity indicates that the path has any value or correspondence to truth.
Jon: hi Kyoshin, i find this quite thought-provoking. given that any religious artist presumably wishes to convey the same sense of awe he sees held by his religion’s god/teacher/doctrine to the observer then where is the balance to be found between affinity and truth? when and how can we know to trust our feelings as genuinely valid and when to recognise them as grounded purely (and therefore perhaps unreliably) in an aesthetic appreciation of the religious setting?
on a related side note – i found one of the Shinto shrines i visited during my recent visit to Japan in particular to conjure this feeling of the sacred but i think this is at least in part due to the intermingling of the surrounding natural environment with the man-made. this intermingling and regard for nature as sacred space is of course, prevelent to a great degree in Shinto and is perhaps the contributing factor towards my fascination with it.
Reviewing Previous Reflections
I started thinking about this issue in detail some time ago but I am grateful to Jon for helping me think about it more. I’ve always been a bit wary about the emotional dimension of religious practice, indispensable though it is, because of growing up in Christian Evangelical circles where the emotions were deliberately stirred up via various media and the subsequent feelings interpreted as the presence of the Holy Spirit. Later, whilst a hedonistic teen, I discovered that the emotions I had felt in evangelical church services were not so different from those I felt at a rave or rock concert. This has led me in the past to make a distinction between two processes; the former representing my experience of evangelical Christian worship/prayer and the latter my experience of Shin faith meetings:
-> activity -> emotion -> interpretation (analysis)
-> analysis -> activity (sange) -> emotion
Even in Shin though the subsequently felt emotion, and how it resonates with one’s personal psychological history (and karma), has a reinforcing effect on how positively or negatively one responds to the tradition.
Emotion and Aesthetics
Jon’s mention of visiting a Shinto shrine reminded me that I happened to visit one with a Jodo Shinshu priest when I was in Japan in 2006. Whilst we were there I asked the priest how he felt when he was there and he said that he felt ‘a very pure atmosphere’ but no religious feeling. I found this fascinating as for him there was obviously a further set of criteria distinguishing an emotionally wholesome or pleasant, perhaps even ’spiritual’ feeling, from a religious one. Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to enquire about this further. However if we take the definition of religious consciousness proposed by Nishida Kitaro as being (my paraphrase) ‘where the self becomes problematic to itself’ then the distinction should become more clear. In this respect a so-called religion or teaching that does not address this problem but only answers to our emotional or intellectual craving is not actually a religion in the soteriological sense.
When and how can we know to trust our feelings as genuinely valid?
Jon’s question is one that has given pause to millions over the centuries. (The Quakers have given it a lot of attention for example, .) First I think we have to acknowledge that we can’t stand outside of the emotional and analyze it in the abstract. As Jayarava wrote perceptively a while ago;
“There is no activity of mind which is not embodied in some fashion, and no activity of the body which does not involve the mind. Cetanā is a more abstract way of referring to the function of cetas – i.e. thinking and emoting.”
Then we have to determine what we mean by truth and validity. From a mainstream Buddhist perspective I guess there are a lot of tests we can or could apply to an experience such as the Dharma Seals, The Six Supreme Qualities of Dharma, and so on. I can’t help coming back though to Shinran Shonin’s words:
with a foolish being full of blind passions, in this fleeting world- this burning house- all matters without exception are empty and false, totally without truth and sincerity. The nembutsu alone is true and real.
and:
How joyous I am, my heart and mind being rooted in the Buddha-ground of the universal Vow, and my thoughts and feelings flowing within the dharma-ocean, which is beyond comprehension! (Nishi Honganji 1997 trans.)
What a joy it is that I place my mind in the ground of the Buddha’s Universal Vow and I let my thoughts flow into the sea of the inconceivable Dharma! (Inagaki trans.)
Usually when we analyse ourselves we feel that we are standing outside looking in but we have really only split off a part of our consciousness or being. As such, to borrow Dogen’s words, one side remains in shadow. Therefore we can’t transcend the self by the self. Instead transcendence is to be found in the unification of self and other in the experience of the casting off or entrusting of the body-mind within the re-orienting context of Amida’s Vow / Bodhicitta.
Kyōshin
Jishin
Gakko
Ray
