MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Surrendering the Will
There is an immediate unprompted success in unselfconscious concentration as soon as the initiative passes from my individual will and is left entirely to the Will of Amida. For only during that moment when the Buddha repeats his Name in the devotee is there no space for a self, no time for an 'I'. At once the Name wholly fills awareness, so that I am spontaneously freed from my ego. All distractions are eliminated and all other mental activities excluded from conscious attention, which becomes as one-pointed as the glowing end of the incense-stick in a temple. The voiced Nembutsu is one with the ineffable Name. Thus the igniting of the incense-stick coincides with the Awakening of Faith by Amida in the Heart of his devotee.
Thereafter all clinging to life's fugitive pleasures, all worldly ambitions for fame, power, wealth, and rank, disperse and fade away like incense-smoke into the air. No longer is the ego required to obey irksome moral restrictions of its desires or to make painful renunciation of its sensual appetites, for these have dissolved and vanished by inanition. Our subsequent callings of the Name after Amida's First Call are moved by deep gratitude for his favour in endowing us with Faith and the promise of Rebirth into the Highest Felicity, of which we enjoy a foretaste even in this life and the full satisfaction in the next.
From the Shinshu viewpoint, any attempt by self-will to fix concentration by calling the Nembutsu is not only mistaken but a foregone failure, of no avail because it is misusing the Name as a means to one's own ends instead of Amida's. This is why Honen, and Shinran after him, maintained that the Nembutsu should be called without worrying about whether one was repeating it mindfully or mindlessly, concern with which would obviously reintroduce the ego-illusion and its futile efforts.