MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Passion
The spiritual Light and the sexual Fire are not, as in our religious and secular moralism, an irreconcilable dichotomy, but two modalities of one and the same Power. Failing to realize this, I fall into the typical Puritanical error of attempting to detach myself from desire by an ascetic revulsion against the body. Only later, after the first brief Vision granted by Amida, whose presence I invoke inside the temple, do I make the discovery that Fire is not to be repressed in the interest of Light and that the lust for life is essentially the same energy as empowers, after its transmutation and sublimation, the wise insight and compassionate activity of the Bodhisattva. So compassion and not disgust should have been my response to this test. The Infernal Fowl of lust and rage that inhabits Hell is portrayed in the gruesome but powerful Jigoku zoshi emaki, a long horizontal scroll of the underworld, preserved in the Nara National Museum.
The Mahayana has long recognized the close affinity between sexual passion and rage; which explains why the Buddhist Eros, Aizen Myo-o (Sanskrit: Raga Raja), is represented iconographically in a red wrathful form. Violent outbursts of lust and anger, the frantic ravings of the imprisoned splendour to be let out of its corporeal cage, are warning signs that our religious aspirations are suppressed and unsatisfied. We feel irritable and annoyed because we are compelled to expend most of our precious life and time in pursuit of mundane and transitory objectives, when in our hearts we know that they should be devoted wholly to the search for Liberation and Enlightenment. Yet we tamely consent to being merely human, when we might aspire to be divine. Having abandoned the spiritual quest and settled for material comfort and contentment, 'most men', as Thoreau observed, ‘lead lives of quiet desperation’.
Honen Shonin, according to one tradition, had said that: 'Even the wicked can enter the Pure Land, how much more readily the virtuous'. But reversing this dictum of his master, Shinran produced a paradox; for his penetrating insight perceived that this was more in keeping with the Eighteenth, or Original, Vow of Amida. That Royal Vow was made expressly to rescue the incorrigible, not the self-righteous, who, because they are really relying on their own virtue rather than on the merit transferred by the Other Power, are the least likely to be reborn in the Western Paradise.
We have remarked that the obtrusively moralistic Puritan condemns the body as evil and would legislate to prohibit all its natural impulses. The Pure Land Buddhist, on the contrary, seeks detachment from his selfish cravings and sensual addictions by allowing the Other Power to tame and transform them into benign and universal friendliness. Notice that it is only craving and attachment to desires that are to be extinguished in Nirvana, which literally means blown out like a flame. It is not the desires themselves that are to be censured or suppressed, leaving behind some cold dead shell emptied of all humanity; for their energies are to be refined and sublimated through the alchemy of the Nembutsu.
Yet most men, expecting infinite pleasure from satiating finite desires, prefer an inferior and ephemeral paradise of ever-dwindling sensations to the never-exhausted felicities of bliss and peace in the Pure Land. According to an old tradition, the damned, not only posthumously but here and now, are each allowed one selfish pleasure, addiction to which ensures that they shun the chance of escape from Hell and voluntarily choose to remain there. Otherwise all the infernal population would long ago have migrated to a cooler climate.