Nagapriya's Articles on Lions Roar

“How do we come to trust in Amida Buddha’s generosity and compassion?” asks Nagapriya. He explores Shinran’s teachings and the practice of nembutsu. I am such that I do not know right and wrong And cannot distinguish false and true; I lack even small love and small compassion, And yet, for fame and profit, enjoy teaching others. —The Collected Works of Shinran While at first glance this might not seem much of a consolation, according to Shinran (1173–1263), the founder of the Jodo Shinshu or True Pure Land School in Japan, an honest assessment of our own limitedness is the beginning of a more sincere relationship to dharma practice, to oneself, and to others. That honesty is the catalyst for a metanoia, a “change of mind” or conversion. Once we learn to recognize that our ego-directed effort is ultimately futile in the pursuit of spiritual liberation, we can begin to live in a way that more fully honors how things are. I was not trained in the Shin, or Pure Land, tradition. When I first encountered Shinran’s teachings, I felt as though I had been given permission to put down an enormous burden that was crushing me. Shinran confirmed that my ego-directed efforts would only serve to enmesh me further in samsara, like a coyote caught in a snare, every attempt to free myself just tightening the noose, and redoubling my suffering and hopelessness. The orientation and language of Shin Buddhism is explicitly religious. It relies upon a transcendent factor, a beneficent influence that is beyond our individual capacities, that is beyond our own karma. Based on his awakening to his own spiritual fraudulence, Shinran came to realize that he could never be the agent of his own liberation because his very aspiration to do so was tainted by his incorrigible greed, hatred, and delusion. There was no advancing, no smooth ascent; all such ideas are nothing more than ways to inflate the fragile ego, which reality must inevitably puncture. Such ideas, he came to realize, had nothing to do with what the Buddhist life is really about, since what is required is not the culmination of the egocentric vision but rather its transcendence. In other words, what is called for is the renunciation of the quixotic attempt by the ego to liberate itself, an attempt inherently doomed to fail. This misguided project is known in more technical terms as the “self-power” (jiriki) approach to spiritual freedom. Shinran came to place his confidence not in his self-power but rather in other-power, or tariki. Other-power turns out to be Amida or Amitabha (“infinite light”), a cosmic buddha whose legend is told in a group of texts known as the three Pure Land scriptures. Eons ago, Amida made a series of vows, which they then fulfilled on the arduous path toward awakening (here and elsewhere, I use the gender-neutral pronoun to refer to Amida). According to Amida’s vows, we are basically guaranteed awakening if we just invoke Amida’s name sincerely. That’s right; all we need do is call Amida’s name sincerely through what came to be known as the nembutsu: namu amida butsu, Homage to Amida Buddha. That’s all. It sounds too easy, doesn’t it? According to Shinran, this simple practice becomes the portal through which Amida’s incalculable spiritual merits are entrusted to us. To put it another way, through the nembutsu, Amida’s awakened mind is gifted to us so that it becomes ours. Our mind fuses with the awakened mind. This strikes at the heart of the tantalizing and puzzling message of True Pure Land Buddhism. It all seems so easy, and yet doubts persist. How do I know if this has happened or not? We can all recite the name, but how do we know if we have done it sincerely? Self-doubt, or lack of reliance on other-power, drives us to keep striving, to persist in trying to make ourselves worthy through discipline and good works. Yet, says Shinran, this desperate effort just digs us deeper into our spiritual predicament, since it is rooted in ego-clinging. So how do we come to trust in Amida’s generosity and compassion? And what does that even mean? The Vision of Shin Buddhism. Shinran is historically, culturally, linguistically, and religiously distanced from us. His lifeworld is now lost in the sands of time, and I suppose we can never retrieve it, not exactly. Yet he left a treasure trove of writings that we can pick through in order to come to an enlarged understanding of ourselves right now. We live at a time when the transcendent is, for many people, no more than an outdated superstition, where consciousness is flattened, where the highest value is the grasping, individual will. We live mostly in a deconsecrated world. Disenchantment with traditional theological visions of human existence has provoked reaction, even a radical atheism that sees religious perspectives not simply as wrong or naive but even as menaces to right-thinking people. Yet the flattened narratives that we now tell ourselves about who we are and what we are here for never satisfy. Buddhism is part of this landscape. A trend in the Western assimilation of Buddhism has been to deconsecrate it. Rather than framing it as a religion, a word that for many people is now irredeemably contaminated, Buddhism is exalted as a philosophy or even a way of life. It is seen as rational, empirical. It demands no metaphysical leap of faith. As part of this trend, Buddhist teachings and practices have been brought into alignment with evolution, with neuroscience, and with modern psychology. Buddhism has been greedily assimilated by the self-help genre and adorns the well-being spa. What could be more soothing than to go for a hot-stone massage and encounter a Buddha figure cradling a scented candle in his lap? A lot of what passes for Buddhism has been shorn of its traditional cosmology, its ritual language, and even its reverence and devotion. But the Buddha’s range extends beyond personal growth, relaxation, and adjustment. The Buddhist vision entails a radical reorientation of oneself, which might be understood as a process of spiritual death and rebirth. The orientation and language of Shin Buddhism is explicitly religious. At its heart is shinjin (“wholehearted entrusting”). It relies upon a transcendent factor, a beneficent influence that is beyond our individual capacities and deserts, that is beyond our own karma. It reveals a cosmic drama in which all beings participate, and it trusts in an inexhaustible compassion that is the source of all enduring significance and value. Shin Buddhism opens up a multidimensional, infinite universe illuminated by the untrammeled play of Amida’s compassionate light. Awakening is not earned, it is not even inherent, but rather gifted—not at a particular moment in time, like on our birthday, but eternally bestowed or even always being bestowed. It is through savoring this spectacular gift that we may come to experience the joy, gratitude, and indebtedness that is the condition of the “truly settled.” Instead of practice being something we rely on to earn awakening, practice becomes a joyful affirmation of blessing and an offering for others, which may in turn help draw them toward their own liberation. Practice doesn’t save us, it overflows as a surplus of humble reverence. To enter into the myth of Amida is to immerse ourselves within an imaginative narrative, like living through a poem. It is to recognize that there is an additional dimension that transcends the self-preoccupied human will. It is to recognize that there is an infinite source of value, an indefatigable compassionate impulse that is eternally reaching out to bless us and fulfill itself through us. We can embrace this impulse or, rather, allow it to embrace us. To use one of Shinran’s refrains, we can be “grasped never to be abandoned” by Amida’s compassion. Shinran’s theology is a welcome reminder of the calculating nature of the unenlightened mind—of how, rather than submit itself to the urgings of enlightenment, it instead co-opts the transcendent into its self-serving intentions. Shinran’s vision is also, in some ways, brutal. It is an assault on the notion of personal growth and self-development. It is an assault on human autonomy. It is an assault on the idea that I can redeem myself. Unlike Zen and Theravada, which emphasize personal effort and discipline as means to “advance” on the spiritual path, the Shin perspective only becomes relevant to someone prepared to abandon this self-directed project. Better, it speaks to those who have no choice but to abandon this project because it has burned itself out. It requires us to surrender the ambition to redeem ourselves and to recognize that liberation occurs when ego-driven effort collapses. Liberation occurs as we open ourselves to a transcendent impulse: the transferred merits of Amida, whose infinite light of wisdom eternally shines upon us and all other beings. Shinran’s religious vision underscores the inherent limitations of human capacity. He affirms that to be human is, in some sense, to be incorrigible. We human beings are irrevocably situated, contingent, and compromised. We are incapable of perfecting ourselves, since to be human is to be embodied, inevitably lacking panoramic awareness, and always morally flawed because we are wedded to the egocentric will. While on first reading this might seem a dispiriting proposal, and even in conflict with the basic Buddhist commitment to our potential for enlightenment, it points to a deep existential truth. To be aware is to be particular and bounded, constrained by the requirements of individual flourishing and purposes. At the same time, Shinran gestures toward a higher source of value and direction, one not under the sway of the egocentric despot that is our calculating will. Self-directed effort can only take us so far, he realized. When we reach its limits, we may let go into a different kind of orientation, one that allows a higher will to emerge through us. This higher will, or...

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