MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Transformation of Nature
It seems as though my long wandering through Samsara, 'this world of dust', has at last come to an end in the Fields of Highest Felicity. The host of butterflies that I see at play gathering sweetness from the field-flowers appear as happy as the psyches of the faithful reborn in the Land of Serene Sustenance. The Name has proved to be the draught of immortality, sole prerequisite for the heavenly happiness; and even though I may have drunk this magic elixir through no virtue or endeavour of my own, I have reached the Earthly Paradise of heightened and unitary Consciousness.
The physical world now seems utterly transfigured by a poetic Vision of the spiritual world that is, as it were, superimposed on it. Or rather, the physical world has become transparent and the spiritual world can be glimpsed through it or beyond it as its background. This discloses the real significance of that sacred geography which is to be found in the cosmologies of so many Traditions and often determines the naming of places. Geographical sites, especially spots felt to be numinous, are called after their mythological counterparts, to which they bear intuited qualitative similarities. In the same way, striking historical events and personages, when described in the sacred chronicles of the race, are discovered to follow a Metaphysical paradigm. As Titus Burckhardt has reminded us: 'Man lives by remaining open to the celestial influences present in nature'. Hence in traditional societies that 'transformation of nature into art' of which A. K. Coomaraswamy wrote with such penetrating insight and which only the greatest landscape-painters have realized in their work, the rest producing only painted replicas of topographical appearances.
For the pilgrim on his Way, the Pure Land still seems to be at the end of an indefinitely distant journey, so that he is in some danger of despairing that his long spiritual quest may prove endless. But once his Insight is awakened by Amida calling to him through his Name, he realizes that there is no Way to follow and no thing to gain that has not always been innately his. In the landscape before his eyes, he sees the goal of his aspiration already reached here and now. So at last he knows where the Other World lies: it is this world seen not only with his normal pair of eyes, but with the Eye of Vision, or prajna, for this endows temporal sight with the sense of eternity and reveals that this world and the next, though polar, are not opposed. The Middle Way transcends both the illusory extremes of inner subject and outer object, which are found to be not two.
Thus it is true to say that the Pure Land, like the Kingdom of Heaven, is within you, so long as it is not forgotten that 'within' is as much a metaphor as the Heavenly Kingdom or the Western Paradise. The Pure Land, like the Earthly Paradise, can with equal truth be described as being 'without' you - without you. At every moment of one's life, with every breath of air taken from the outside world, with every drop of drink and bite of food provided by the labours of others, one tacitly admits one's dependence on the outer, on the Other Power. For as Shinran Shonin saw, all those other beings, without whom we could not survive, are possessed of the Tathagatagarbha, or Buddha-nature, and so as potential Buddhas are worthy of our reverence and gratitude.