MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
The Differences Between Protestantism and Buddhism
As some Protestant apologists have claimed to find close affinities between their forms of Christianity and Pure Land Buddhism, it might not go amiss to point out certain fundamental differences. At first sight, it would seem as though Honen and Shinran had anticipated, often in almost the same words, what Luther and Calvin were going to say about faith some three centuries later. But looked at in more depth and detail, what the Pure Land Patriarchs meant by Faith and what that term signified to the Protestant leaders turn out to be two quite different things.
To dispose of such comparisons with Protestantism, one need look no further than the first two of the six main tenets of Calvin: particular election and predestination. Buddhism recognizes no God of Love who specially elects his favourites to Heaven and by his arbitrary will condemns the rest in advance to everlasting torment in Hell. Nor is the doctrine of karma to be equated with predestination, since man always possesses some measure of free will. By his own actions and passions he determines his destination in blissful or painful states of existence, which are of limited duration in proportion to the transgression and not imposed by some Divine Despot who has bestowed free will on his human creatures with the onmiscient foreknowledge that they will use it to disobey him. As the Hyakujo Howa Zuimonki says, 'I alone shall go to Hell; I alone shall go to Heaven. In all things, I realize that it is each one alone, one by one'. This is not due to any predestination or particular election on Amida's part but to the diverse karma of sentient beings.
Nor does Luther or Calvin advocate the recitation of the Divine Name with faith as the sole means to salvation. Such a method is to be found in Christianity almost alone among the Hesychasts of the Greek and Russian Orthodox Church and even there developed only to the point reached by the Jodo sect of Honen, not to that attained by Shinran. From the Shinshu viewpoint, Christian faith is not perfectly pure and selfless, since it still contains an admixture of good works undertaken by the individual will, which is inevitably tainted with egoism.
Shinran's own doctrine of Pure Faith was developed in complete independence from any possible Christian influence; but had he known of it, he would certainly have classified Christianity among his Mixed and Accessory Practices or those still sullied by the efforts of the self to be good and do good. Being therefore inferior to the perfectly Pure Faith of the Other Power, it could at best lead its devotees to a posthumous state analogous to Rebirth in the Borderland of the Western Paradise but lacking the possibility of final Liberation. The pinnacle of Shinran's thought is reached in his conception of jinen honi, or natural spontaneity, and this brings his teaching much closer to Taoism than to Christianity.