MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Antinomianism
The Pure Land sects cannot be accused of antinomianism, for Honen, Shinran, Rennyo, and the other leaders all directed their followers to obey both the inner ethical laws of the Buddha and the outer moral laws of Confucius. But at the same time they insisted on the decisive difference between social morality imposed from without by the State and its established institutions and the inward goodness of Amida's presence through his Name in the Heart of his devotees. For such sages realized that there can be no Deliverance by morality alone.
A distinguished Western scholar who has dedicated a lifetime to the study of the jnanic, or intellectual, content of Buddhism (but, unfortunately, at the expense of neglecting its bhaktic, or devotional, aspects) has accused Shinran of preaching 'an impoverished and truncated fideism'. This view is so unbalanced that it makes one wonder if he can have read Shinran's works in a reliable translation; otherwise he could hardly have failed to notice strong links with the Madhyamaka of Nagarjuna, the First Patriarch of Pure Land Buddhism, with the Yogachara school of Asanga and Vasubandhu and with ancient Taoist Metaphysics. Now this criticism is demonstrably in error, because Shinran held that Pure Faith includes the hope of Rebirth in the Western Paradise, and this is sought solely with the charitable aim of returning thence, in the orthodox Mahayana spirit of the Bodhisattva, so as to aid other sentient beings still in Samsara in reaching the Pure Land. Shinran does not, therefore, exclude good works, but only warns that if these are not to arouse resentment in their recipients and lead to mischief or disaster, they must be done by the Other Power of Amida, not by the self-power of the ego, no matter how altruistic its intentions. If Shinran had taught that the individual could save himself by his own faith alone, the charge of fideism might have been justified, since such a claim is manifestly absurd. But Shinran's doctrine was exactly the opposite: that the individual is powerless in this age to save himself and can only be rescued by Faith transferred from Amida. Thus if Shin doctrine is to be described as solifidian, it is certainly not in the usual sense of the devotee being justified by his personal faith alone.
Again, Shin practice concentrates one-pointedly on Faith, not because it has been 'truncated' of the meditative methods central to the earlier Buddhist schools but because the Calling of the Name with Faith is now the only accessible path left open to most of us in these last days of the Dharma. Shinran has thus not impoverished the Buddhist Way but widened it, since the Nembutsu makes the incalculable riches of the Buddha's own merit available to all, the ignorant as well as the erudite. Have those who dismiss Pure Land Buddhism contemptuously as mere popular religion perhaps forgotten that we are all people?
Whereas other religions have tended to fossilize into dogmatism, the Buddha Dharma has survived for two thousand five hundred years because of its flexibility and readiness to adapt its doctrines and methods to changing conditions of time and place, thanks to its basic principle of anitya, or impermanence. Ever since humanity entered Mappoji, the Final Age, Buddhism has had to reconsider what now constitutes a practicable possibility for men of ever-diminishing spiritual capabilities who can no longer follow the Way of the Sages. The Madhyamaka may well have been in its day the central tradition of the Mahayana and the Prajnaparamita-sutras those most appropriate for the highly gifted aspirants of India in the second century A.D. But such difficult methods had already become impracticable in thirteenth-century Japan and could no longer be followed even by the most learned and saintly, like Honen and Shinran. How much less suited, then, are such methods to the spiritual and moral decadence that surrounds us in the twentieth century, when even those few still interested in religion are addicted to the academic vice of thinking, talking, and writing about the Dharma instead of practising it! Greatly as we admire the ascetic and meditational exercises of the Way of the Sages developed for earlier times, we must regretfully leave them to those who, like the learned professor in question, are still capable of attaining Buddhahood by their own unaided efforts. But he surely goes astray when he dismisses the doctrines of Shinran, an even more scholarly Buddhist than himself, as being intellectually provincial solely on the grounds that, as a Japanese, Shinran happened to live on the easternmost borders of the Buddhist world. One might as fairly accuse the critic of the same fault because he lives in America and not in India!