Echoes of the Name

Things may be a bit quiet here for the next week as I have quite a bit on right now. Jishin’s computer packed in too so there’s going to be even more of a delay until he can start blogging here unfortunately.

Yesterday the weather here in the Midlands was perfect. After all the recent darkness and rain the sharp, warm sunlight worked a wondrous transfiguration on my mood and on the landscape. I found my breath taken away by the shadow patterns cast by street railings, and the intensity of colour in a Sparrowhawk’s wings as it swooped on and narrowly missed catching a small bird in my garden. The daily dance of life-and-death …

‘Reflections on Hōnen Shonin Memorial Weekend’

Usually on memorial days I just post a quotation or a few simple words of gratitude to the teacher in question. Real gratitude though is something beyond formal piety and must stem from a genuine encounter with another. In that sense I think that it can be good from time to time to reassess the legacy of our teachers. Indeed, within the cosy confines of our tradition we can easily forget what a controversial person Hōnen Shonin was and to some extent still is. To this day followers of the teachings of Nichiren criticise Honen for closing the doors to other paths (in particular the Lotus Sutra path) and denigrating the capacity of human beings to awaken [1].

In Hōnen’s thought one can identify two-strands; one spiritually introspective and one religiously political/sectarian. Regarding the latter religiously political/sectarian strand we find that he was at times unpalatably dogmatic:

“Since vocal-nembutsu was thus the one and only Buddhism, Hōnen never considered it to be some merely smooth path fit only for those lacking opportunities and perseverance. It is not surprising, then, that he writes in his “Reply to Kita-no-Mandokoro of Regent Kujo”: “When those who are ignorant of the paths to salvation say that nembutsu is an easy practice for those incapable of better ones, the ignorant are also terrible slanderers.” [This] amounts to an assertion that practices other than vocal-nembutsu are being rejected not because of their difficulty but for their utter pointlessness. Hōnen’s “Correspondence with Hokujo Masako” bespeaks an even more self righteous view: “Those who do not believe in nembutsu are those who have committed serious sins in their past lives and who will promptly return to hell.”Hōnen’s dogmatic and obsessive faith in nembutsu pushed him so far as to use that last word, which he seldom did …A maximal recommendation of nembutsu as the creative expression of a transcendental truth could have coexisted with an acceptance of other practices, but for Hōnen it necessitated a fundamental denial of the value of all other traditional pursuits of salvation.”[2]

In order to neither excuse nor embrace this dogmatism but rather understand it we must place Hōnen’s attitude in context:

“Hōnen was not only well-acquainted with the power structure of Buddhist organizations but himself experienced discrimination, being a “mere” nembutsu preacher of “mere” provincial warrior class origin … [Therefore] Hōnen’s teachings denied any importance to the traditional religious hierarchy, and moreover, rasped against the grain of the estates system that supported and permeated the feudal order. As such, his teachings were no longer a petty dogmatic quibble for the powerful, in whose eyes instead was reflected an organized insurgency. [2]

Hōnen also had various other serious objections to the socio-religious structure of the society of his day which are elaborated further in the book by the author Soho Machida quoted above. As for myself, whether or not the social-political aspect of Honen’s teaching had a positive benefit on Japanese history I will have to leave to the historians. For us in the modern day however the exclusivity of his nembutsu teaching is rather problematic in light of our religiously plural environment and our less literal-minded approach to and broader awareness of the scriptures of the Buddha-dharma. Nonetheless I hope to demonstrate that for Jōdo Shin followers, such as ourselves, the afore-mentioned introspective strand of Honen’s thought is his real legacy, and that we need not see our own path as a rejection of those of other schools but rather as based upon a personal assessment or appraisal of which path is best suited to our own nature; in other words as an existential rather than dogmatic choice.

Memorial days are about giving thanks for the transmission of the Buddhist teachings and in our tradition we have a very interesting transmission text called the Tannisho. This text is an extraordinary one because it acts like a kind of spiritual telescope that allows us to see Shinran through the eyes of Yuien, and Hōnen through the eyes of Shinran. Whilst a subtle and easily misunderstood document it is exceedingly important as it represents an oral teaching transmission that has existed within our stream of the Jōdo tradition alongside doctrinal texts such as the Senjakushu. Indeed in the records of Hōnen’s words we find the following passage:

“A man who reads about the doctrines of the Jōdō without receiving oral instruction will miss the thing really necessary to the attainment of ōjō … The main thing, then, is that we clearly distinguish between the teaching intended for the good, and that applicable to the evil like ourselves.” [3]

The latter point alludes to one of two oral teachings that Hōnen passed on and which are recorded in the Tannisho. These are respectively ‘The Evil Person as the Object of Salvation’ [chp.3] and ‘The Meaning of No Meaning’ (or Working of No Working) [chp.10]. Together these two teachings relate to the problem of intention in religious practice (see this recent post) with which Dogen, Nichiren and Shinran all went on to struggle with in the Kamakura Era.

On the former Yuien quotes Shinran as elaborating:

“Even a good person attains birth in the Pure Land, so it goes without saying that an evil person will.

Though it is so, people commonly say, “Even an evil person attains birth, so it goes without saying that a good person will.” This statement may seem well founded at first, but it runs counter to the intent of the Primal Vow, which is Other Power. This is because people who rely on doing good through their self-power fail to entrust themselves wholeheartedly to Other Power and therefore not in accord with Amida’s Primal Vow, but when they overturn the mind of self-power and entrust themselves to Other Power, they will attain birth in the true and fulfilled land.

It is impossible for us, who are possessed of blind passions, to free ourselves from birth-and-death through any practice whatever. Sorrowing at this, Amida made the Vow, the essential intent of which is the evil person’s attainment of Buddhahood. Hence, evil persons who entrust themselves to Other Power are precisely the ones who possess the true cause of birth.

Accordingly he said, “Even the good person is born in the Pure Land, so without question is the person who is evil”” [4]

And on the latter we find in Shinran’s letters:

The great teacher Hōnen said, “No-meaning is the meaning.”

“My understanding is that nothing apart from this realization is necessary for the attainment of birth into the Buddha Land.”[5]

Therefore Hōnen’s contribution to the Japanese Buddhist world of his day was to highlight that one cannot overcome the discriminating self by the calculation of that same self, but only at the point where “the nothingness of the self makes itself present in that self-awareness of [limitation or] evil, and that very nothingness becomes the locus of conversion” [6], and to show that this natural dynamic of faith-realisation forms a suitable path for people of all walks of life.

Unfortunately the persecutions that this revelation brought about led Hōnen to muster certain doctrinal and polemic defences that are not always satisfactory or convincing today. In fairness though I would argue that he was forced to write his defence on a reactive basis and could not give free flow to his spiritual creativity. Either way we are fortunate that Shinran, who stayed in exile in the countryside after being pardoned, subsequently found the time and freedom to carefully research and express the valid place of the other-power teaching within Buddhist teaching and tradition via a rather “more conciliatory and inclusive approach to the various teachings” [7].

In the end though Hōnen’s most important legacy to us is his communicating to Shinran the reality of The Natural and Non-discrimatory Working of the Dharmakaya as Compassionate Means Beyond Conception via their their deep spiritual friendship and what Fujimoto Kiyohiko calls beautifully “the Language of the Soul”. Namuamidabutsu.

Notes:
[1] For a well-researched though sectarian explanation of Nichiren’s criticisms see The Living Rissho Ankoku Ron by Rev. Ryuei Michael McCormick. I’m not well-versed in the Nichiren traditions but it seems to me that some of Nichiren’s criticisms of sectarianism are fair, some of his criticisms are based on his own personality (in that he had a more optimistic outlook on his ability to perform certain practices than Honen), and some are based on his view of the superiority of the Lotus Sūtra in terms of various classification systems that are just as historically spurious as similar systems in the Pure land tradition. It is also worth noting that Nichiren never encountered Shinran and thus his criticisms pre-date many developments within the Jōdo movement.
[2] The Exclusive Nembutsu (senju-nembutsu) as Liberation Theology - Soho Machida, Princeton University
[3] Hōnen the Buddhist Saint p.29
[4] A Study of Hōnen’s Doctrine of Evil Persons as the Object of Salvation
(akunin shoki setsu) - Fujimoto Kiyohiko, Bukkyo University, Kyoto
[5] See: Mattosho, p. 590. Translation taken from: Letters of Shinran, p.34
[6] Keiji Nishitani, Extract from Religion and Nothingness
[7] The Ultimacy of Jodo Shinshu: Shinran’s Response to Tendai - Alfred Bloom, The Pure Land Vol. New series 10-11, 1994.12, pp. 28-55
[8] See Tannisho 8

I sometimes follow the blogs of the practitioners of other Buddhist traditions not so much for their doctrinal content as to hear their experiences of participating in Dharma movements that are embedded in different cultures to their own. One such recent post comes from the blog of an SGI member called Byrd Ehlmann who writes:

“As most of my readers know, I have been practicing Nichiren Buddhism with the SGI for over 20 years. Of late, I have been reading a great deal about Japanese culture and political power systems in an attempt to “tease out” Buddhism from “Japan-ness” in my own mind.

For years, I have been taught that certain “ways of doing things” and “ways of seeing things” were “Buddhist” — I am only now waking up and realizing that they are not necessarily Buddhist, but they apparently are typically Japanese.”

Whilst the SGI-experience may not be the most representative case-study I think most long-term members of culturally ‘foreign’ religious organisations come to this kind of realisation at some point. The difficult part is how to handle that realisation. A lot of people I have observed via the web seem to wind-up getting very frustrated and sometimes this leads to a kind of racism. The reductive generalisations in a comment to Byrd’s post by someone called Barbara Pike are a good example of this. (e.g. “I don’t think that most of them [i.e. the Japanese] ever learn to cope with adult life the way that grownups in the rest of the world do.”)

In truth this isn’t only a question of Western versus Eastern culture but a much more messy and complex situation with many shades of grey. For example an interesting, though extremely sad, dispute recently arose between a Jodo-shu lay-organisation in the US and the Jodo Shu Sect due, in part, to differences in attitudes to authority between Nisei Japanese-American trustees and their visiting Japanese Ministers.

I don’t have any easy answers to these issues and they are very much context dependent. Studying Japanese culture is certainly a potentially useful thing to do. However I think we should be wary of thinking that we will then be able to neatly excise ‘cultural accretions’ from Dharma practice. The fact is that, for better or worse, what we are - including our culture - forms the vessel or instrument which the Dharma resonates within.

The way forwards seems to be to gently be ones self whilst at the same time being aware of other perspectives. Sometimes it is so easy to see something we disagree with and object on the point of abstract principle. Then we end up in a standoff of cultural mores or values rather than genuine inter-personal dialogue. On the other-hand when different parties can demonstrate and explain where they are coming from at a personal level within the context of real friendships and relationships then we tend to see more of a willingness for compromise, change or innovation. In otherwords I believe that grassroots change is always the way forwards, but I don’t necessarily mean that this need be outside of an existing framework. I suppose it depends in the end on how receptive Sangha leaders are to change.

The problem is of course that such change takes time and there are many out there who are keen to hear the Dharma now. The only Western dojo of the Shin tradition I belong to here in the UK is still too young to really analyze yet (only a little over a decade old), but looking across the Atlantic to the BCA is very interesting. Change seems to be happening but is it really grassroots change or top-down, is it motivated by falling membership or genuine outreach, and is it happening quickly enough or in the right way to reach out to people? What if anything does the formation of the North American Shin Buddhist Association (NASBA) tell us about frustrations amongst Shin followers and converts (do they have many Japanese-American members?) in the States?

I wonder what your experiences of this issue have been?