MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Genso-Eko
Whilst the first phase in the spiritual quest follows the Way of the Buddha and culminates in Ascending Realization, the second phase, pursuing the Bodhisattva Career, results in Descending Realization. For when, after Rebirth in Jodo, Amida Buddha. in accordance with his Forty-eight Vows, freely transfers his Enlightenment to his devotees, each can then make the Bodhisattva's choice of a voluntary redescent into this world of suffering to help rescue all sentient beings by bringing them the Wisdom and Compassion of the Other Power. After the moment of Enlightenment, for such a realized being Samsara is no other than Nirvana and Nirvana is no other than Samsara, though to the ignorant they are worlds apart, so that while descending into Samsara, the Bodhisattva in reality never leaves Nirvana. The two movements of the spirit to and from these nondual states, the ascending and descending phases of the Buddha-Bodhisattva Path, are neither separate nor identical but are two aspects of the one Way and occur in two consecutive kshana, or thought-instants. As Saichi says in one of his poems:
I visit the Pure Land whenever I wish:
I am there and I am back,
I am there and I am back.
Our individual karma and communal karma are so inextricably involved that there can be no isolated deliverance of a single sentient being without final deliverance for all. Indeed, in the ultimate view, there are no individual beings, but One Being Only, the Buddha himself, who alone transmigrates through all the phases of Becoming in all the worlds.
Unlike the Bodhisattva or even the myokonin Saichi, I am extremely reluctant to return from my brief Vision of the Pure Land to this defiled world, and so I look back nostalgically toward the West. I need to be reminded by the rain-streaked face of the bronze Amida Buddha sitting in the temple grounds that I have yet to fulfil my vow of expressing in verse and prose this account of my spiritual quest for the Western Paradise, whose successful accomplishment is made possible only by the Other Power.