On Dogen 13

Honen and Shinran’s Divergent Perspectives on Death

Reconsidered from a distance, Mount Hiei in the Heian period appears as something deeply strange and enigmatic. As the head temple of the Tendai school, Mount Hiei held absolute hegemony centered on Heian-kyo throughout the Heian period. It was the shadow ruler of the Heian-kyo system. While co-opting the aristocrats and imperial family who served as the public rulers of the system, Mount Hiei formed networks of extraction across the entire country to consolidate its dominance. To view it as a mere religious organization is to misread the era entirely.

Even today, people who have lived for generations in certain small districts of Kyoto speak with pride of the city’s thousand years of history. Within Japan this is generally interpreted as Kyoto pride, but in reality it is the pride of a world confined to an extremely small number of blocks. It cannot be spoken of as Kyoto in general. And even now, as if guarding this small world, Mount Hiei stands to the northeast in the direction of the demon gate.

Throughout this series I have surveyed the powerful system that Mount Hiei built across the Heian period, and I have shown that it possessed dimensions too complex to be dismissed simply as a breeding ground for corruption. The reason Mount Hiei’s history cannot be overlooked is that it served as the matrix from which the Pure Land school emerged, the school that has exerted the greatest influence on the centuries that followed down to the present day. Honen, founder of the Jodo school, was a monk of Mount Hiei. Shinran, founder of Jodo Shinshu, who as Honen’s foremost disciple elevated the Pure Land school to an immense stature, was also a monk of Mount Hiei.

The people of Kyoto do not understand this, but it is a fact that the seeds born on the stage of Heian-kyo, a world that amounts to a single small block when seen against the full expanse of Japan’s territory, became a vital driving force in shaping the thousand years of history that followed. To view this through the spatial frame of present-day Kyoto Prefecture or Kyoto City is already to misread it. The true Kyoto is an extremely small district. Everything outside it is not Kyoto.

Honen and Shinran both founded their religions on the premise of the Pure Land. But in what respects did the two differ? Honen lived from 1133 to 1212 and Shinran from 1173 to 1263. The two lived roughly forty to fifty years apart. In an era when Heian-kyo had collapsed, political authority had been seized entirely by the warrior class, and the shogunate had been established in the distant eastern city of Kamakura, half a century was literally the span of an entirely different world.

The rapid transformations of the age could not fail to exert a powerful influence on the Pure Land faith that connected Honen to Shinran. For Shinran, Honen was the person he respected above all others, yet there may also have been a strong sense that certain aspects of Honen’s teaching no longer fit the times. It was around 1207 that Honen’s faith began to be treated as a serious problem by the old Buddhist establishment centered on Mount Hiei, and campaigns of obstruction and efforts to bring about his downfall commenced.