Search Results

This brief essay is an address that Suzuki gave in New York in 1955 at the installation ceremony of a large bronze statue of Shinran (1173-1262), the founder of Shin Buddhism. The statue was transported from Hiroshima where it had survived the atomic bombing of 1945. The gist of Suzuki’s message is that people should not look to the external historical Shinran but to their own inner Shinran, for the discovery of him in themselves is the discovery of their own humanity, leading ultimately to everyone’s humanity.

This chapter explores a Buddhist interpretation of the bombing: the approach of True Pure Land Buddhism (or Shin Buddhism). Hiroshima is characterized by its large population of True Pure Land adherents; approximately 80 percent of the city's residents belong to this sect. Focusing on True Pure Land priest kōji Shigenobu's interpretation of the bombing, I examine the way in which this Buddhist understanding of the bomb aids believers' attempts to understand what is otherwise an incomprehensible act of violence. Offering a basic understanding of the school's founder Shinran's thoughts, I argue that embracing critical self-reflection in this school assuaged the inclination toward retaliation. Recognition of one's helplessness and complete entrustment of oneself to Amida Buddha also calls into question the very concept of moral accountability in case of human-made tragedy, as this gives rise to a critical question in discussing the actual Japanese atrocities, such as Unit 731, Comfort Women, Nanjing Massacres, and so on. The discussion in this section will frame the examination of moral accountability in the last chapter.

During the Kamakura period and beyond, deathbed practices spread to new social groups. The ideal of mindful death was accommodated to warriors heading for the battlefield and was incorporated into war tales. It was reinterpreted in emergent Zen communities by such figures as Enni, Soseki, and Koken Shiren; within the exclusive nenbutsu movements, by Hōnen, Shinran, Shinkyō, and others; and by Shingon adepts such as Kakukai, Dōhan, Chidō, and others who advocated simplified forms of A-syllable contemplation (ajikan) as a deathbed practice naturally according with innate enlightenment. Amid the thriving print culture of early modern times, new ōjōden and instructions for deathbed practice were compiled and published. These often show a pronounced sectarian orientation, reflecting Buddhist temple organization under Tokugawa rule; they also reveal much about contemporaneous funeral practices. Deathbed practices declined markedly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a casualty of modernity and changing afterlife conceptions.

This is Suzuki’s longest essay on Shin Buddhism, the Pure Land tradition going back to the religious figure Shinran (1173-1262). It elucidates a variety of themes found in Pure Land and Shin Buddhism: Amida Buddha’s original vows, self-power (jiriki) and other-power (tariki), karma, sin, nembutsu, faith, and the Pure Land paradise. Suzuki presents faith as a state of passivity in which one is embraced by Amida Buddha and his mysterious other-power. Suzuki also argues strongly that Shin Buddhism should not be compared to Christianity despite the tendency to do so.

This essay is a collection of excerpts from Suzuki’s book Japanese Spirituality (Nihon teki reisei). In it he tries to define the essential nature of religious awareness in Japan and explicates examples from Japan’s religious traditions, especially Pure Land Buddhism. He describes this awareness as reisei, tentatively translated as spirituality, and defines it as a state in which conflicting entities are experienced as one, even while retaining their own identity. Suzuki claims that Zen and Pure Land, especially Shin Buddhism, exemplify reisei the best among Japanese traditions.

Polemical accounts suggest that the Western Paradise has traditionally been imagined as a strictly transcendent pocket universe, having no relation to this world. But medieval Pure Land believers sought the Pure Land in this world in a variety of ways, mapping it onto the landscape around them in order to rehearse the event of birth. Hōnen’s understanding of the Pure Land amplifies its supernatural character as a site within which the laws governing the real world do not apply. Shinran’s identification of himself as neither monk nor layman further knits together estrangement from the real world and birth in the Pure Land. Rennyo takes Shinran’s self-identification seriously, attempting to build a community based on the principle of mutual equality and organized according to seniority, reflecting the utopian values of the Warring States period. “Traditional” Pure Land does not begin to emerge until the early modern period.

Following the untimely death in prison of Kyoto School philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, his unfinished essay on Shinran was assembled for publication, serving as a kind of final testament. Early in his career, Miki had come into conflict with other Japanese Marxists over his contention that religion could play a positive role in the proletarian revolution. The Shinran essay picks up on this possibility, framing the Pure Land Buddhist view of the Dharma ages in terms of the historical dialectic. According to Miki, Shinran (like Marx) discerned that the trajectory of history points toward the establishment of a truly human society, or a buddha land built upon the earth, in which the full exercise of individual human capacity will be possible for the first time. Miki’s utopianism is complicated by his role in articulating a vision of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, relying on some of the same logic we see in the Shinran essay.

Historian Ienaga Saburō turned to religion in search of a way to resist the ultranationalism of his day. He discovered in Japanese Buddhism what he termed a logic of negation, first articulated by Shōtoku Taishi and eventually made thoroughgoing in the religion of Shinran. He understood this logic of negation as informing both retreat from society and confrontation with society. Ienaga continued to explore this logic of negation after the war, criticizing mainstream Buddhism for its accommodation of state interests but praising some Buddhist activists and reformers for carrying into the present what Ienaga considered to be Shinran’s legacy. The logic of negation also informed Ienaga’s own stance toward the state, as he entered into a decades long confrontation with the Ministry of Education over textbook censorship. Ienaga’s postwar career models the kind of critical utopianism that his contemporary Theodore Adorno called for in the aftermath of the war.

This chapter investigates the ways in which some Issei ministers construed Shinran’s teaching by borrowing concepts from Christianity, incorporating other Buddhist schools’ practices, and studying modern democracy. It presents the accounts of Takeichi Takahashi, Itsuzō Kyōgoku and Bishop Emyō Imamura—all of which interpreted Shin doctrine in a new light, through a pragmatic mode of thinking. The hermeneutics developed by Takahashi and Kyōgoku differ, as the former represents the Americanization of doctrine, while the latter exposes its Japanization. Kyōgoku, on the other hand, expanded Kiyozawa’s theory of self-exhaustion and attempted to bridge the gap between the concepts of self-power (jiriki) and other-power (tariki).

This introductory chapter provides a brief historical background of the Shin Buddhist tradition. It pinpoints two Buddhist leaders who advocated an exclusive reliance on the celestial buddha Amida for birth in his Pure Land at the beginning of the Kamakura period (1185–1333)—during a time of dramatic political, social, and religious change. These figures are Hōnen (1133–1212), the patriarch of the Jōdoshū or Pure Land Sect, and his disciple Shinran (1173–1262), who came to be regarded as the originator of the Jōdo Shinshū or True Pure Land Sect, or Shin Buddhism as it is often called in modern scholarship. This chapter also introduces Yasuda Rijin (1900–1982), a modern Shin Buddhist thinker whose work involved a “demythologizing” of the popular understanding of Shin Buddhism.

This chapter explores the 1972 essay, “Fundamental Vow, Fundamental Word.” This essay brings together many of the themes that Yasuda had lectured and written about for decades—the deep connection between the Tathāgata and sentient beings, the centrality of practice, the true land, and so on. In discussing these themes, however, he places them in a new context and, by doing so, he is able to develop his points in new ways and tease out fresh meanings. His focus in this essay thus are the eight vows that provide the framework of Shinran's Kyōgyōshinshō and that are mentioned, with one exception, as the hyōkyo, the “extolled” or featured vow or vows at the beginning of each chapter.

This epilogue highlights some of the implications of the book's findings for our understanding of Shin Buddhism and secrecy in religion. It does this by clarifying the questions that the book has answered in part and by raising questions that remain unanswered. First, it considers the things that unite and divide Shin Buddhists, from the reading of writings by Shinran and Rennyo as scripture to the emphasis on lay religious life, the centrality of Amida and devotion to him, and the shinjin. The discussion then turns to how different social contexts lead to different consequences of secrecy, what powers secrecy has, and how esotericism and social secrecy relate to one another. The Gosho and the initiation rites in Urahōmon are cited as good examples of how esoteric and social secrecy can have a symbiotic relationship.

This chapter discusses Shinran's concept of compassion and compares it with Dōgen's compassion. For Shinran, compassion is the image of the absolute being. The compassion that he teaches is a great love that “cannot belong to humans.” His emphasis was not on the relationship of person to person but rather the relationship of people to love itself. The chapter also considers the distinction between the karma that controls humans and the humans that are controlled by karma; Shinran's preaching about Amida Buddha's compassion toward human beings; and Shinran's views about evil. Finally, it explains Dōgen's idea of “seeking the truth for the truth's sake,” along with his claim that body–mind must be abandoned for the sake of the Dharma, how his compassion handles the problem of evil, and what he has to say about “filial piety.”

This section provides an overview of the Pure Land tradition and discusses its philosophical significance. Pure Land Buddhism was formulated in China in the sixth and seventh centuries, based on Indian scriptures that were interpreted according to indigenous Chinese thinking. Today, the name “Pure Land” is used to refer to either a line of Buddhist thinking or a cluster of Buddhist institutions. Buddhist practitioners can create a “sacred space” within their own mind when they attain the most advanced forms of meditation; when they dwell in that state of mind, they are similarly “dwelling in a pure land.” This section also presents translations of a variety of texts by Japanese philosophers from the Pure Land tradition, including Hōnen, Shinran, Kiyozawa Manshi, Soga Ryōjin, and Yasuda Rijin.