Study Group March 2026 Session

On March 29 we had our third session of discussing “Notes on the Inscriptions on Sacred Scrolls” (Songō shinzō meimon). We looked at the section CWS 497-499 on Bodhisattva Mahāsthāmaprāta (which after pronouncing the Sanskrit once, I only used the Japanese version Dai-seishi which is also easier to type). In many pictures and sculptures, Amida Buddha is depicted flanked by the two bodhisattvas, Avalokiteśvara (Jpn. Kannon) and Dai-seishi. And while Kannon is mentioned a ton of times in many sutras and commentaries, Dai-seishi is hardly referenced outside the inscription from the Suramgama Sutra on the scroll Shinran cites.

 

My theory for why Shinran wants to highlight Dai-seishi for his audience is to show Buddhism is about the powerful strength of wisdom and not just the warm fuzzy embrace of compassion.  For his fellow travelers on the Pure Land path, he wanted to let them know that there’s something strong and dynamic in their spiritual liberation despite how society demeans them as weak and passive. The Other Power symbolized by Amida expresses itself as both Kannon (unbounded Life) and Dai-seishi (infinite Light).

 

Shinran in his commentary brings the text from its general sense of extolling meditation (samadhi) to a specific exhortation for the vocal nembutsu. Where the text says awakening (satori) will naturally occur without depending on expedient means, Shinran says that with jinen (inevitability) other practices are not needed at all.

 

We discussed how many Jodo Shinshu ministers (especially the ones from Japan) talk of shinjin as something everyone can just jump into from square one and anyone who indulges in practices besides reciting nembutsu is suspected of being a self-power addict. In the section we read, it is clear that Shinran is not dismissing other practices as bad, but only pointing out that awakening can happen without depending on them. I can speak for the converts by saying I needed to do a lot of other practices in order to realize the efficacy of the nembutsu and my overestimation of my abilities.

 

We talked about how the phrase “Come as you are” can be misleading as a motto for Jodo Shinshu temples. It is meant to be welcoming, telling people there are no pre-requisites for becoming a member. But often it is interpreted as “I don’t need to do anything because Amida accepts me like I am, sitting on my hands and saying nothing.” But the motto comes from the White Path Parable when the traveler is told to “come immediately,” that is, get your rear in gear without overthinking about how to make yourself look good. It signifies a forward movement towards life itself, propelled by the wisdom that breaks through your preconceived notions. The nembutsu is a call to be engaged with reality, to participate in the working of hongan, the most basic aspiration to recognize all lives in one’s existence.

[photo from The Australian]

I wanted to highlight someone who is like Dai-seishi (“great arriving at strength”) and I thought of Susan Abulhawa, who I saw interviewed on the Bad Faith podcast of March 19 on YouTube. She was in the news because people were criticizing the New York City mayor’s wife for providing illustrations for a book to which Abulhawa contributed. The critics were concerned with Abulhawa’s statements criticizing Israel (calling its people “parasites” and various beasts) so the mayor spoke to distance himself and his wife from Abulhawa. On the Bad Faith podcast, Abulhawa spoke eloquently of why she uses those terms for people who do cruel things such as (what she witnessed as a child) making two little boys spit in each other’s mouths like a soccer match in order for a group of children to pass through a checkpoint. Her novel Mornings in Jenin describes the decades of violence and humiliations that the Palestinians have been subjected to.

 

Buddhism teaches us to respect all beings equally but that teaching also tells us to catch ourselves and others thinking, saying and doing things that do not recognize the dignity of all beings. Right now is not the time to only sit silently while children and adults throughout the world are being murdered and maimed by weapons and by deprivation. As individuals there is not much we can do alone but the nembutsu calls us into community and into the actions of wisdom and compassion.

Study Group February 2026 Session

On February 22 we had our second session of discussing “Notes on the Inscriptions on Sacred Scrolls” (Songō shinzō meimon). Shinran’s notes begin with the three passages from the Larger Sutra that appeared on one scroll (CWS 493-497). And as I said last time, the Larger Sutra is the foundational text for Jodo Shinshu, but after watching Jim Pollard’s talk on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3uqmghr5es), it made me realize we need to read foundational texts (sutras and commentaries) because especially in the West, it’s too easy to make Buddhism into an ego-enhancing project. In Jim’s talk, Shinran could have gotten stuck in the first two gates of making oneself look good – the “ethical” phase of becoming a moral paragon or the “religious” phase of becoming a dedicated follower. But by reading the Larger Sutra with the commentaries of Vasubandhu and Tanluan, Shinran was reminded that Buddhism is the teaching of transcending the ego, of settling down to just being a foolish being in the embrace of the true wisdom and real compassion of unbounded Life and Light (the Wide-Vow gate).

 

We discussed two related concepts brought up in the Larger Sutra quotes: nonretrogression and jinen. Nonretrogression is a mouthful but I think in the Buddha’s time it resonated with people fearful of their next reincarnation, afraid any moral misstep could result in being reborn as an animal, hungry ghost or devil, or in the human realm as a poor, sick and/or ugly woman (male rebirth was considered a promotion). In Shinran’s time, people who worked for a living were told they were already condemned to hell for breaking the precepts that the aristocratic monks upheld by keeping their hands clean of doing labor and business transactions. For these people to hear from Honen and Shinran that there was no backsliding into the “unsaved” category due to any causes or circumstances affecting your thoughts and behavior was a big relief.

 

Prof. Jeff Wilson suggested “spiritual momentum” as a synonym for nonretrogression. That term captured the idea that we are receiving a wind at our backs to keep us going towards enlightenment no matter how unworthy we think we are. Another person suggested “gravity” which played on the idea of the settling feeling of falling back down to earth.

 

That sense of getting one’s feet back on the ground and out of the clouds of calculations relates to the concept of jinen, the ji “automatic,” nen “essence.” And it relates to the horizontal “crosswise” movement in the passages Shinran highlights as opposed to the usual way of thinking of spirituality as climbing up. Unfortunately in the main hall hondo in many temples, the ministers sit on a raised platform and some ministers speak and write from a lofty detached position talking down to the members sunk in their miseries. I mentioned Rev. Cyndi Yasaki’s article in Wheel of Dharma as a refreshing example of a minister relating the Dharma to her current personal experience of being pregnant.

 

[Screenshot of June Jordan in "A Place of Rage"]

These days I wish all religious people would be talking about solidarity with the actual people in our world who are experiencing hardships instead of making generalized statements of “all lives matter.” Recently I watched the short documentary “A Place of Rage” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbEK7dlImtA) and I was impressed with the poet June Jordan, reading her poems and giving commentary. In the film twice she mentions her solidarity with the Palestinians which at that time (early 1990s) was not a common topic with Black activists. I read that she had to persuade some of her fellow activists to stop supporting Israel and to recognize the suffering of the Palestinians. The recently deceased Rev. Jesse Jackson was another Black activist who visibly supported the Palestinians and was unfairly labeled as an anti-Semite.

 

The plight of Palestinians is not unrelated to the current persecution of immigrants in the U.S. There is a close connection between the authoritarian forces in Israel, in the U.S. and all over the world, referred to as the “imperial boomerang” or recently in an article by Nikhil Pal Singh in Equator, it is called “homeland empire,” pointing out how the post-9/11 security measures are aimed at subjugating U.S. residents to the same oppression that our country imposes overseas. As Buddhists we already know about the interconnection of all lives, yet how come it is so difficult to get Japanese American Jodo Shinshu followers to have empathy for the people being hounded by ICE/CBP? Talk to the people in Minnesota who are going out of their way to help their neighbors getting groceries and providing lookouts at schools and daycare centers. To me, they are the ones moved by “the karmic power of the great Vow.”

 

Study Group January 2026 Session

 

On January 25 we started our reading and discussion of “Notes on the Inscriptions on Sacred Scrolls” (Songō shinzō meimon). From the time of our last meeting in December finishing up “Notes on ‘Essentials of Faith Alone,’” many horrendous things have happened in our country. In the state of Minnesota there was a surge of forces of the Department of Homeland Security: Customs Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE). Two people were shot and killed in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and with the news of those murders, it was learned an off-duty ICE agent had shot and killed a man in Los Angeles, Keith Porter, Jr. on New Year’s Eve. Besides those murders, we have seen numerous photos and videos of people being dragged from their cars, students and teachers being attacked with tear gas at schools, observers and protesters hit with pepper spray and rubber bullets.

 

These days with all the depressing news, I find it hard to get started doing anything “serious” but thankfully, I have those of you in this study group to support me in delving into the words of Shinran. We do this study not as an escape from reality but in order for us to make sense of, survive and be inspired to resist the current surge of authoritarianism. Shinran is speaking to the people of his time dealing with the chaos of a violently repressive ruling class along with natural disasters, sharing with them the wisdom from past teachers who also had to deal with difficult times and personal circumstances.

 

Back in Shinran’s time, they didn’t have videos and photos but Buddhism was conveyed to the common people in visual form using hanging scrolls. The scrolls which Jodo Shinshu followers would display at their gatherings usually depicted either a Buddhist figure  (shin-zō, “true image”) or a form of the nembutsu (son-gō, “revered Name”). There would be passages (mei-mon, “impressive words”) written or pasted around the main image and Shinran compiled this work to explain in vernacular Japanese those significant passages which were written in Chinese.

 

Shinran begins with three passages from the Larger Sutra that appeared on one scroll (CWS 493-497). The Larger Sutra is the basis of Jodo Shinshu for Shinran because the story of Dharmakara is what gives the nembutsu meaning. The first passage noted is the 18^th vow and we discussed shingyō, here translated as “entrusting.” The shin part is to be aware, to accept what is true, while the gyō part indicates joy and aspiration (see CWS 94), so “entrusting” doesn’t quite capture what Shinran sees in the 18^th vow.

 

The second passage comes from the verse section of the second half of the Larger Sutra, called Tōbō-ge by Higashi and Ōgon-ge by Nishi. The two verse sections in the first half of the Larger Sutra are often chanted at Shin temples but not this third verse section. We discussed the phrase “coming about of itself” as related to jinen, usually translated as “naturalness.” I said it didn’t mean “natural” as in the “natural world” but more like coming about inevitably without calculation like how each of us can say somehow we’ve reached the stage of nonretrogression, having encountered the teachings that changed how we live and see the world.

 

I meant to save the third passage for the next session but I realized later that I totally skipped over page 495 when we were talking about jinen. So we look at the commentary on page 495 about the second passage and will pick up the third passage next time.

 

 

It is depressing to hear that over 73,000 people are presently being held in U.S. detention centers. To see that aerial photo of adults and children yelling for “libertad” makes me wish the camera-drones could have bombed down the walls and fences so those prisoners could escape. I think many of us hate seeing people in cages, especially those of us whose parents and grandparents had to spend years behind barbed wire. What we call the Pure Land has to be a vision of complete freedom for all beings – there is no justification for placing anyone in a cell, camp or corral, not in the U.S. or anywhere else. In the nembutsu if we can hear those cries of “libertad” we can be drawn into participating in the liberating power of hongan, the universal aspiration for freedom and equality.

Study Group December 2025 Session

 

On December 21 we had our review session of “Notes on ‘Essentials of Faith Alone’” on Zoom. As an overview, I wanted us to think about how we are in a situation not that much different from Shinran’s – struggling to convey the nembutsu teachings to an audience who only knew sparse, corrupted notions of Buddhism during a time of chaos, political and environmental.

 

Of all the texts by Honen’s disciples, Shinran chose Yuishin-shō by Seikaku to explain to his audience. Just the title alone captures how the Pure Land path differs from the more well known Path of Sages. The ultimate state of nirvana is not something you have to earn by doing physically demanding tasks or by swearing off all “impure” behaviors and thoughts, but it is there by having only (yui) the awareness (shin) of the true state of all beings’ interconnection. (See my January 2025 post about shin NOT meaning merely “faith” as it’s been long translated.)

 

The common people of Shinran’s time had been told by the Buddhist elites that they were all doomed to spend kalpas in the lower realms because they broke the precepts in their daily life and they were incapable of doing marathon bouts of meditation and acts of devotion. After leaving the Mt. Hiei monastery, Shinran witnessed Honen assuring the poor and working folks in Kyoto that they were already taken up, not to be abandoned, by the awakening personified as Amida Buddha. When they asked Honen, “But don’t we have to do something?” his response was “Just Namu Amida Butsu,” express your awareness and gratitude for being already liberated.

 

I said if anyone asks what you got out of studying this text, you can point to the key section where Shinran quotes the verse by Tz’u-min (CWS p. 456) and goes on to explain the wording. In expanding on “Solely making beings turn about and abundantly say the nembutsu, I can make bits of rubble change into gold” (CWS 459-460), Shinran uses the pronoun warera, “we,” showing his total identification with the non-elites, the so-called “rubble” – the discarded, dismissed, looked down upon.

 

There is a lot of “us versus them” in the current political rhetoric that says you’re “us” if you see white, Jewish/Christian, hetero-cisgendered, homeowning, Western cultured people as superior and believe the “them” deserve to be downtrodden (impoverished, incarcerated, incinerated etc.). Shinran’s declaration of solidarity calls to us to identify with all the people being maligned as “less than” and see each one as precious as gold. Most of us, like Shinran, come from privileged backgrounds, and we can understand what a leap of shin (awareness, acceptance) it is to break from the messaging of our surrounding society and let the true principles of the Buddhist teachings guide our lives.

n

 

[graphic from Substack]

This month I want to call attention to the Buddhists who are not necessarily followers (or even people aware) of Jodo Shinshu, but they are channeling Amida’s mission of awakening people to equality and interdependence. You can learn about and support Decolonial Dharma (https://www.decolonialdharma.org/#donate) and read their posts on Substack “Bad Buddhists.” Also in 2026, I will be participating in the online Refuge Circles of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, hoping to bring attention to Shinran’s teaching of “just show up” for the people who are being treated as “bits of rubble.”

 

Study Group November 2025 session

 On November 23 we gathered on Zoom for the eleventh session of “Warera: Shinran and Solidarity.” We covered “Notes on ‘Essentials of Faith Alone’” from the middle of CWS page 467 to page 468.

We started with the passage “Neither accommodated…” which Shinran says is a technical concept of Tendai Buddhism so he won’t waste his and his readers’ time explaining it. I feel it is a reminder that our Dharma talks should focus on the teachings to guide people to liberation on the Pure Land path and anything else, however intriguing, is irrelevant.

 

Next is the passage telling us there may be times when we cannot really nen-butsu (contemplate the Buddha-Dharma) because we’re to wracked with guilt over the crimes of our actions, words and thoughts or because we’re just too ill to think at all (the way I’ve been feeling most of the time). Here Shinran specifically suggests the saying of Namu Amida Butsu “with your mouth” rather than in other passages where shō-myō称名 encompasses a variety of meanings such as discernment and analysis of the Name.

 

On page 468 Shinran comments on the Contemplation Sutra passage that says when you shō (think on and/or utter) the Name of Amitayus (immeasurable Life), you eliminate eight billion kalpas of your evil karma. As Shinran points out, this passage is to make us realize we just don’t have the evil karma of our teenage years to now, but we carry the results of many eons of bad thoughts, words and actions. When we have accumulated such a heavy load, one calling of the Name isn’t taking that load seriously, so we should do at least ten. At the end of the comment, Shinran does his usual emphasis on nembutsu is not just lip service but should have a meaning that reverberates in our heart/mind.

 

In our discussion, we talked about the Path of Sages which describes most of what people in the West feel is Buddhism. There are teachers who seem like sages to me, such as the late Larry Ward, but hearing them guide their students sounds like they expect their followers to do a lot of disciplined mental and emotional practice that I am not capable of, although in my 20s I thought I could when I did Zen meditation. We noted that networks based on meditation practice such as Plum Village seem to have a growing support of avid followers while our Shin temples are experiencing declines in membership and financial support. I feel we have to be grateful for Jodo Shinshu while we can still access it and keep hoping the up and coming ministers will keep it alive for others who realize the Path of Sages doesn’t work for them.

 

 

 This month I want to highlight the American author Herman Melville (1819-1891). I think reading fiction is important for understanding Buddhism because it shows us the inner mind of people, much like the story in the Larger Sutra expresses the interior of Shakyamuni’s mind. The concrete manifestation of “immeasurable Life” is the uncountable lives around, before and after us. Fiction gives us a way to not only meet those many lives outside of our little circle but it shows us what motivates people to act in certain ways.

 

It probably took me over a year to read Moby Dick but it was well worth it for the philosophical and psychological gems within the adventure. Then I learned that Marxist thinker C.L.R. James wrote a book praising the book for illustrating the state of the industrial, capitalist world Melville was seeing develop. Captain Ahab represents the men at the top who in pursuit of a great prize, maximum profits, they exploit the laborers and the earth’s resources, leading to the destruction of everyone. James felt Melville was especially keen in seeing that the people in charge like the technocrat manager Starbuck were too beholden to Ahab but the ship’s safety was actually in the hands of the black and brown workers.

 

Recently in Great Short Works of Herman Melville (HarperCollins 1969, paperback 2004) I read the story of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a wry depiction challenging the history-old notion that some people are authorities who tell others what to do, making the underclass dependent on doing work for their basic necessities of food and shelter. That and the other stories are full of sharp observations of humans and their foibles that bring them into conflict with each other. Maybe Melville wasn’t a Buddhist but he was closer to Shinran’s assessment of humanity than the philosophers of his time and place.

Study Group October 2025 Session

 

On October 19 we gathered on Zoom for the tenth session of “Warera: Shinran and Solidarity.” We covered “Notes on ‘Essentials of Faith Alone’” from CWS page 466 to the middle of page 467.

 

Shinran explained Shandao’s passage about not appearing wise and good when on self-reflection we see that we are pretty stupid and nasty at times. For the common people he was writing to, I don’t think performative religiosity was their problem as much as it was for the spiritual teachers they came in contact with. And Shinran was telling them he himself had to call out the monk cosplay he easily fell into due to his Mt. Hiei habits.

 

That passage along with the subsequent passages on breaking the precepts shows us how down to earth Shinran was in honestly describing his own corrupt tendencies which becomes a mirror for us to see our own moral failings. But rather than making us feel miserable, I felt the wording was full of Shinran’s joy at knowing there is a basis that supports his life and embraces him no matter how much he messes up. That basis is from the Larger Sutra – the aspiration that comes to us from beginningless time, deep in each of our beings – that realization that we are all together born in the realm of oneness.

 

In our discussion we had a chance to nit-pick about the CWS translation where Shinran contrasted the truth of nembutsu with the ko-ke of our heart/minds. CWS keeps saying “empty and transitory” but the “empty” part could be confused with the fundamental Buddhist principle of “emptiness.” “Vacuous and temporary” might make more sense – we’re so petty and vain over things of that have no consistent worth.

 

Like last month, I apologize for this rough summary. I remember we had good discussions of several points, but I’m finding it hard to write about them. I’m no longer on opioids but it’s hard to concentrate because of my back pain and worries about my mortality (the tests confirmed that my spine and liver have cancer metastasized from the breast cancer I had seven years ago).

 

[movie poster of “No Other Land”]

I find some relief when I lay on my back in bed, so I’ve been reading books and watching a lot of movies on my smartphone. One movie that I want to promote to you is “No Other Land.” If you haven’t already seen it in theatres, you can now rent it from streaming services and the proceeds go towards helping the subjects of the documentary – the terrorized Palestinians living in the West Bank. Besides feeling empathy for the people being hounded from their homes, schools and farms, it is important to see that there are villains in real life. I can’t help feeling sorry for the young men and women soldiers and civilians who feel they must attack the Palestinian families as if they were insects to exterminate. What twisted education they must have received to have no sense of valuing living beings, the humans along with animals and plants. What cruel society brought them up to believe they are the only worthy people and everyone else needs to be wiped off the land they think they own. The documentary was filmed over four years from 2019 and ended in October 2023, so the horrors of Gaza are not shown but you already witness the genocidal attitude of the Zionists.

 

Thankfully there are some Buddhist groups who see the destruction of lives in the Palestinians lands and connect it to the larger forces working throughout history and globally. It’s not enough to see our own corrupt thoughts, words and actions – we have to see how groups with economic and political power have been oppressing all those they see as “less than.” The message of equality and respect in the Larger Sutra applies to all of us. The nembutsu calls to us but also calls through us to fulfill hongan, the innermost aspiration to awaken to oneness, throughout the world.

 

Study Group September 2025 Session

 

On September 21 we gathered on Zoom for the ninth session of “Warera: Shinran and Solidarity.” We covered “Notes on ‘Essentials of Faith Alone’” from CWS page 463 bottom “To rejoice” to page 465.

 

I started out saying it is hard right now to feel the spiritual joy that Shinran expresses with all that’s going on around us and in our personal lives. But then I said Shinran lived during very tumultuous times – clan battles, famine, plague, earthquakes etc. and maybe not the most harmonious family life, but he felt that on the deepest level of our being, to know that we all are included in the embrace of unbounded light and life is a reason to feel joyous.

 

We talked about feeling this joy in our body as well as in our heart/mind such as in the Bon Odori dances that came out of the nembutsu odori movement. Last year the Techno-Hoyo group from Japan stopped in several American cities and hearing the beat of the music, people, young and old, couldn’t help but get on their feet and dance.

 

Dancing is one way to get out of our calculating minds and feel alive but for most of us in the West, we think of religious salvation (i.e. enlightenment) as something we have to earn, to be worthy of. Becoming aware of our inclusion in the buddhas’ awakening is one of the most difficult of difficulties because it goes against our conditioning that “good things” only go to those who worked for them (for example, the Americans’ reluctance to adopt things like universal health care, accessible public transportation, housing for all and free college is because we don’t want “those lazy people” to enjoy these benefits).

 

In the passage we covered is an example of Shinran’s creative interpretation of traditional texts. Where Shandao seems to say shinjin is not complete if one of the three minds of the Contemplation Sutra is missing, Shinran asserts that shinjin is complete if there is the One Mind, the wholehearted focus on the powerful aspiration to include all beings in awakening. Shinran shifts attention away from the Contemplation Sutra/Shandao strand of Honen’s disciples to the Larger Sutra/Vasubandhu-Tanluan strand of the One Mind that includes the triple aspects of the 18^th vow.

 

Lastly we looked at how Shinran feels birth in the Pure Land happens eventually for everyone although right now many of us feel stuck on the periphery (borderland, inside the womb-caste or lotus). The description of the “almost there” images reminds us also that although we see so many examples of people we would like to exclude from the Pure Land, they all will get there at some point.

 

[photo from Chicago Reader/The Triibe]

I couldn’t think of any one person to highlight this month, so I want to praise all the people in the Chicago area who have been coming out to protest the ICE raids. At the Broadview detention center they’ve been met with tear gas, pepper bombs and spray and physical violence (notably male agents beating up on women). Other protest locations include the site in Franklin Park where a man was killed by ICE agents. There are similar actions going on in all the cities, large and small, where ICE and CBP are grabbing people they deem as “illegals” and unleashing violence against those who protest these actions.

 

Last month I wrote about how I admire the disability activists who take action despite their physical limitations. Now I wonder for as little as I’ve done if I’ll be able to do anything because this week I experienced excruciating pain from a bone fracture. My brain is foggy enough but right now I’m writing this doped up on opioids. There are some tests I need to do for my doctor to diagnose my condition but he said there is a possibility my spine and liver may have cancer metastasized from my breast cancer of seven years ago. I shouldn’t be alarmist because I don’t want worrying about my mortality to overshadow the things I can still do, joining with you all in the fight against the dehumanization and destruction in the world.