1 Introduction

Gutoku Shinran 愚禿親鸞 (1173–1263) maintains his status today as one of the most consequential religious thinkers in Japanese history. The tradition stemming from his thought and teaching activity, Shin Buddhism (J. Jōdo Shinshū 浄土真宗), has been a significant force in Japanese society since the fifteenth century and remains one of the largest Buddhist movements in the world at present, with over twenty thousand temples in Japan and a century-old institutional presence in North America. His writings have been studied in a commentarial tradition going back to his early descendants in the fourteenth century, burgeoning during the Edo period, and continuing in recent times with prominent nonsectarian philosophers such as NISHIDA Kitarō西田幾多郎(1870–1945), SUZUKI Daisetsu 鈴木大拙 (1870–1966), TANABE Hajime 田辺元 (1885–1962), MIKI Kiyoshi 三木清 (1897–1945), and NISHITANI Keiji 西谷啓治 (1900–1990).

Nevertheless, outside of Japan, Shinran’s Buddhist tradition has long received disproportionately little attention, and most academic interest in Shin Buddhism continues to be confined to historical, sociological, or cultural studies.Footnote 1 There appear to be two general reasons for this marginalization. The basic cause is the lingering assumption, vigorously asserted in the nineteenth century by Christian missionaries in Japan, that Shin is not only geographically and temporally removed from “original” or “authentic” Buddhism but removed fundamentally in philosophical outlook and soteriology.Footnote 2 Some researchers continue to regard Buddhism as having undergone a sea-change in the Japanese Pure Land tradition, so that it came to be wholly based on simple faith rather than practice.Footnote 3 Further, the degree of Shin’s supposed removal from the mainstream of Mahāyāna Buddhism is considered evident in the number of striking similarities it possesses to Protestant Christian tradition in both doctrine (the checklist of Karl Barth 1886–1968 is illuminatingFootnote 4) and in social manifestation (critical spirit, focus on laity, married priesthood). In short, Shinran’s teaching has largely been deemed a reductive adaptation of Buddhist symbols and practices to the religious needs of the medieval Japanese peasantry. Further, it is often assumed that, through some accident of history or circumstance, Pure Land beliefs in Japan came to resemble Christian Protestantism.Footnote 5

This view leads to the second cause, one that concerns the reading of Shinran’s works. Ostensibly his writings provide a rich and reliable resource for the study of his thought. There is a substantial body of works from his own hand, including systematic expositions, commentarial tracts, hymns, and letters, as well as a record of his spoken words, almost all of which were intended to communicate his Buddhist thought in doctrinal terms. Textual problems and questions of authenticity are relatively few, and a number of his works, including his major writing, Passages Revealing the True Teaching, Practice, and Realization of the Pure Land Way (J. Ken jōdo shinjitsu kyōgyōshō monrui 顕浄土真実教行証文類), survive in autograph manuscripts. One might add that a complete English translation of all Shinran’s doctrinal writings has been available for more than a decade (The Collected Works of Shinran [Shinran 1997, hereafter CWS]). A persistent problem has been, however, that the imposition on Shinran’s Buddhism of a common notion of faith as simple creedal assent not only impedes a serious engagement with him as a religious thinker but further leads to distortive readings of his works by masking their actual character.

Shinran’s concern in his writings is less to impart doctrinally validated teachings or methods of proper conduct than to articulate and enable a fundamental transformation of awareness. This is because it is precisely such an “overturning” of ordinary awareness and entry into a transformed mode of existence that signals the authentic encounter with enlightening activity that lies at the core of his Buddhist thought. His focal issues are, therefore, the nature of a person’s interaction with the Pure Land path and the distinction between provisional and genuine modes of engagement. He recognizes that it is usual for persons initially encountering Pure Land teachings to seek a coherent intellectual understanding of the doctrines from the perspective of the conventional self and to pursue means to assimilate the advantages of the path into their ongoing lives. Shinran, however, views such efforts as a continued assertion of the false discrimination and self-attachment that propel ordinary human life in anxious and painful existence. Thus, he seeks in his writings to precipitate a shift in apprehension that leads to authentic engagement with, and indeed itself arises from, the working of the Pure Land path. In other words, Shinran views the distinctive accessibility and effectiveness of Pure Land Buddhism as rooted in its transformative functioning within the realm of mundane, illusive thought and language.

In this article, therefore, I will focus on aspects of reading Shinran, first taking up the overarching issues of Mahāyāna and Pure Land Buddhist thought that contextualize the basic problems in doctrinal understanding he feels compelled to address in his own writings.Footnote 6 I will then go on to consider the character of his methods of composition in formulating and communicating his own religious awareness. I will close by highlighting several of the major philosophically relevant themes and issues in his thought.

2 Part One: The Context of Shinran’s Thought

Buddhist texts may be said to treat two fundamental questions: the nature of the goal of the Buddhist path and the means by which it may be reached. The Japanese Pure Land tradition takes as its basis the compassionate action of Amida, Buddha of Immeasurable Life, who is taught in the Larger Sūtra of Immeasurable Life (S. Sukhāvatīvyūha, J. Daimuryōjukyō 大量寿経) to have established and fulfilled vows to bring all beings to awakening. The central eighteenth vow states: “If, when I attain Buddhahood, the sentient beings of the ten quarters, entrusting themselves with sincere mind, aspiring to be born in my land, and saying my name perhaps even ten times, should not be born there, may I not attain the supreme enlightenment” (CWS 1: 80, adapted). Regarding this tradition, therefore, it is often assumed that the answers concerning these two basis issues are uncomplicated: the aim is birth, upon death in this world, into a golden paradise (the buddha-field of Amida Buddha named Utmost Bliss and described in Pure Land sutras), and the method of attainment lies in reciting the formula known as the nenbutsu or “Name” (J. myōgō 名号) of Amida Buddha – “namu-amida-butsu” as recommended by the Sūtra of Contemplation on Immeasurable Life Buddha (J. Kanmuryōjukyō 観無量寿経) – firmly believing in his vow to save all beings who do so.

In the case of Shinran, both of these understandings are inadequate and easily become obstructions to a straightforward reading of his writings. The objective in Shinran is not an afterlife in Buddhist paradise, and the way is not recitation of Amida’s name while holding firm faith. To grasp the answers Shinran provides, we must bear in mind that his thought is rooted in two interrelated motifs that lie at the heart of the Mahāyāna Buddhist path: a thoroughgoing rejection of flawed or deficient notions of religious attainment and a searching, self-reflective stance critical of the least trace of ego-attachment, particularly in engagement with the path. Thus, I will begin here by sketching fundamental Mahāyāna Buddhist themes that anchor and find expression in Shinran’s efforts to treat the basic topics of the Pure Land path and that inform his project in his works.

2.1 The Goal of the Pure Land Path: The Stage of Nonretrogression

Shinran explicitly and repeatedly locates the pivotal center of the Pure Land path not with reaching a world of the afterlife but in the attainment termed, in Mahāyāna Buddhist delineations of the bodhisattva path, “the stage of nonretrogression” (S. avinivartanīya, avaivartika, J. futaiten 不退転), which is often identified with the first of the final ten stages of bodhisattvahood leading to perfect enlightenment. In this, he stands squarely within mainstream Mahāyāna Pure Land thought and reflects its primary concerns. For Pure Land practitioners, as Buddhists, the ultimate aspiration is, of course, for supreme awakening, but the crucial significance of the Pure Land path, in its origins and for Shinran, is as a viable avenue to attain nonretrogression.

According to general Mahāyāna thought, bodhisattva aspirants, in the course of their praxis, repeatedly enter into increasingly profound meditative states before surfacing again into the world of ongoing physical existence. If they advance successfully in their immensely long and strenuous endeavor, however, at some point they break through false discriminative thinking in deep meditation and attain or “touch” “suchness” (S. tathatā, J. shinnyo 真如) or “emptiness” (S. śunyatā, J. kū 空) for the first time. According to Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250), the first great systematizer of the teachings expounded in the Mahāyāna sūtras, when persons at last reach this stage of true reality, “They see the dharma, enter the dharma, attain the dharma, and abide in the firm dharma, from which they can never be moved, and thus they ultimately reach nirvāṇa”Footnote 7 (Nāgārjuna, quoted in CWS 1: 19). Although they again emerge from deep samādhi to carry on their karmic, bodily lives in the world of speech and discriminative perception, and although they must continue to perform the bodhisattva practices in order finally to sever the extensive roots of their afflicting passions and progress through the remaining nine stages of the path, with the realization of wisdom attained in the first stage, a decisive change has taken place. Prior to this attainment, they face the constant danger of lapsing into negligence or despair, or of descending into the eternal repose of a self-indulgent nirvāṇa of merely individual release. Nāgārjuna calls this latter the “death of the bodhisattva.” Genuine practitioners must exert themselves with unremitting vigilance and many times the energy of those who seek merely their own salvation, if they are to perfect true wisdom-compassion and ferry all other beings to enlightenment before themselves. Once bodhisattvas have transcended the reification of self and other and attained suchness, their practice will, henceforth, unfailingly proceed toward their full awakening of buddhahood, and they will never falter or regress to their former state of ignorance.

2.2 Remoteness from the World of Awakening

Within the tradition, the primary impetus for the Pure Land path is seen to lie in an acute awareness of distance or separation: growing historical severance from the time of Gautama Buddha; physical separation from the world in which he appeared and gave direct guidance to disciples who revered him; and, above all, personal remoteness from the profound awakening in which he found liberation from the bondage of afflicting passions and saṃsāric existence. Nāgārjuna states that among bodhisattva practitioners are some who are obstructed in their practice by adverse conditions in the world – strife, disease, rampant avariciousness, and above all, the absence of the support they would find in the presence and instruction of an awakened one. The Pure Land path arose out of the quest for a way that the gaping abyss might be overcome, not by replacing or circumventing the bodhisattva path, but by enabling its genuine practice. Moreover, it arises out of a fundamental inversion of perspective, so that the agency of the practitioners is contextualized by the activity of the enlightened wisdom-compassion that they seek to manifest.

For practitioners in circumstances hostile to their endeavor, Nāgārjuna raises the question of whether there might be a simpler, quicker path to the basic goal of nonretrogression. He declares that there are indeed various kinds of paths, and he recommends calling the names of the buddhas and bodhisattvas who fill the cosmos as an effective and speedy method to bring one to the threshold of authentic bodhisattvahood. Thus, the path of “easy” or accessible practice resulting in attainment of nonretrogression is to “think on the buddhas (J. nenbutsu 念仏) of the ten quarters and say their names in praise” (T 26.1521.65c-17-71c04).Footnote 8 For Nāgārjuna, this nenbutsu is a comprehensive practice involving all three modes of human activity – physical action, speech, and thought. One performs deep prostrations in worship as one utters the name of the buddha or bodhisattva, and with focused mind one contemplates the virtues of each buddha and buddha-field one by one. Through this practice, one gains the aid of the buddhas and will be enabled to be born into a buddha’s sphere of enlightened activity at the time of death. There, one will have the instruction and encouragement of the buddha and other beings in that field, so that one will be able to carry on the bodhisattva practices unimpeded and ultimately reach fulfillment.

Here, we see the Pure Land path’s fundamental significance as a means to the relatively swift attainment of nonretrogression. Although Nāgārjuna does not restrict such practice solely to Amida’s name, he singles out Amida Buddha and his vows as the prime example of the practice he recommends. In Amida’s vows, attainment of nonretrogression is taught to occur along with birth into the Pure Land. Persons born into Amida’s buddha-field never fall back again into saṃsāric existence. In the supportive environment of the Land of Bliss, surrounded by other bodhisattvas and guided by Amida, they will fulfill the practices for perfect enlightenment and carry on the work for the enlightenment of all beings.

During the Heian (784–1185) and Kamakura (1185–1333) eras, Japanese Pure Land Buddhists, building on doctrinal developments in China, elaborated popularly influential images of Amida’s golden Pure Land in written works such as Essentials for Birth (J. Ōjōyōshū 往生要集 [Genshin 1973]) by Genshin 源信 (942–1017), in chapel and garden architecture such as in the Byōdōin temple, and in pictorial art such as the Taima mandala tapestry, which illustrates scenes and descriptions of the Pure Land from the Sūtra of Contemplation on Immeasurable Life Buddha. Achieving ten utterances of the nenbutsu in a person’s final moments in this world in order to neutralize past evil and bring about Amida Buddha’s reception of the person into the hereafter became a widespread concern. As we will see below, Shinran’s contribution to Pure Land Buddhist thought turns, in large part, on rejecting notions of the Pure Land as an object of otherworldly aspiration and returning the tradition to its fundamental Mahāyāna Buddhist orientation and its original concerns with the goal of attaining non-retrogression. Moreover, Shinran probed the manner by which this attainment came to realization, again drawing deeply on Mahāyāna modes of thought.

2.3 Active Enlightenment: Hōnen’s Revolutionary Recasting of Practice

It was Hōnen 法然, also Genkū 源空, (1133–1212) who achieved perhaps the most radical doctrinal innovation of the formative period in Japanese Buddhist history. By establishing the practice of vocal nenbutsu – the utterance of “namu-amida-butsu” – as an effective, self-sufficient path of Buddhist praxis, he paved the way for similar developments resulting in other new schools. Thus, Hōnen is recognized as the first, and perhaps most revolutionary, “founder” of a native Japanese Buddhist tradition.

Nenbutsu practices in early Buddhist tradition centered on mindfulness exercises conducted in veneration of Śākyamuni Buddha and probably included elements of bodily worship and contemplative mindfulness focused by repetition of epithets for the Buddha. Later, the nenbutsu developed into a basic practice of monastics involving ritual prostrations with the body, contemplation on the features of enlightened beings and vocal recitation of their names, conducted with long lists of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Such nenbutsu practice was, and remains, an indispensable activity in the Tendai monastery of Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei, where Hōnen originally trained and lived. In addition, the Chinese Tientai practice of “constant walking samādhi” (J. jōgyō zammai 常行三昧), in which a monk circumambulates a large statue of Amida, intoning the nenbutsu and meditating on Amida Buddha and features of the Pure Land continuously for ninety days, had been transmitted to Mount Hiei during the Heian period. Moreover, the group practice of “constant nenbutsu” (J. fudan nenbutsu 不断念仏), in which the nenbutsu was chanted continuously for seven days, interspersed with the chanting of sūtra passages and hymns at the “six hours” of the day, was frequently conducted. Although deeply familiar with such comprehensive modes of practice, embracing physical, mental, and verbal discipline, Hōnen taught that simply uttering the Name of Amida Buddha, “namu-amida-butsu 南無阿弥陀仏,” and entrusting oneself to his vow to save all beings, would result in birth into Amida’s buddha-field of enlightened activity, known as the Pure Land (J. jōdo 浄土). No intellectual command of Buddhist teachings, accumulation of merit, moral rectitude, or any act of practice other than the vocal nenbutsu is necessary.

Further, according to Hōnen’s interpretation of the teachings, Amida’s Pure Land offers an ideal environment for fulfilling the bodhisattva practices necessary for realizing Buddhahood. Thus, once born there, eventual attainment of Buddhahood becomes fully settled. The Pure Land Buddhist path based on the working of Amida’s Vow is therefore an effective means toward Buddhahood – for Hōnen, the only viable way for people at present, given the long absence of an enlightened guide like Gautama Buddha and the increasingly defiled state of human existence in the world – and it can be practiced independently of any other Buddhist teaching or method of praxis. While traditionally the nenbutsu practice involved mental concentration and the accumulation of numerous recitations, Hōnen taught that in the Pure Land path only the simple saying of “namu-amida-butsu” with complete trust was involved. There was no specified manner of utterance, no necessity for any accompanying ritual or meditative endeavor, and no stipulation of the length of the period of practice or number of repetitions.

The question, of course, is why mere vocalization of Amida’s Name should hold the power to bring about birth into a buddha-field and eventual enlightenment. Even through extraordinary achievements of learning, meditative practice, sustained discipline, and compassionate action, such attainment is virtually impossible to accomplish. Without an adequate demonstration that vocal nenbutsu in itself held such power, Pure Land praxis would remain a supplementary discipline within the existing schools of Buddhist tradition, one supportive practice to be performed in combination with a range of other methods.

Hōnen promulgated his teaching by adopting an innovative perspective on the nature of the practices taught in Buddhist tradition. He reasoned that, although the utterance of the Buddha’s name had long been transmitted in various Buddhist schools as one among different kinds of practice useful for attaining enlightenment, the vocal nenbutsu designated in Amida’s vow as the act leading to birth into the Pure Land was qualitatively distinct from the other techniques found in the Buddhist teachings. While the physical act of voicing the Name of Amida in itself might be identical, in other forms of Buddhism it was performed in conjunction with various other practices, including the awakening of the aspiration for enlightenment (S. bodhicitta, J. bodaishin 菩提心) and the selfless transference of merits, and like other practices, its fulfillment as praxis genuinely leading toward Buddhahood turned on the practitioner’s own purity of motive and powers of concentration and discipline.

The nenbutsu taught in Amida’s vow, however, as the simple voicing of “namu-amida-butsu” accessible to all beings, regardless of their moral qualities or spiritual capacities, was specifically selected by Amida Buddha as the means by which he could bring to fruition his compassionate vow to liberate all living things from saṃsāric existence. In other words, Amida, through his vow and the salvific virtue of his own already completed performance of endless aeons of bodhisattva practices, established the saying of the Name as the medium by which his own compassionate working could actively reach each being. Thus, the nenbutsu has been prepared as effective practice – already fulfilled by Amida as the act resulting in birth in the Pure Land – and given to beings as the cause of their attainment. Salvific activity is particularly appropriate in the present age, when the accomplishment of praxis as ordinarily understood in Buddhist tradition has receded beyond the reach of beings. Anticipating this situation, Amida’s vow teaches that one should relinquish the illusions and attachments focused on the self and its capacities and set aside the extensive body of traditional methods of praxis as no longer effective, since they require a purity of performance no longer achievable. The Pure Land tradition characterizes such practices as “self power” (J. jiriki 自力) and instead advocates saying the nenbutsu as the act that embodies “Other Power” (J. tariki 他力), Amida Buddha’s wisdom-compassion functioning in the world from beyond the ego-self and its calculations.

Hōnen’s historical role relates to our concerns here because of the means by which he effected his ground-breaking contribution to Buddhist tradition and his legacy as inherited by his disciples. Based on his principle of “the nenbutsu selected in Amida’s primal vow” (J. senjaku hongan nenbutsu 選択本願念仏) that embodies the Buddha’s Other Power, he established the Pure Land school (J. Jōdoshū 浄土宗) as a valid Buddhist path, effective in itself and independent from the traditionally recognized schools that had been transmitted to Japan from the Asian continent over the preceding centuries. Hōnen set about to accomplish this in his major writing, Collection on the Nenbutsu Selected in the Primal Vow (J. Senjaku hongan nenbutsu-shū選択本願念仏集 [Hōnen 1998]), composed in kanbun (classical Chinese) and addressed to an audience versed in Buddhist erudition and its methods of discourse. Here, Hōnen systematically raises the traditional issues involved in recognizing the Pure Land teaching as a legitimate school of Buddhism. These include: the identification of foundational sūtras, the delineation of the historical lineage of masters by which the Pure Land path has been transmitted down to the present, and its doctrinal orthodoxy, demonstrated with reference to the sūtras and the commentarial tradition. In his work, Hōnen argues logically and cogently on the basis of scriptural evidence, including extended citations from the recognized Chinese canon.

Hōnen allowed his work to be copied only by disciples during his lifetime, but it was published shortly after his death. It immediately garnered vehement censure and counter-argument from scholar-monks of traditional schools, attesting not only to the impact Hōnen’s nenbutsu teaching was already having in Japanese society, but also to the recognition of the forms of scholastic discourse and rational argument into which his thought had been cast. From his followers’ accounts and records of his spoken words and letters, it appears that Hōnen was an immensely charismatic figure, communicating his teaching to both the ordained and lay and persuasively responding to the questions of his many listeners from all walks of life. Nevertheless, the major formulation of his religious thought followed customary models, dictated by his formidable role in Buddhist history.

2.4 The Problematic of Hōnen’s Nenbutsu Teaching

As we have seen, Hōnen asserted that the nenbutsu as imparted to beings in Amida’s vow differs profoundly from all other practices handed down in Buddhist tradition. Persons might – and in fact, in the traditional monastic centers, regularly did – perform the utterance of the Buddha’s name as another means of healing the mind and gaining merit, in continuous recitation or as an element of ritual worship or contemplative practice. Or persons might, instead, say the name solely as the act prescribed in Amida’s vow, entrusting themselves wholly to the working of the Buddha’s compassion and abandoning any notion of their own goodness or endeavors as contributing to realization. According to Hōnen, the former manifests self-power or reliance on one’s own capacities for fulfillment, the latter Other Power. He taught that, in present times, it is only the latter that remains operative as genuine practice moving one toward awakening. However, a serious difficulty in understanding this teaching arose among Hōnen’s followers, one that he struggled to deal with but was unable to resolve doctrinally.

Disciples found that the nenbutsu of Amida’s vow as proclaimed by Hōnen, in fact, involves two disparate elements, both of which are essential: on the one hand, the actual, vocal saying of Amida’s Name, “namu-amida-butsu,” and, on the other, the wholehearted entrusting of oneself to Amida’s vow. For Hōnen, these two elements of practice and faith – utterance of the nenbutsu and wholehearted entrusting of oneself to Amida’s vow – were mutually and unproblematically interfused as the means devised by Amida Buddha in establishing a path to realization both accessible to all, not only a religious elite, and unfailingly effective. However, many who sought to follow his teaching found that in actual engagement, the path appeared to be defined by emphasis on one element or the other, with disparate demands. The question became for many followers: which is central in the life lived in accord with Amida’s vow, practice or trust? Hōnen himself was said to have uttered the nenbutsu 60,000 times daily and to have urged followers to recite the nenbutsu while carrying on their ordinary activities, throughout their days and lives. At the same time, he taught that genuine trust was grasping that a single utterance, being not one’s own good act but the Buddha’s fulfilled name, was sufficient for attaining birth in the Pure Land. How, then, should persons of the nenbutsu conduct their lives?

Followers who emphasized practice tended to assume that since the nenbutsu was provided out of Amida’s wisdom-compassion, those who entrust themselves to the Buddha’s vow will spontaneously, out of joy and gratitude, seek to live in mindfulness of Amida and to recite the name as often as possible. This view, however, sometimes shaded into ethical and eschatological concerns, so that some believed that practitioners of the nenbutsu needed to live in a manner appropriate for birth into Amida’s buddha-field. Their lives were devoted to diligent recitation and moral rectitude, and those who failed to display such dedication were viewed as negligent in their practice. Further, many holding this view adopted older concerns rooted in the Contemplation Sūtra, in which nenbutsu recitation was seen pragmatically as a means of cancelling the karmic effects of one’s past evil.Footnote 9 This latter belief gave decisive weight to the nenbutsu uttered at the moment of death, when the nullification of one’s final defilements of karmic evil made birth in the Pure Land possible.

By contrast, those who emphasized trust tended toward a more relaxed view of nenbutsu recitation and other forms of religious observance or moral rigor, instead insisting on total trust in Amida’s compassion. The Pure Land sūtras speak of ten or even a single utterance as adequate, and Hōnen affirms this teaching, since the name as prepared by Amida holds the resultant virtues of his inconceivably long and perfect practice. When practitioners take refuge in the vow and utter the nenbutsu, their salvation is promised by Amida, and, consequently, they should have no misgivings. At an extreme, however, insistence on leaving everything to Amida’s salvific activity led to forms of antinomianism, in which even moral restraint was viewed as the impulse to deny one’s cravings and affirm one’s own goodness. In less acute forms, emphasis on trust led to a denigration of dedication to continued utterance as evidence of doubt of the vow’s power and as a residue of attachment to one’s own action in bringing about attainment.

Hōnen sought to maintain a tenuous balance between these two, mutually disparaging positions of emphasis on praxis and emphasis on faith:

If, because it is taught that birth is attained with but one or ten utterances, you say the nembutsu heedlessly, then faith is hindering practice. If, because it is taught [by the Chinese Pure Land master Shandao that you should say the Name “without abandoning it from moment to moment,” you believe one or ten utterances to be indecisive, then practice is hindering faith. As your faith, accept that birth is attained with a single utterance; as your practice, endeavor in the nenbutsu throughout life. (Hirota 1989: 12–13; also Hōnen 2011: 258–259)

Historically, however, we find that while Hōnen was able to transmit his insights through his own compelling presence while alive, after his death, his disciples developed their individual interpretations of his nenbutsu teaching in diverse directions, with some tending toward emphasis on nenbutsu practice and other toward trust in the vow. The master, in short, had failed to achieve a clear doctrinal resolution of this issue of religious life.

3 Part Two: Shinran’s Approach: The Phenomenology of Religious Awareness as Transformative

3.1 Pure Land Buddhist Anthropology

Shinran’s mode of expression in his writings and his teaching activity may be characterized as phenomenological and therapeutic in intent – directed toward transmitting an encounter with the genuinely Other that is manifest as the Pure Land path – rather than simply doctrinal or apologetic.Footnote 10 He seeks not to reiterate Hōnen’s achievement in arguing for general recognition of the orthodoxy and institutional legitimacy of the Pure Land School but rather to rectify misapprehensions of the path among Hōnen’s followers themselves. This involves less the correction of ideas than effecting a fundamental change in the nature of a person’s engagement with the path. Shinran’s works, which may largely be seen as carefully selected and arranged anthologies, Japanese translations, or detailed explications of passages drawn from the Pure Land sūtras and commentarial tradition in Chinese, are intended to elicit a response to the compelling “summons” or “call” (CWS 1: 38, 505) of the teaching.

As we have seen, at the roots of the early systematization of Pure Land practice lies the aspirants’ recognition of the gulf separating their own being in the world from the life of enlightened wisdom. For Hōnen, it is precisely an awareness of incapacity, deepened to encompass the totality of one’s existence, that opens the possibility for authentic nenbutsu. Thus, Hōnen states that persons attain birth “by becoming their foolish selves” (CWS 1: 531) and also of “turning yourself into a foolish person” (Hirota 1989: 71).Footnote 11 Only by wholly casting aside adherence to one’s own powers for attaining awakening and thereby fully entrusting oneself to the Buddha’s vow does a person’s utterance become nenbutsu of Other Power.Footnote 12At the same time, it was necessary that the Pure Land teaching bridge the chasm between the person powerless to accomplish any act of genuine merit and Amida’s salvific activity. For Hōnen, this was achieved by Amida’s compassionate selection of the simple act of nenbutsu and the believer’s single-hearted trust in it. In and through such trust in “the vow in which Amida selected the nenbutsu” (J. senjaku hongan 選択本願), the saying of the nenbutsu becomes at once indispensable in one’s life and that act which, being performed in accord with the Buddha’s Vow, is replete with the Buddha’s virtues. In other words, the vocal nenbutsu thereby becomes effective in bringing beings toward awakening.

This solution to the problem of closing the gap between a being and the Buddha, however, implies a reciprocity at work in the relationship between a person’s trust and Amida’s vow,Footnote 13 and this suggested interaction opens the way for reverting to reliance on one’s own act – either of trust or of nenbutsu – to bring oneself into accordance with the Buddha. As long as Amida’s activity remains an object of a person’s judgment or aspiration, being and Buddha remain vastly parted, and Hōnen’s principle of trusting in Other Power remains paradoxically entangled in self-affirmation.

3.2 Deconstructing the Dichotomy Underlying Trust and Practice

For Shinran, the attempts by Pure Land Buddhists to secure some channel for negotiating the rift between being and Buddha – whether wholehearted trust or diligent recitation – inevitably result in the irreconciliable bifurcation of faith and practice as disparate, willed human acts. Although Hōnen teaches that saying the nenbutsu is practice that has been prepared for beings by Amida Buddha, this teaching alone fails to elucidate precisely how – by what working or mechanism – one’s own utterance is, in fact, practice fulfilled by Amida. At the same time, it is unclear how an attitude of trust or faith, if its sources are human subjectivity, can be the foundation for a genuine link with the realm of awakening or an act of authentic practice, regardless of its object or its impetus in reflective self-awareness. In inquiring after a principle by which either utterance or faith can function as a bond with Amida’s vow and the cause for attaining birth in the Pure Land, we are inevitably shunted between the two without being able to ascertain a firm basis. This was the impasse that vexed Hōnen’s followers. It is here that Shinran incisively brings to bear the Mahāyāna insight into the tenaciousness of human self-attachments, particularly within the sphere of religious praxis. By doing so, he challenges both conceptions of faith and practice and lays bare crucial questions concerning the sources and significance of human subjectivity and agency in relation to the nenbutsu.

For Shinran, speaking from a fundamental Buddhist perspective, a good act is one that moves one’s existence toward enlightened wisdom, and evil is any act that impedes such advance. Thus, the problem of performing genuine good and ceasing from evil does not merely concern our ordinary sense of good and evil in relation to ethical conduct in society or even the morality delineated in Buddhist precepts for monastic or lay life. Instead, it involves, more fundamentally, our judgments themselves and the roots of thought and action in discriminative, reifying apprehensions of the self and world. Perceiving the world in terms of oneself and surrounding things as substantial and enduring gives rise to clinging to an elemental level of human existence, and because it is an illusory grasp of reality centered on the ego-self, it results in an obsessive, painful experience.

Shinran views such false discrimination and reification as being so deeply ingrained in the karmic matrix of a person’s life that human existence is, in itself, inescapably bound to the ignorance of egocentric perception and judgment. This inexorable character of human existence is manifested in the ubiquitous linguisticality of human understanding, by which the world is grasped as disparate objects and values of good and evil are absolutized from the self’s stance. Even endeavor in religious praxis is prone to contamination at its roots, reversing its effects. It is precisely in this that we find the necessity and viability of the Pure Land Buddhist path, which is distinguished from meditative traditions by a fundamental linguisticality that integrates the realization of wisdom with the use of language.

3.3 Linguisticality and the Pure Land Buddhist Path

For Shinran, the Pure Land Buddhist teaching is accessible and transformative for persons regardless of their particular intellectual or moral capacities precisely because it provides a way to liberative insight – or contact with what is true and real – through and in the medium of language. In this respect, Shinran’s path differs from Buddhist traditions in which delusional thought and conceptualization mediated by language are broken through by means of ascetic discipline and meditative techniques. Borrowing a phrase from the Chinese master Tanluan (J. Donran) 曇鸞 (476–542), he states that in the Pure Land path, “nirvāṇa is attained without severing blind passions” (CWS 1: 70), meaning that even without reaching a point at which dichotomous thinking (language use, conceptualization) has been eradicated, one is filled by or attains suchness (things-as-they-are) or true reality beyond the falsely discriminative grasp of words and concepts.

The centrality of language in Shinran’s thought may be grasped from his characterizations of the two fundamental elements in traversing the path: “entrusting” (J. shinjin 信心, “entrustment-mindedness”) of oneself to Amida’s vow, and “practice” (J. gyō 行), which indicates the immediate nexus between our lives in the world and true reality. According to Shinran, shinjin is indicated in the Larger Sūtra by the expression, “hearing [Amida’s] Name” (CWS 1: 474), which is praised by all the Buddhas throughout the cosmos. Such hearing “means that sentient beings, having heard how the Buddha’s Vow arose – its origin and fulfillment – are altogether free of doubt” (CWS 1: 112, 474). Further, he states that practice is “to say the Name of the Tathāgata of unhindered light (i.e., Amida Buddha)” (CWS 1: 13). The religious path, therefore, is to hear Amida Buddha’s Name or Vow and to say the nenbutsu. The pivotal role of language as the vehicle of awakening is apparent.

Authentic engagement with it is not, however, simply an intellectual grasp or adoption of the verbal teaching but necessarily involves a shift in engagement with language itself. The language of the Pure Land path must be accessible to people who perform no disciplines to abolish ordinary (in the Buddhist view, delusional) modes of thought, and at the same time, it must possess the power to transform their existence by severing the bonds of delusional thought. That is, although language normally functions as a medium of false discrimination between subject and object and among objects, it must also be able to lead people to break through the horizons and conceptual frameworks of the world and the self that are constructed through our cultural conditioning and our ordinary, egocentric modes of apprehension. How does our engagement with the Pure Land teaching (hearing and saying the Name) differ from our usual, delusional linguistic activity, so that it becomes the cause and the activity of enlightenment? In terms of the path, how are its two dimensions – its linguistic medium and its transcendence of language – integrated?

Here, we will consider two aspects of a transformed relation to language: the reflexive awareness of linguisticality and the emergence of true words. These two aspects correspond to opposite faces of the central moment of religious transformation in Shinran’s thought: the falling away of self-power as calculative thinking (J. hakarai はからひ) and the attainment of shinjin. The consequences of both aspects expressed in terms of language may be seen in the following passage:

I know nothing at all of “good” or “evil.” For if I could know thoroughly, as Amida Tathāgata knows, that an act was good, then I would know good. If I could know thoroughly, as the Tathāgata knows, that an act was evil, then I would know evil. But with a foolish being full of blind passions, in this fleeting world – this burning house – all matters without exception are empty words (soragoto) and gibberish (tawagoto), with nothing of truth, reality, or sincerity (makoto). The nenbutsu alone is true and real. (Tannishō 歎異抄 [A Record in Lament of Divergences], Shinran 1982: 131; CWS 1: 679)

From Shinran’s perspective, communicating the path requires simultaneously a negative aspect of freeing the teaching from ordinary frameworks of understanding and an affirmative aspect of conveying a genuine apprehension of reality. His method in seeking to accomplish this is to speak from his own awareness. This does not provide a process to trace, either in conceptual thought or in methodical action, but may be received as Shinran’s own summons from his stance within the working of the vow. To read his words in accord with his intent, therefore, is to be moved from an appropriation of the teaching into our conventionally perceived universe to a realization of language as false and true in Shinran’s senses. On the one hand, one’s conceptions of self and world and one’s judgments about them come to be seen as shaped by egocentric attachments and as fabrications (“empty words and gibberish”). On the other hand, “the nenbutsu alone is true and real” (CWS 1: 679), accessible to our understanding, yet manifesting as reality that transcends conceptual manipulation. Thus, the teaching has a remedial function, illuminating the falsity of the thought and speech ordinarily generated by human beings. At the same time, it is true word, and thus characterized by the nondualities of word and reality and of act and word, it enters and transforms thought and speech.

3.4 “Other Power Means Being Wholly Free of Calculative Thinking”

As we have seen, for Hōnen the distinction between self-power and Other Power hinged on whether persons relied on their own abilities to accomplish good actions or whether they entrusted themselves to the Buddha’s working. Shinran, however, perceives attachments to one’s own powers as not merely volitional but as involving, at their most fundamental level, one’s very perceptions of good and evil. Thus, he explains “self-power” as “endeavoring to make yourself worthy through mending the confusion in your acts, words, and thoughts, confident of your own powers and guided by your own calculation (emphasis added) (hakarai)” (CWS 1: 525). Hakarai (calculative thinking) is perhaps the single major term in Shinran’s thought adopted from ordinary Japanese instead of the Buddhist canon in Chinese, and for him it expresses the element of human existence that obstructs the Buddhist path. If “doubt” expresses the opposite of shinjin, then the core of doubt is adherence to one’s grasp of good and evil guided by calculative thinking. This is expressed in the Larger Sūtra:

[Śākyamuni Buddha said:] Suppose there are sentient beings who, with minds full of doubt, aspire to be born in that land through the practice of various meritorious acts; unable to realize Buddha-wisdom, the inconceivable wisdom, the ineffable wisdom…, they doubt these wisdoms and do not entrust themselves. And yet, believing in [the recompense of] evil and good, they aspire to be born in that land through cultivating the root of good. (CWS 1: 209)

In the passage from Tannishō quoted above, Shinran uses the term “soragoto” (deceitful, vacuous, or insincere words) to indicate his own realization of the intractable egocentricity of his judgments of good and evil. We find in his works, however, another use of the term “soragoto”; a comparison of these two usages will help us grasp the nature of his insight.

In addition to the conception of “soragoto” as the falsely discriminative linguisticality that is an inherent element of unenlightened human existence, Shinran uses the term in the following way:

While persons who do not know even the characters for “good” and “evil”

All possess a mind true, real, and sincere (makoto no kokoro),

I make a display of knowing the words “good” and “evil”;

This is the manifestation of great falsity (soragoto). (CWS 1: 429)

As recorded in Tannishō, Shinran confesses to ignorance of “the two, good and evil,” but in this hymn, he speaks of making a “display of knowing the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’” while taking pleasure in his status as a Buddhist teacher.

In the Tannishō passage, “false language” (J. soragoto 虚言) expresses the self-awareness of one who has awakened to the incapacity to truly determine good and evil, while in the hymn, it characterizes the consciousness of the person who presupposes his ability to judge self and others appropriately, though inevitably doing so from the perspective of the ego-self and its convenience. The hymn identifies Shinran as one possessed of “great falsity,” while the words in Tannishō show him in fact to be, in the context of the hymn, a person of “mind true and sincere” (J. makoto no kokoro). These two aspects reveal that while falsity in the sense of warped and fragmentary apperception cannot be eliminated from human life, blind falsehood as an absolutist and ultimately self-serving judgment of good and evil can, for there are people who, out of the self-awareness of their incapacity, know their own ignorance of genuine “good” and “evil,” and such people are described as people of “truth, reality, and sincerity” (J. makoto).

It is likely that Shinran’s words in Tannishō were spoken in response to the concerns of followers regarding the need to accomplish meritorious acts and the fear of having committed evil. Shinran seeks to disclose and, thereby, undermine their assumptions, stating that he himself “knows nothing at all of the two, good and evil.” In this way, he manifests his own lack of a self-reflective self or of calculative thinking, which has collapsed within him into an encompassing world of discriminative perception that is itself evil in the Buddhist sense. This breakdown of an inner, judgmental self that had assumed its own good is the crucial overturning or discarding of self-power, for here the confidence has vanished that one can, through effort to amend the self, decisively rectify one’s own thoughts and acts. Hence, the “false language” (soragoto) of good and evil – the language of the doubled self or the “mind of calculative thinking” – has fallen away. When Shinran further states that he “has no idea whether the nenbutsu is truly the seed for being born in the Pure Land or whether it is the karmic act for which [he] must fall into hell,” he is expressing his utter incapacity for truly determining good and evil. It is precisely for this reason that, as he states, “hell is decidedly my abode whatever I do” (Shinran 1982: 23, CWS 1: 662). Here, on the one hand, the Name and the Vow stand extricated from the bounds of ordinary thought and cease to be means operating within the parameters of the delusional self. On the other, a person’s acts come to be pervaded by an awareness of their roots in a distorted vision of self and world.

As stated above, Shinran indicates no method for discarding calculative thinking, since any self-generated attempt would be futile. It is solely through an encounter with Amida’s vow as genuinely Other, originating from enlightened wisdom, that a transformation may occur. He states in a letter:

When people first begin to hear the Buddha’s Vow, they wonder, having become thoroughly aware of the karmic evil in their hearts and minds, how they will ever attain birth as they are. Such people … come to abhor such a self and to lament continued existence in birth-and-death; and … then joyfully say the Name of Amida Buddha deeply entrusting themselves to the Vow…. Since shinjin … arises through the encouragement of Śākyamuni and Amida, once that true and real mind is made to arise in us, how can we remain as we were, possessed of blind passions? (CWS 1: 553–554)

Here, “karmic evil” does not express acquiescence to committing evil but rather a penetrating recognition, itself arising through the working of enlightened wisdom, that even one’s judgments of right and wrong stand within an encompassing falsity of ignorance. This is a stance not of self-indulgence but of sensitivity to the pain inflicted on ourselves and on others by the delusive self in saṃsāric existence.

3.5 Attainment of Shinjin

For Shinran, the realization of shinjin or entrustment-mindedness is radically transforming, for it is the disclosure of an encompassing and delimiting dimension of existence (Hirota 2009, 2000). It situates and pervades the totality of one’s being without necessarily altering the character of the self or one’s particular circumstances. Hence, Shinran states that it occurs in a person’s life once, irreversibly, and in a single thought-moment (J. ichinen 一念).Footnote 14

The central sūtra passage informing Shinran’s understanding of shinjin is from the Larger Sūtra:

All sentient beings, as they hear the Name, realize even one thought-moment [of] shinjin and joy, which is directed [to them from Amida’s] sincere mind, and aspiring to be born in that land, they immediately attain birth and dwell in the stage of nonretrogression. (CWS 1: 111, adapted)

These words of Śākyamuni in the Larger Sūtra are understood in the Pure Land tradition to indicate that Amida’s seventeenth vow (that Amida’s name will be praised by all the buddhas throughout the cosmos) and eighteenth vow (that all beings who say his name in trust will be brought to birth into his Pure Land) have been fulfilled and are operative in the world at present. The central issue for Pure Land commentators and practitioners was to understand Amida’s eighteenth vow and the method of practice prescribed in it. Hōnen interpreted it based on the Contemplation Sūtra passage that describes the person who performs no good act throughout life except the utterance of the nenbutsu ten times at the point of death yet is enabled thereby to attain birth in the Pure Land (see note 7). In Hōnen’s view, this passage reveals not only that simply saying the nenbutsu is the practice indicated in the eighteenth vow but also that, since those who perform good acts and those who perform none are both able to attain birth, attainment depends wholly on the Buddha’s power and not any sort of human praxis. Shinran, however, instead turned to the passage above, which he understood in a manner vastly different from the tradition and from his teacher Hōnen.

The passage as translated here reflects Shinran’s unique construal of it, which is indicated by his “reading marks” (J. kunten 訓点) and his commentaries on it.Footnote 15 Since the passage’s content parallels the eighteenth vow, it had been understood in the Chinese and Japanese tradition to teach that when sentient beings, on hearing Amida’s name, awaken “trust and joy, say [the nenbutsu] even once and, sincerely directing their merits [toward attainment], aspire to be born in [Amida’s] land, then they will attain birth [there on death in this world] and [in the Pure Land] abide in the stage of nonretrogression” (this is the meaning of the sūtra passage as understood prior to Shinran). Shinran diverges from this reading at three significant points, all bearing on his understanding of the nature of shinjin.

The first two differences are closely intertwined. Hōnen, following the Chinese tradition of Shandao (J. Zendō 善導) (613–681), understood the eighteenth vow to specify “saying the nenbutsu even but ten times” (J. naishi jūnen 乃至十念) and interprets the parallel phrase (J. naishi ichinen 乃至一念) in the passage on the fulfillment of the vow to indicate “saying the nenbutsu (nen 念) even once” out of trust and joy. It is clearly natural to interpret the two passages in the same way. Shinran, however, while following the tradition in understanding the vow to speak of saying the nenbutsu, explicitly rejects this interpretation of the passage on the fulfillment of the vow.

In addition to utterance of the nenbutsu, the term nen may also mean “thought” or “mindfulness,” or it may have a temporal meaning of the briefest interval of time or “instant.” Shinran adopts these latter two meanings for the fulfillment passage, thus placing weight on the realization of shinjin and the nature of this attainment: “realize even one thought-moment of shinjin.” It is not that Shinran understood the vow and the passage teaching its fulfillment to differ. Rather, based on his own experience, Shinran discovered that instead of following Hōnen in interpreting the vow and its practice on the basis of the Contemplation Sūtra, a fuller, more apposite understanding was provided in the fulfillment passage of the Larger Sūtra itself. Further, the fulfillment passage illuminated the nature of the nenbutsu in a way that resolved the controversial problem of the bifurcation of utterance and trust.

To grasp Shinran’s understanding, it is necessary to turn to his second major deviation from the orthodox interpretation of the passage. The text speaks of beings who “sincerely direct” the merits of their good acts and practices toward attaining birth in the Pure Land. Shinran, however, by inserting honorific auxiliary verbs and particles in Japanese into the reading of the Chinese text, indicates that the agent who “directs” is not the practitioner but the Buddha: Amida “directs his sincere mind” to beings. For Shinran, the words of the sūtra, as Śākyamuni’s exposition, arise from wisdom or true reality and cannot be properly understood merely within the frameworks of our ordinary language use. “Sincere mind,” in its genuine meaning, can only refer to the Buddha’s enlightened wisdom and not the irresolute, self-interested human mind. Further, human beings, though they may endeavor to achieve true good, have no pure merit to direct toward attaining awakening. Thus, the sūtra passage is appropriately construed as Amida acting on beings.

In this reading, Shinran found expressed in the sūtra the means by which the act of practice selected and fulfilled by Amida becomes the practitioner’s own. Through bringing beings to “hear” his name or vow, Amida Buddha awakens wisdom-compassion in them. Through the action of this wisdom, they come to apprehend the flawed, constricted nature of their judgments and their discriminative grasp of self and things in the world, and the obsessive energy that had impelled their calculative thinking falls away. This is simultaneously the emergence of Other Power in their existence; hence, they rejoice and utter the name. Hearing is thus holistic and transformational, pervading the entire existence of the practitioner, though not necessarily altering its concrete conditions or circumstances. Nevertheless, as Shinran states in the letter quoted above, “How can we remain as we were?”

Shinran describes the utterance of the name alone as true and real, for it emerges as the manifestation of Amida’s wisdom-compassion working in the practitioner’s existence. Because the nenbutsu arises from the Buddha’s enlightened mind “given” to or awakened in persons, it is the Buddha’s practice, which Shinran describes:

The great practice is to say the Name of the Tathāgata of unhindered light. This practice, embodying all good acts and possessing all roots of virtue, is perfect and most rapid in bringing them to fullness. It is the treasure ocean of virtues that is suchness or true reality. (CWS 1: 13)

It is not that Pure Land practitioners perform no practice or that practice in the Pure Land path has been replaced by faith. Rather, they enact the Buddha’s virtues, so that “these virtues quickly and rapidly become perfectly full in the hearts of persons who entrust themselves to them. Thus, though persons … neither know nor seek it, the vast treasure of virtues completely fills them” (CWS 1: 487). This is practice free of all reification of agency or objectification as means or method. Liberated from the shadows of contrivance and acquisition, it is itself the surfacing in the sphere of human speech and action of nondiscriminative wisdom or reality.

In Shinran’s view, “Supreme nirvāṇa is uncreated dharma-body … true reality … suchness … Amida Tathāgata comes forth from suchness and manifests various bodies – fulfilled, accommodated, and transformed” (CWS 1: 153). Thus, a person’s utterance of the nenbutsu, emerging from the attainment of the Buddha’s mind of awakening in the mode of shinjin, manifests “the treasure ocean of virtues that is suchness or true reality” pervading and transforming a person’s existence (CWS 1: 13). For this reason, Shinran can also assert: “To say Namu-amida-butsu is to praise the Buddha … to repent all the karmic evil one has committed since the beginningless past … to desire to be born in the Pure Land of peace … to give this virtue to all sentient beings” (CSW I: 504).

Further, we see from Shinran’s re-interpretation of the fulfillment passage the radical shift in orientation resulting from his distinctive understanding of the nature of shinjin: sentient beings “immediately attain birth and dwell in the stage of nonretrogression.” Pure Land teachings are perhaps liable in any period to be understood as focused on an afterlife in an idealized realm. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as Pure Land Buddhism spread among the laity and the common people amid stark conditions of life and periodic famines and epidemics, yearning for peace in the afterlife was a powerful religious motive.Footnote 16 In his works, however, Shinran underscores the centrality in the teaching of the stage of nonretrogression (“stage of those truly settled” [shōjōju 正定聚] or “definitely settled” [hitsujō 必定], “stage equal to Tathāgatas” [nyorai ni hitoshi 如来に等し], etc.), which, as we have seen, was the original goal of the Pure Land path as a development of the bodhisattva practice in Mahāyāna thought. Further, although in the tradition, this goal had been identified with reaching the supportive environment of the Pure Land, Shinran asserts that it is to be attained in the present life.

4 Part Three: Major Issues in Shinran’s Thought

4.1 Truth

True reality is the single way, pure and undefiled; there is no other. The true and real is Tathāgata …. The true and real is boundless space…. The true and real is Buddha-nature. (Nirvana Sūtra, quoted in “Chapter on Shinjin” 26, CWS 1: 97)

Shinran frequently employs the concept of truth, but usually not in the modern sense in which doctrinal assertions are believed to represent or accord with the way things are and therefore to be “true.”Footnote 17 In his writings, the major term corresponding to “true” or “truth” (J. shinjitsu 真実; J. makoto 真, 実) must be taken as basically synonymous with “real” or inconceivable “reality” and its various traditional Buddhist expressions: suchness, dharma-nature (S. dharmatā, J. hosshō 法性), dharma-body (S. dharmakāya, J. hosshin 法身), nondiscriminative wisdom, and so on.Footnote 18 At the most fundamental level, therefore, truth for Shinran is not primarily propositional but rather reality itself, as things free of the imposition of discriminative, reifying conceptualization and verbalization.

Thus, in Shinran’s thought, truth stands distinct from the character of our ordinary modes of knowing and reflection, which he views not only as fallacious but as insincere and morally corrupt. He states in a commentary:

“True and real” (shinjitsu) refers to the Vow of [Amida] Tathāgata being true and real; this is what the term “sincere mind” [in the Eighteenth Vow] means. From the very beginning sentient beings, who are filled with blind passions, lack a mind true and real, a heart of purity, for they are possessed of defilements, evil, and wrong views. (CWS 1: 493)

It is not simply that human thought and perceptions are limited so that truth does not naturally enter its compass; rather, our vision and awareness are fundamentally askew, warped by delusional self-attachments, and thus in conflict with truth.

At the same time, however, truth for Shinran stands in relation to human understanding and takes linguistic form. It may be said to emerge in the realm of human apprehension and become manifest in words and concepts. We may get a sense of his notion of truth by looking at the method by which he demonstrates the “truth and reality” (J. shinjitsu) of the teaching of the Larger Sūtra in Teaching, Practice, and Realization of the Pure Land Way (J. Kyōgyōshō monrui). In the first chapter of this work, “Chapter on Teaching,” Shinran argues that the truth of the sūtra is evident from the circumstances in which it was delivered by Śākyamuni Buddha, as related in the sūtra itself. As may be ascertained from the dialogue between Śākyamuni and his disciple Ānanda that frames the delivery of the sūtra proper, immediately prior to expounding his teaching, Śākyamuni has emerged from profound samādhi, called “the samādhi of great tranquility” (CWS 1: 339), and his countenance and physical features hold a splendor and radiance that reflect the depth of his meditation. From the Buddha’s extraordinary appearance, it is clear to his disciple that the sūtra he is about to preach will be not merely one version of the teaching among many, but the teaching – that which Śākyamuni has expressly appeared in our world in order to transmit. Shinran’s argument turns on the following sūtra passage, which he adduces in the first quotation of Teaching, Practice, and Realization after indicating its significance with his question:

How is it known that [this sūtra] was the great matter for which Śākyamuni appeared in the world? The Larger Sūtra states: “[Ānanda asked,] Today, World-honored one, your sense organs are filled with gladness and serenity. Your complexion is pure. Your radiant countenance is majestic …. Today, the World-honored one abides in the dharma most rare and wondrous. Today, the Great Hero abides where all Buddhas abide …. Today, the Preeminent one of the world abides in the supreme enlightenment. Today, the Heaven-honored one puts into practice the virtue of all Tathāgatas.” (CWS 1: 7–8)

This passage forms the core of Shinran’s proof of the sūtra’s truth. The words that Śākyamuni delivers are known to be true not because they do indeed teach the nature of the world and human existence coherently or because what they assert is ascertained to represent the state of things, but because the words have emerged from the deepest samādhi, which is itself true reality – the “dharma most rare and wondrous” or the “abode of all buddhas.” For this reason, the Buddha’s exposition of his teaching may be said to “put into practice the virtue of all Tathāgatas.” It does this by manifesting, in words, reality that is beyond ordinary verbal expression and conceptualization.

This may seem to be foundationalist in that its veracity rests on the Buddha’s realization, but we must note that a critical rift lies between the reality realized by the Buddha, which transcends words and concepts, and any verbal expression of the teaching, so that logical, methodical construction of a secure superstructure of doctrine upon an unshakable foundation of truth is impossible. Moreover, this conception of truth does not rest simply on the authority of the Buddha. Thus, Shinran can assert:

If Amida’s Primal Vow is true and real, Śākyamuni’s teaching cannot be lies. If the Buddha’s teaching is true and real, Shan-tao’s commentaries cannot be lies. If Shan-tao’s commentaries are true and real, can Hōnen’s words be a lie? If what Hōnen said is true and real, then surely my words cannot be empty. (Tannishō 2, Shinran 1982: 23)

This is surely a line of logic or reasoning that at bottom turns our usual expectations upside-down. According to this passage, the truth of Amida’s Vow is not demonstrated on the basis of the Buddha’s teaching, but in fact precisely the reverse: the teaching may be called true because of the Vow.

Shinran also states this same basic view of truth or reality as underpinning the veracity of its verbal expression from the reverse perspective:

After true shinjin has become settled in us, even if Buddhas like Amida or like Śākyamuni should fill the skies and proclaim that Śākyamuni’s teaching and Amida’s Primal Vow are false, we will not have even one moment of doubt. (CWS 1: 575)

Again, the truth of the Vow is not demonstrated by displaying evidence of the teaching’s authority. Rather, it is truth itself as the occurrence or event of its emergence (shinjin becoming settled in one) that provides the touchstone by which one may judge verbal expressions.

To augment the sketch of characteristics above, we may note that Shinran’s rejection of hakarai (calculative thinking) is not an abandonment of notions of reasoning and truth. In his writings and recorded words, Shinran lays out his own arguments in rational structures with tight logical connectives. Truth, however, is not arrived at through the thinking with which we normally carry on our everyday lives, for such thinking is rooted in attachments to a delusional self. Rather than viewing truth as a propositional statement or assertion about the world from the stance of a reified subject, Shinran characterizes it as a fundamental shift in stance, a transformative event in which the self is dislodged from an absolute standpoint and made aware of its conditioned nature. Truth is the emergence of self-awareness of one’s existence as finite and delusional (evil in the Buddhist sense of being bound to saṃsāric existence). This realization breaks a tenacious ignorance, even as one continues to live in a world of false, discriminative thinking. Thus, one may await the realization of shinjin, but it cannot be brought about by any self-generated contrivance.

This sense of truth as a basic shift in mode of existence is expressed in a passage from Shūjishō, a record composed by Shinran’s great-grandson Kakunyo 覚如 (1270–1351). In words that parallel those from Tannishō quoted before, Shinran states: “For myself, I have no idea whether I am bound for the Pure Land or for hell. The late Master Hōnen said, ‘Just come wherever I may be.’ Having received these words, I shall go to the place where the late Master has gone, even if it be hell.”Footnote 19 To receive Hōnen’s instruction, to hear the Primal Vow, and to receive the truth of the teaching are not a matter of understanding confined within the horizons of ordinary existence but may be expressed as going “to the place where the late Master has gone,” or as a shift in the stance of one’s conduct of life, even as it emerges for the first time as actually saṃsāric.

Here, we see a further aspect of Shinran’s conception of truth. Shinran speaks of the importance of his encounter with Hōnen, who beckons to him from across the gap between the place where he stands and ordinary existence. In precisely the same way, in his spoken words and letters, Shinran beckons his disciples from their reasoning of methods for achieving the Pure Land to his own stance, in which hell is decidedly his abode. What is central here is the transformative force of contact with what is true. The true words encountered in the person of Hōnen do not so much call one from the things of the world as they call one from the sameness of the world envisioned and embraced from the stance of the ego-self. The otherness of Other Power manifests itself precisely as the limit or boundary of the framework in which a person measures and gauges the worth and endurance of his own extended existence. For Shinran, only in an existential encounter with otherness through dialogical engagement can the delusional attachments of everyday life be broken. A reasoned or determinedly resolute adherence to the Pure Land teaching cannot bring one beyond the limits of an ego-centered stance.

An additional characteristic of Shinran’s notion of truth is its dynamic multivalence. It becomes manifest in the process of understanding because it is a mode of apprehension and not an objectified formulation. The quality of truth lies not in an intellectual grasp alone but in awareness that includes the recognition of its own finitude and its final partiality and untruth. I have dealt with this aspect of truth as it manifests itself in terms of the structures and concepts of the Pure Land teaching elsewhere (Hirota 2008). Here, I will note only that truth for Shinran is not abstract and transcendent but always truth as enacted and encountered, as Other Power that acts to reveal the situatedness of human understanding. In this sense, truth for Shinran is neither objectified nor emanational; as the self-awareness of karmic beings, it does not stand apart from ignorance and falsity.

From the above, we see that in Shinran’s thought, truth is above all enacted, a transformative event, dialogical in character as appropriate to the linguisticality of our existence, and pluralist and nonreifying in its force.

4.2 Reality as Jinen

As the essential purport of the Vow, [Amida] vowed to bring us all to become supreme Buddha. Supreme Buddha is formless, and because of being formless is called jinen 自然. Buddha, when appearing with form, is not called supreme nirvāṇa. In order to make it known that supreme Buddha is formless, the name Amida Buddha is expressly used; so I have been taught. Amida Buddha fulfills the purpose of making us know the significance of jinen. (CWS 1: 428, 530)

Although Shinran adopts a number of terms from Buddhist tradition to refer to reality or awakening free of discriminative reification – suchness, dharma-body, thusness, oneness, Tathāgata, etc. – late in life he came to favor yet another word, jinen. Jinen is adverbial in meaning, signifying “thus of itself,” “spontaneously,” or “naturally,” and also came to be used as a noun (“naturalness,” or “nature” in the sense of the natural world). In using this term for suchness or supreme nirvāṇa, Shinran expresses both the ultimate, inconceivable attainment of the Pure Land path and also his vision of reality as inherently dynamic, actively giving rise to the working of wisdom-compassion. Jinen or naturalness is true reality that transcends all conceptual grasp and, at the same time, is always vital, functioning as the liberating force that encompasses and fills the lives of ignorant beings. Shinran defines jinen with regard to the stance of the practitioner as “being made to become so of itself” – that is, being brought to awakening through Amida’s working and not through one’s own designs and endeavor.

Shinran identifies various aspects of jinen in its active dimension. As the vow, it works “to bring each of us entrust ourselves to it, saying Namu-amida-butsu” (CWS 1: 427); thus, it is the calling to and awakening of shinjin in beings. Further, “there is no room for the practicer to be concerned about being good or bad” (CWS 1: 427–428), for by its working, all the “practicer’s past, present, and future evil karma is transformed into the highest good” (CWS 1: 453) (this will be discussed below). Thereafter, by jinen, a person “naturally is in accord with the cause of birth in the Pure Land and is drawn by the Buddha’s karmic power” (CWS 1: 496–497). Further, “The spontaneous working (jinen) is itself the fulfilled land” (CWS 1: 382), the Pure Land, which in Shinran’s thought may best be described not as a golden paradise but as inconceivable light or buddha-wisdom. Every aspect of our liberation from saṃsāric existence, therefore, and our perfect realization of enlightenment come about not through our contrivance and endeavor, but “naturally, by jinen.” Thus, jinen signifies both formless, supreme Buddha and the working of Amida’s Vow, which arises from, and brings all beings to, “the supreme Buddhahood” that is formless.

On the path extending from present life carried on in a world of conceptual meaning and purposes to formless, supreme Buddhahood, the final overcoming of the reification and objectification of forms comes at the moment of death. For Shinran, birth into the Pure Land at the end of life means realization of perfect enlightenment. At the same time, it is impossible to determine a boundary line, such as the time of death, to that which is formless. From Shinran’s comments on jinen above, written when he was 86 years old, it is clear that in the depths of the attainment he calls “realization of shinjin,” he came to know jinen. Thus, he speaks of “the ocean of shinjin that is itself suchness or true reality” (CWS 1: 79). In taking refuge in the Primal Vow, he also went beyond the Vow, and in deepening his experience of “hearing the Name” (realizing shinjin), he transcended the “form” of Namu-amida-butsu (its meaning or utterance) and came to carry on his life within the true and “real existence” (J. jinen) that works without forms. However, he concludes his comments on jinen with an admonition:

After we have realized this, we should not be forever talking about jinen. If we continuously discuss jinen, that no working is true working will again become a problem of working. It is a matter of inconceivable buddha-wisdom. (CWS 1: 428)

Once one has apprehended the nature of jinen intellectually, one should not continue to analyze it, for seeking to fathom it with the mind is to remain caught upon forms and concepts. It is precisely where the human intellect ceases to press its devices and designs that the world of jinen opens forth. Hence the phrase, “No working” – no calculation and contrivance – “is true working,” the dynamic of the Vow.

Shinran seeks through the term jinen to indicate the dynamic self-manifestation of suchness or true reality in the world of human apprehension, not chiefly as a transcendent realm but as itself the process of awakening, from within, to the horizons of human conception and understanding. Here, the desperate determination propelling human desires and attachments loses its force, finding itself subverted by an intuition of that which pervades all that human discrimination divides into fields of self and other. When Shinran speaks of “the treasure ocean of virtues that is suchness or true reality,” unknown and unsought, instantly becoming “perfectly full in the hearts of persons who entrust themselves” in the realization of shinjin (CWS 1: 13, 487), he is pointing to such awareness. Thus, “our desires are countless, and anger, wrath, jealousy, and envy are overwhelming, arising without pause; to the very last moment of life they do not cease, or disappear, or exhaust themselves” (CWS 1: 488), for we continue to live a saṃsāric existence conditioned by our karmic past. At the same time, “once the true and real mind is made to arise in us, how can we remain as we were, possessed of blind passions?” (CWS 1: 554).

4.3 Transformation as Entry into Deepening Self-Awareness

Jinen means “to be made to become so,” which indicates that without a practicer’s calculating in any way whatsoever, all her past, present, and future karmic evil is transformed into good. “To be transformed” means that karmic evil, without being nullified or eradicated, is made into good, just as all waters, upon entering the great ocean, immediately become ocean water. We are made to acquire the Tathāgata’s virtues through entrusting ourselves to the Vow-power; hence the expression, “made to become so.” Since there is no contriving in any way to gain such virtues, it is called jinen. (CWS 1: 453–454, adapted)

“Transformation” (J. ten-zu) is another reoccurring and distinctive term used in Shinran’s thought. In the tradition preceding Shinran, both Pure Land teachers and ordinary people were widely influenced by the idea that the nenbutsu held the power to eradicate the effects of the evil one had committed (J. metsuzai 滅罪).Footnote 20 It was based on the passage in the Contemplation Sūtra that provided Chinese and Japanese Pure Land thinkers with a key for understanding the significance of Amida’s eighteenth vow, which we have considered above (see note 7). Shinran, however, does not teach the eradication of evil but rather its transformation into genuine good without ceasing to be evil. Structurally, as a dynamic nonduality or interpenetration, this is the opposite face of realization of shinjin, which is also the manifestation of wisdom-compassion.

To express the complex and paradoxical transformation that occurs upon attaining shinjin, Shinran adopts concrete analogies from the Pure Land tradition, such as ice melting and becoming water or streams flowing into the sea and becoming one in taste with saltwater. Both metaphors are used to express the transformation of “afflicting passions” (J. bonnō 煩悩) or evil into virtues of wisdom-compassion or “enlightenment” (S. bodhi, J. bodai):

  • Through the benefit of the unhindered light,

  • We realize shinjin of vast, majestic virtues,

  • And the ice of our blind passions necessarily melts,

  • Immediately becoming water of enlightenment.

  • Obstructions of karmic evil turn into virtues;

  • It is like the relation of ice and water:

  • The more the ice, the more the water;

  • The more the obstructions, the more the virtues. (CWS 1: 371)

In this pair of hymns we see the two moments of transformation that Shinran’s writings articulate. In the first hymn, we are brought to realize shinjin, and at once our delusional thoughts and feelings become the Buddha’s wisdom-compassion. In the second hymn, however, we find that our existence is such that blind passions and Amida’s mind make up a single, interfused whole. While delusions and attachments turn into virtues in the light of wisdom, they remain as they are: the opposite of good. Hence, to the same degree that acts impeding enlightenment proliferate, so virtues are abundant: “The more the ice, the more the water.”

Acts of the ego-self, while remaining as they are, immediately fuse with wisdom, and at the same time, they are gradually transformed, like ice melting to become the water of wisdom. In becoming the same as the Buddha’s wisdom, the evil pervading the self’s existence, which had been hidden from one because of ignorance and self-attachment, is brought to light. Hence, one’s evils are said to increase. Moreover, as obstructing evils increase and one’s awareness broadens and deepens, one naturally repents and comes to feel gratitude for Amida’s compassion. This is why Shinran states that the saying of the nenbutsu that arises from shinjin is in itself an act of repentance and praise for the Buddha. All our deeds – the roots of our existence itself – come to be seen as stemming from ignorance and characterized by karmic evil, so that all possibility of living as persons free of delusional self-centeredness vanishes, and at the same time, this evil is constantly transformed into good that embodies the action of buddha-wisdom.

Shinran characterizes evil as “karmic” (in such terms as “akugō” 悪業 and “zaigō” 罪業, literally “evil karma”).Footnote 21 Karma signifies the law of cause and effect at work in human existence. In general Buddhist thought, past acts, be they good or evil, become causes manifesting their effects in the present, while present acts become the causes of future results. Good acts necessarily result in circumstances favorable toward more good, and evil in unfavorable ones. For Shinran, all our acts, whether good or evil by the prevailing moral or ethical standards, are evil in the sense of being defiled by ignorance and passions. Moreover, this evil is karmic, meaning that it stretches infinitely back into the past. Since the beginningless past, all our acts have worked only to bind us to saṃsāric life. Due to aeons of repetition and habit, we harbor unknowable evil in the depths of our existence. Hence, to become aware of the roots of our existence is to know the basic nature of the self pervaded by passions and ignorant clinging. This attachment traps us completely, and we cannot let go.

Amida, as the elemental embodiment of wisdom-compassion, neither forgives nor redeems evil. Rather, the Buddha becomes one with beings’ karmic evil and blind passions in order to enable their awakening to authentic self-knowledge, which is the realization of no-self. This oneness of Buddha and sentient being, of the virtues of wisdom and karmic evil, is the fundamental nature of Amida himself as Buddha, manifested as “grasping, never to abandon” the person who is evil. Since Amida’s virtue embraces evil and ignorance within itself, not only does a person’s karmic evil not disappear, but it is illuminated by wisdom-compassion, and thus comes to fulfill the activity of Amida’s virtue. One is grasped by compassion just as one is possessed of blind passions, so that one’s evils, which have been committed since the distant past, continue to work out their effects in one’s life by karmic law. But at the same time, they are transformed by the power of Amida’s vow. Thus, one who has attained shinjin, the core of whose existence is karmic evil, is nevertheless filled with the Buddha’s virtues, for one’s karmic evil is the substance of the activity of wisdom-compassion.

4.4 Temporality

[I]n the preceding moment, life ends; in the moment following, you are immediately born in [the Pure] Land, where you will constantly enjoy the pleasure of the uncreated dharma for endless kalpas. (Shandao, quoted in CWS 1: 116, adapted)

To entrust oneself to the Primal Vow is [described by Shandao,] in the preceding moment, life ends. This means that [on realizing shinjin,] “one immediately enters the group of the truly settled.” Concerning [the sūtra’s teaching that those who realize shinjin] “immediately attain birth,” [as Shandao states,] in the moment following, you are immediately born. This means, “in that instant one enters the stage of the definitely settled.”Footnote 22 (CWS 1: 594)

Temporality is a major, distinctive theme in Shinran’s thought. Although time is an inherent element of the Pure Land narratives – the sūtras place the establishment and fulfillment of Amida’s vow aeons in the past, and nenbutsu practitioners look toward birth in the Pure Land in the future – Shinran rejects common assumptions that the Pure Land path can simply be assimilated within the clear-cut temporal and spatial coordinates of ordinary life. Realizing shinjin is for a practitioner, who until then has lived solely within the temporal framework of past, present, and future, to awaken to and be filled with that which transcends the objectified flow of time. Shinran therefore recasts Shandao’s statement above, locating the end of saṃsāric existence within the course of ongoing life. In a hymn, he states:

  • After long waiting, we have been able to encounter the moment.

  • When shinjin, firm and diamond-like, becomes settled:

  • Amida’s compassionate light has grasped and protects us,

  • So that we have parted forever from birth-and-death. (Tannishō 2, Shinran 1982: 38, rev.; CWS 1: 381)

While carrying on life in the world, the person of shinjin has broken the bonds of saṃsāric existence. One does not thereby part from physical existence in the stream of time, which continues to death. Rather, one comes to perceive one’s own existence as thoroughly dominated by the demands of the false self, and thus apprehends the course of time not as simply linear – progressing from past to present and then future – but rather as cyclic and repetitive. Temporal life is not merely historic, but saṃsāric, for the nature of one’s personal existence condemns one to further acts of ignorance. Nevertheless, while within such time, one encounters that which breaks the grip of time’s inevitability.

Thus, as we have seen, Shinran teaches that attaining shinjin takes place in “one thought-moment,” the briefest possible instant, at once within the flow of time, but without duration and thus also outside time.Footnote 23 The realization of shinjin occurs in the course of the practitioner’s life, not merely as a temporal event, but as the interruption of saṃsāric time. It is the point at which that beyond the compulsive birth-and-death of the self – the wisdom-compassion of the Vow – breaks into and fills the life of the practitioner. At this instant, one’s life as solely saṃsāric time comes to an end; hence, Shinran’s radical reinterpretation of Shandao above. From this point on, each moment of life, as it arises, is transformed into Amida’s virtue, so that one lives both in saṃsāric existence and in wisdom-compassion. To express this, Shinran speaks of “the ultimate brevity and expansion (emphasis added) of the length of time in which one attains the mind and practice [i.e., shinjin and nenbutsu] that result in birth in the Pure Land” (CWS 1).

4.5 Immediate Attainment of Birth

Because beings’ realization of shinjin is the “self-directing” or transference (J. ekō 回向) of Amida’s wisdom-compassion to them and its transformative unfolding in their existence, Shinran teaches that at the moment it occurs, one attains nonretrogression. As we have seen, this is the original goal of the Pure Land path in Mahāyāna thought. Shinran asserts that contact with the field of awakening, which had been thought to occur with entry into the Pure Land at death, actually emerges through the Buddha’s activity in one’s life.

Moreover, Shinran interprets the Larger Sūtra passage on the fulfillment of the vow as asserting that when beings realize shinjin, they “immediately attain birth” (J. soku toku ōjō 即得往生). This is one of the most striking aspects of his teaching, but it is entirely consistent with his understanding of shinjin as the awakened mind of the Buddha.Footnote 24

Throughout the preceding Pure Land commentarial tradition, “birth” had meant to enter the Pure Land at the end of life in this defiled world. No master prior to Shinran had taught that one attains birth in the present. Further, it had been taught that once born into the Pure Land, the practitioner becomes able to perform bodhisattva practices until eventually realizing Buddhahood. Thus, reaching the Pure Land and thereafter realizing enlightenment had been seen to lie within a temporal line along which the practitioner progresses from saṃsāric existence to Buddhahood. Shinran fundamentally alters this perspective. Instead of maintaining temporal and spatial conceptions of the practitioner’s movement to the field of enlightenment, Shinran states that the practitioner is not the source of gradual progress toward enlightenment, and yet becomes the locus of the Buddha’s activity. In this way, he brings Pure Land thought into correspondence with basic Mahāyāna insight, in which saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are nondual.

With the notion that beings can go to the Pure Land – the realm of nirvāṇa – on leaving saṃsāric existence at death, it is easy to assume that nirvāṇa lies entirely in one’s future. However, along with the present and the past, the future also comprises the world of saṃsāric time. Since nirvāṇa transcends birth-and-death, it transcends the falsely reifying human conception of time itself. Shinran states:

“The realm of nirvāṇa” refers to the place where one overturns the delusion of ignorance and realizes the supreme enlightenment…. Nirvāṇa is… the uncreated…. Buddha-nature…. Tathāgata. This Tathāgata pervades the countless world; it fills the hearts and minds of the ocean of all beings…. Since it is with this heart and mind of all sentient beings that they entrust themselves to the vow… this shinjin is none other than Buddha-nature. (CWS 1: 460–461)

Speaking from his stance in the realization of shinjin, Shinran states that nirvāṇa is not simply transcendent, but “fills the hearts and minds of all beings” drifting in saṃsāric existence. In temporal terms, it is timeless and uncreated, and yet also transtemporal, pervading the immediate present that spans the conceptions of past, present, and future. Nirvāṇa fills the karmically created world of birth-and-death, so that the eternal is not different from the world of impermanence. These two realms are not simply identical, however, for they also stand in a relationship of mutual exclusion. This opposition of time and timelessness is, from another perspective, the opposition between nondiscriminative wisdom and ignorance, or eternal bliss and suffering. While they stand in these relationships of mutual contradiction, nirvāṇa fills saṃsāra.

Since the timeless fills the hearts and minds of all beings, one need not depart from the world of saṃsāra in order to touch the timeless. Rather, one enters the timeless that transcends birth-and-death precisely within the realm of saṃsāra, in entering the ocean of the Primal Vow. Thus, “shinjin is none other than Buddha-nature.”

4.6 Under Winds of Compassion

Persons of shinjin, looking to the past, perceive the immense burden of karma that informs their own existence, long driven by the delusions of self-attachment. At the same time, they realize that Amida’s vow to free them has been fulfilled in the infinite past and has always been working to grasp them. Looking to the future, they recognize that their saṃsāric existence in the past and present can lead only to further ignorant clinging to self; they are the people whom Śākyamuni describes as “difficult to cure” (CWS 1: 125), people destined for hell, or as Shinran said of himself: “I know truly how grievous it is that I, Gutoku Shinran, am sinking in an immense ocean of desires and attachments and am lost in vast mountains of fame and advantage… How ugly it is! How wretched!” (CWS 1: 125). At the same time, their attainment of birth in the Pure Land in the future has been settled, and looking toward it, they “rejoice beforehand at being assured of attaining what they shall attain” (CWS 1: 474).

This past and future, each with a dual, contradictory structure that includes both saṃsāric existence and the working of the vow, is established in the present with the attainment of shinjin. At that moment, the vow fulfilled in the inconceivable past, while remaining the past, enters the temporal flow of one’s life, so that “all one’s past, present, and future karmic evil is transformed into good” (CWS 1: 453). Further, one’s attainment of birth in the Pure Land, while remaining in the future, becomes completely settled in the present. Shinran states that the person “immediately attains birth.” The fulfillment of the vow in the past and birth in the Pure Land in the future are aspects of the transtemporal dynamic of wisdom-compassion that, while continuing to encompass the practitioner’s entire existence from the directions of the past and the future, becomes one with it in the immediate present and radically transforms it.

The present that we ordinarily experience is no more than a fleeting instant, a barely perceptible point at which the past extends itself into the future, or the promise of the future fades and turns into the past. Such a present is not the authentic present in which we live and act but a present robbed of all significance by the framework of homogenous, objective time we construct. Clinging to an imagined self, we seek to forge its identity and permanence against the flow of time into the past and look anxiously to a future plotted by self-centered hopes and designs. Here, there is only saṃsāric repetition. True time, however – time as self-aware, impermanent existence free of the domination of the egocentric will – holds the potential for life that is novel and fresh. Such time emerges as the present when the vow’s fulfillment and birth in the Pure Land fuse with and transform the past and future. Although saṃsāric time merely stretches on endlessly, the time experienced in the awareness of shinjin, while flowing, does not flow, and while moving, is still. It is time, and it is timelessness (Nishitani 1978, Ueda and Hirota 1989: 180–181).

In the present, one still has one’s existence as a human being possessed of blind passions and devoid of truth and reality. However, because one has realized shinjin and entered the ocean of the vow, one’s life has fundamentally parted from the world of birth-and-death, pervaded by immeasurable light and life. In the vow to liberate the person who is evil – the person of saṃsāric existence – beings awaken to that which transcends such existence, and in the transformation, without elimination, of their delusional feelings and perceptions, they apprehend the working of that which is true and real. Moreover, such existence is experienced not as fraught with contradiction but as harmonious and whole: “When one has boarded the ship of the Vow of great compassion and sailed out on the vast ocean of light, the winds of perfect virtue blow softly and the waves of evil are transformed” (CWS 1: 56). When we have entered the field of the vow, the waves of evil, which until then had raged in us, become one with the calm winds of wisdom and compassion. This is the life of nenbutsu, in which each moment, as it arises, comes to be pervaded by the working of the vow. Thus Shinran speaks of “the ultimate brevity and expansion (emphasis added) of the length of time in which one attains the mind and practice (shinjin and nenbutsu) that result in birth in the Pure Land” (CWS 1: 298).

4.7 At Home in the Cosmos

[Shandao] explains that the heart of the person of shinjin already and always resides in the Pure Land. “Resides” means that the heart of the person of shinjin constantly dwells there. (CWS 1: 528)

Should I have been deceived by Master Hōnen and, saying the nenbutsu, plunge utterly into hell, even then I would have no regrets…. I am incapable of any other practice, so hell is decidedly my abode whatever I do. (Tannishō 2, Shinran 1982: 23; CWS 1: 662)

These two passages from Shinran, taken together, express in spatial or cosmic terms the complex structure of the practitioner’s existence that we have considered in temporal terms above. They may appear, however, to contradict in different ways the basic Pure Land teaching of birth in Amida’s buddha-field at death as the goal of the path.

As noted before, the Pure Land Buddhist imagination developed in the early Mahāyāna movement out of a sense of increasing remoteness from the enlightened presence of Śākyamuni. Ideas of buddha-fields throughout the universe provided images of the possibility of overcoming the adversity of present conditions through entry elsewhere into an ideal environment supportive of religious practice. The notion of separation came to be depicted not only temporally but also as inexorable deterioration in terms of circumstances increasingly obstructive to religious aspiration and praxis. The teaching of the last dharma-age (J. mappō 末法) widespread in Heian and Kamakura Japan bespeaks this insight. Shinran, too, knew famine and epidemic and further speaks of the injustice and persecution he experienced at the hands of “the emperor and his ministers, acting again the dharma and violating human rectitude,” and of the corruption and jealousy of monks “in the various temples” who “lack clear insight into the teachings” and pursue only their own worldly ends (CWS 1: 289). The problem Shinran focuses on, however, concerns not historical surroundings, but the fundamental finitude of human existence, which in Buddhist terms is finally ignorance or false, discriminative thinking and perception.

In Shinran’s understanding, Pure Land teachings address precisely the problem of overcoming the distance from the Buddha’s awakening, but the solution lies not in a displacement of one’s proper abode to an afterworld. Instead, “dwelling” or “abiding” in the condition of nonretrogression in the present is already an entrance into the buddha-field of enlightened wisdom-compassion in this world. Thus, while conducting everyday life in society, the person of shinjin is already “a disciple of Śākyamuni and the other Buddhas” of the cosmos (CWS 1: 117). Grasped by the light of Amida’s wisdom-compassion “and having their bodies touched by it,” practitioners “become pliant and gentle in body and mind” (according to Amida’s thirty-third vow, quoted in CWS 1: 117). Anger and envy arise in them moment by moment to the close of life, yet they have become persons “who hear and never forget this dharma [of Amida’s vow]” (CWS 1: 117), so that thoughts and feelings rooted in attachment to the ego-self are continually transfixed and transformed by self-awareness. Thus, Shinran states: “Signs of long years of saying the nenbutsu and aspiring for birth can be seen in the change in the heart that had been bad and in the deep warmth for friends and fellow-practicers; this is the sign of rejecting the world” (CWS 1: 551). Rejecting the world made up of objects of craving and aversion, one comes to apprehend the burdens of one’s very existence imposed upon and borne by others around one.

Between life possessed of afflicting attachments and enlightened existence capable of genuinely compassionate action there lies a temporal gap, with the final crossing occurring when karmic bonds are severed at death. Shinran emphasizes, however, that this is not a removal to another realm:

When persons become enlightened, we say they “return to the city of dharma-nature”…. With great love and great compassion immediately reaching their fullness in them, they return to the ocean of birth-and-death to save all sentient beings. (CWS 1: 454)

To go to the Pure Land is to return at once to “the gardens of birth-and-death and the forests of blind passions” (CWS 1: 173), now enabled effectively to enact compassion free of the shadows of discriminative thought and attachment. Shinran states: “All sentient beings, without exception, have been our parents and brothers and sisters in the course of countless lives in the many states of existence. On attaining Buddhahood after this present life, we become able to save every one of them” (CWS 1: 664).

At the same time, the active unfolding of awakening that Shinran terms jinen already moves across this temporal rift. Thus, he can express his joy and gratitude: “My heart and mind are rooted in the Buddha-ground of the universal Vow, and my thoughts and feelings flow within the dharma-ocean, which is beyond conception” (CWS 1: 291, 303). Further, the practitioner’s goal of compassionate action that, one with wisdom, has “nothing for its occasion of arising”Footnote 25 – no objectifying grasp – moves from beyond the self in the present. The nenbutsu practitioner’s ethical life thus comes to be oriented in its depths not by rules to be accorded with, virtues to be enhanced, or ideals to be pursued, but by the nurture of perceptions of one’s existence from beyond the horizons of the ego-self. In the light of wisdom-compassion, one finds oneself illumined and pervaded by what is genuinely other, transcending the unfathomable attachments and horizons of self. Thus, the significance and power of Shinran’s Pure Land Buddhist path lies in disclosing the concurrence and interaction of saṃsāric existence and nirvāṇic awakening, afflicting passions and wisdom-compassion, and enabling beings to embody the transformation of the one into the other.