On Dogen 14
Shinran's Ultimate Horizon
Countless corpses scattered along the roadsides of a city. The old memory carried by Kyoto, which today puts on the appearance of a tranquil place, was a world of misery beyond our imagination. Against the despair of ordinary people confronted with a daily life in which one person after another collapsed and died, the existing forms of Buddhism, already centuries old since their transmission to Japan, could offer nothing.
All religions, not only Buddhism, carry a certain limit. Whether that limit is covered over by drowning in the lust for power that comes with expanding the faithful, or confronted head on, depends on the person and the institution. This was precisely the challenge that the history of Japanese Buddhism faced after the end of the Heian period and the beginning of the Kamakura. The reality of people dying at a pace that overwhelmed the intentions of powerful monks who had seized control of politics, economics, and military power through the authority of the existing religious establishment could only expose their incompetence to the world.
It is in circumstances like these that the communal illusion disintegrates. The more entrenched a communal illusion, the more sudden its disintegration and the more devastating its impact on the people within it. Because they believed the illusion was the world. And as I have traced through the historical overview in this series, the movement to search for something outside the communal illusion began from within the Tendai school at Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei, one of the driving forces that had shaped the communal illusion of Heian-kyo for centuries.
Some monks who left the incubator of the communal illusion on Mount Hiei and entered the city were confronted with a world beyond words. They faced the fact that secluding themselves on the mountain to practice was an act of selfishness that ignored the world entirely. They grew disillusioned with themselves. And they began to ask whether there was anything they could do to stand alongside the suffering of the people. The foremost figure in this history was Honen, but given the era, others must have emerged as well.
Why the most important lineage in this context moved toward what would come to be called Jodo (Pure Land) Buddhism is not easy to understand. In terms of the actual force that drove the expansion of this tradition, Shinran of Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land) contributed more than Honen. Both schools share the word Jodo in their names, meaning they belong to the same broad lineage of Pure Land faith. But the problem is that the crisis of faith in this era was so deep that the relationship between master Honen and disciple Shinran cannot be treated as a simple succession. It was precisely because the situation was so muddled that Shinran alone was able to see through to the essence.
Because we cannot avoid viewing these movements as history, we tend to conduct our examination of Jodo in a continuous line from Honen to Shinran. But I believe the issue lies elsewhere. If the problem of Jodo had simply been a matter of doctrinal gravity, the Jodo tradition would never have achieved its overwhelming position in Japan. What then is the thing that must be perceived in this era? It is in fact not a complex problem. It comes down to answering a single simple question. That question is death.
The movement of a new Buddhist lineage from Honen to Shinran was born precisely to think through this simple question of death with total rigor. Put differently, in the thoroughness with which they engaged the problem of death, the religious worldviews of Honen and Shinran diverge at the root. They cannot be equated. Shinran was certainly influenced by Honen, who had likewise grown disillusioned with Mount Hiei and begun his own independent teaching in Heian-kyo. But to call Shinran the legitimate successor of Honen on that basis is precarious. It is better to consider Shinran as having created an entirely different religion. In what is commonly described as his negation of the Jodo tradition, he pushed the gaze upon Jodo further than anyone.
From Shinran’s perspective, even the master Honen’s thinking about Jodo was sloppy and soft. Shinran systematically negated the Buddhist tendency to reify death, prayer beads, the nenbutsu, and Jodo. This is an ultimate and final position for a religion to take. When everything has been negated and pushed to its furthest point, what form of religion remains at the end? This is the world Shinran challenged, and in this respect he stands alone.