If we are to truly show our respect and gratitude to Shinran during this anniversary period, I believe we must do our best to understand Shinran’s spirit, and to share that understanding as best we can. What I mean is, we must try to understand Shinran’s deepest motivations and explore how he pursued their fulfillment. In this way, we will come closer to Shinran, we will come to see our own motivations more clearly and come to see how to better manifest these motivations in our own lives.
This is not something that can be done institutionally; it is not a “program.” True religious life is never top down; it is an individual matter that declares its importance in the inner world of personal motivation and intention. How long Shinran’s influence lasts in this country and how vital a role it may play in its broad religious fabric, will, as it always has, depend upon the seriousness and intentions of individual followers. To this end, I offer the following personal thoughts.
We don’t really know why Shinran entered the monastic life. For a host of reasons, it was not unusual for nine year olds to do so at the time. I suspect then that the decision was made for him, not by him. More important than why he entered is the fact that he stayed. He studied and practiced as a monk, not for just a few years, but for twenty. That his decision to leave was stressful and traumatic further suggests the depth of his personal dedication.
Upon leaving the monastery, he immediately undertook a one-hundred day vigil, engaging in meditation and contemplation, trying to clarify for himself the path he needed to take. And he decided to seek out the Pure Land teacher, Honen, well known, well respected, who himself had left monastic confines in order to offer the Buddhist teachings to anyone who wanted to follow.
It was within Honen’s teaching of nembutsu that Shinran experienced the religious awakening that radically altered the direction the rest of his life would take, as well as his understanding of his struggles as a monk. This part of Shinran’s story is very familiar to many us and is readily available, but there is something fundamentally important that is often overlooked: Shinran desperately wanted to live a Buddhist life.
Shinran left monastic life because he had been unable to realize his own religious goals and aspirations; for all his dedication, he was unable to reach awakening. He was unable to control his passions. And scholars tell us he was probably disillusioned with institutional practices and the attitudes of many of his fellow monks. All of that said, at the end of almost one hundred days of intense introspection, he did not abandon religious life, but instead he turned to Honen. That is to say, despite the shortcomings he saw in himself, despite the flaws he saw flaunted in the religious community, Shinran wanted more than anything to live a fulfilled Buddhist life. This was his primary motivation and therefore the only point where we can meet him.
Shinran went on, like most of us, to live a life of family concerns and challenges, joys, attachments and losses. He characterized himself as neither monk, nor lay. A more relevant interpretation for us today suggests that Shinran began to live a life that was both fully secular and fully Buddhist. But if we are to really learn from him, we must not race ahead, we must start at the beginning. We must first ask ourselves, individually, how important it is, to me, that I live a Buddhist life. Honestly looking into ourselves in this way, we come to meet Shinran as our personal teacher for the very first time, there in the quiet depths of our own introspection, in the examination of our deepest motivations.
And if we so choose, we can also follow his lead, the example he set with his living. For Shinran, the how of living a Buddhist life took place within the continuous processes of deep self reflection in light of the Dharma—deep listening, study, discussion—and the continual recitation of nembutsu.
The source and apex of this life for him, and that which he wished and urged for all beings, is in the religious awakening or insight he called shinjin; but this center swims in the sea of continuous nembutsu. Throughout his letters to followers, Shinran advises those who feel their shinjin is not settled, to say nembutsu and aspire for birth; for those who feel their shinjin is settled, he urges that they say nembutsu and pray for the spread of Dharma and peace throughout the world.
For Shinran, nembutsu practice was both the beginning point and the fulfilled end of religious life, the bookends, the context within which religious life—dharma study, self reflection--was conducted. To “aspire for birth” is to want to live a fulfilled Buddhist life; to want the Dharma and peace to spread through the world, is the expression of a Buddhist life fulfilled.
Our personal efforts to understand, to aspire, to realize awakening, are to my way of thinking never in question for Shinran; looking at his life, we can only conclude that he expended his utmost efforts throughout its entirely. And he urged those around him, and by extension he urges us, within the contexts of our lives and our times, to do the same.
And urge is a critical term here. It is not about requirements. Shinran urges us to consider teachings and activities that were important for him—we choose to take the offering, or not. Shinran knew full well that each of us must make his or her own way. But it was his way to kindly offer what he knew and loved.
An authentic Buddhist life is one of personal integrity and effort. What Shinran awakened to, what he finally understood, did not suggest to him that he should not expend his personal efforts, but that Buddha was the real force behind the fruition of those efforts. He came to understand that Buddha knows far better than we, the limitations of our capacities, as well as our inherent, and deeply hidden, religious receptivity. And he offers the practices that will, not may, but will bring us fulfilled realization and awakening, just as we are.
Trust in Buddha is the realization that Buddha gives us all we need; trust frees us from unnecessary anxieties and enables us to give ourselves completely, unreservedly, joyfully, to the Buddha’s way. As Haneda Sensei of the Maida Center once said, our nembutsu before shinjin is the same as our nembutsu after shinjin. What changes is our attitude, the motivations behind saying it. Before shinjin, we recite because we think we have to; after shinjin, we recite because we want to, because we cannot help ourselves.
As a final note, I add this. Shinran’s perspective that real practice is Buddha’ practice is not unique to Shinran; and Shinran never once claimed he was introducing anything new—the terminology of Other Power in contrast to self power is unique to Pure Land schools, but the underlying principles can be found, explicitly, in both Soto and Renzai teachings and I would think elsewhere within the broader Buddhist community. I do feel however, for the purposes of lay Buddhist life, these principles have been more maturely developed in Shin. Therefore, rather than being a point of sectarian distinction, a rallying point for why we are different from other Buddhist traditions, Shin’s deep traditional understanding of the dynamics of Buddhist practice and awakening might better serve as a site of common concern and mutual study. A rich resource and contribution indeed.
Namuamidabutsu
