Nembutsu Now, Not Off to the Side

 For most of us, death is in the hypothetical future. “Whether it be today, whether it be tomorrow; whether I go before others or others go before me,” as we recite from Rennyo’s “Letter on the White Ashes” (hakkotsu no ofumi). I wanted to visit Rev. Paul Imahara in Las Vegas to hear from someone for whom death is in the very near future.

When I turned 70, it dawned on me that now my life expectancy is more likely in the single, not double digits. There’s a lot I shouldn’t have to put up with anymore (so relieved I retired from the temple October 1st) and there’s things I shouldn’t put off while I still have mobility and a relatively clear head. In that latter category, I was eager to hear what Rev. Paul is doing.

When I heard Rev. Paul was having health issues, I called him for details. He said he was in the hospital and the doctors found he had liver cancer which spread to other areas. His condition was considered inoperable and he was told he had “4.2 months” to live. Remarkably he doesn’t have much pain or nausea and he was able to attend his grandson’s wedding in Hawaii and from there travel to Japan with his family where he wanted to say farewell to his friends.

Since I was going to Berkeley to attend the Ho-on-ko service, my husband suggested I stop in Las Vegas on the way and visit Rev. Paul. I checked into an airport hotel and took a taxi to his residence in a senior community. His daughter and her husband arranged for us to have dinner at a nearby Japanese restaurant.

The conversation during dinner was mostly small talk to catch up with each other. I asked Rev. Paul if he had to be careful of what he ate and drank and he said his doctor told him to eat and drink whatever he wanted. During and after dinner Rev. Paul kept remarking the sake was exceptionally delicious and I was glad he could enjoy the taste and I could share in that enjoyment.

His daughter and her husband said they’d drive me back to my hotel (30 minutes trip) and gave Rev. Paul the option to go home instead of riding along. He said, “Patti came all this way because she wanted to talk to me, so let us talk.”

During that ride we had our serious talk. He said he didn’t want to be critical but mentioned one young minister who gave nice lectures explaining Jodo Shinshu history but it was as if he didn’t learn much about the actual teachings during his training. Rev. Paul and I agreed that seemed true for a lot of ministers. They talk of Buddhist philosophy but don’t get into what Shinran taught, which is the nembutsu. In the weekly Dharma discussions on Zoom that Rev. Paul attends, he said the one Japanese minister (the other participants are lay people) confessed that he often gives Dharma talks putting nembutsu off away to the side (ano hen).

Although Shinran said the nembutsu is beyond our comprehension and our attempts to pin it down into a pat explanation, Shinran felt it was important to keep talking about it to people as evidenced in Tannisho and his written works. I said to Rev. Paul that even though nembutsu is beyond our rational thinking, we experience it. Rev. Paul responded with, “We receive it.”

That awareness of receiving is so key to Shinran’s teachings but so hard to convey in English to our Western-educated minds (focused on getting things). English as a language just doesn’t offer such verb conjugations as in Tannisho’s first chapter: tasukerare-mairasete and azukeshime-tamaunari.

In Rev. Paul’s case, he doesn’t have to be standing on a mountain top, shouting to the multitudes about the nembutsu. He participates in some interactive Zoom study groups with fellow travelers (ondobo) from Japan, the US and Europe. To be in touch with a few people who are involved in their own social circles is adequate enough compared with those who may have a large in-person and online audience, with print and video sermons accessible to anyone. It is enough for him to be the attestation (shō) to me of how the Great Life (Amida) flows and provides support in the nembutsu, even as death approaches.

We didn’t have to put our palms together and recite “Namu Amida Butsu.” In so many small gestures and expressions, Rev. Paul is conveying the nembutsu he is receiving in wave after wave.

At this time many people are suffering and we can only do limited things which may (or may not) help them. But in the nembutsu we hear the voice that calls us to an awareness that transcends our suffering and its causes. It is not supernatural like some selfish wish-fulfilling magic, but the voice calls from the Greater Life (Amida) that is not confined by our egocentric concepts. To receive this awareness of all lives being embraced is to shift our focus from the dwindling lifespan we cling to and to open our hearts to the many lives around, before and after us.

Larger Sutra Summary - Sutra Study Class Session 20

On September 19, 2023 for our last class of this series we had a summary of the material we covered in the Larger Sutra and discussed Akegarasu’s story “The Pigeons” (pp.171-174 in Shout of Buddha).

Over some twenty years ago, the weekly study group was reading articles from Shout of Buddha and I was glad to have someone who read Japanese - Michael Conway - in the class to help me find places where the English translation was off. By “off” I mean “misleading” rather than “wrong” – at the time Rev. Saito and Joan Sweany made choices to make the material appealing to Westerners who had no knowledge of Jodo Shinshu. As I mentioned in this class, throughout Shout of Buddha are references to the Larger Sutra, as Akegarasu was praising the text that brought him back to life after he mentally hit bottom from the scandal. But in the English translation it is hard to see this – Rev. Saito and Joan Sweany knew it was no use sending people to read a text that wasn’t available in a full translation at the time.

 

The first time I read “The Pigeons” in Japanese after my study in Japan, the thing that immediately struck me was Akegarasu was writing about his teacher Kiyozawa. When the pigeons deride the black pigeon’s teachings of liberation, the phrases they use are exactly what was thrown at Kiyozawa by the established Jodo Shinshu spokespeople. Akegarasu admits in his writings that after Kiyozawa died, he and the other students presented a softened version of Kiyozawa’s teachings that were more in line with the Edo-period Jodo Shinshu they were raised in as sons of temple priests. From his discovering the true essence of the Larger Sutra, Akegarasu finally could appreciate the full flavor of Kiyozawa’s words guiding us to spiritual liberation.

 

Like the black pigeon in Akegarasu’s story, the whole Larger Sutra is the Buddha guiding us to freedom – freedom from the life-sapping, murderous trap of ego-attachment. In his story, the main character encounters a man of freedom, Lokesvararaja, the one freely moving in this world like a king. This encounter awakens his desire for his own freedom but Lokesvararaja points out that Dharmakara must wrestle with the ego-based judgment that gives him the delusion that he is separate and superior to other beings.

 

It is that ego-based judgment and attachment that is the net trapping us in unfulfilling lives. What “The Pigeons” is warning us against isn’t just the seductive delights of the material world, but the more dangerous bait of religious righteousness. The way I see it now and as I did when I returned to the Buddhist Temple of Chicago in the mid-1990s, people are quick to call themselves Buddhists and indulge in the pleasure of being told and telling others that they are already full of wisdom and compassion, that they are already bodhisattvas who don’t need to do more than encourage others to identify as Buddhists and think the same way. It’s using Buddhism for self- and mutual flattery. And like the pigeons being fed beans by the butchers, people’s egos only get fatter and it becomes harder to escape the net.

 

Teachers such as Kiyozawa saw that Jodo Shinshu coming out of the feudal period was just leading people to slaughter as fodder for the continuing dark forces in this world by making them pin their hopes on an afterlife Pure Land. He heard the shout for liberation in Shinran’s words and wanted others to hear it – “Don't keep feeding your ego-self. Let go of the judgments and attachments that prevent you from awakening to the oneness of all life. Encounter the brightness in the world which encompasses all beings and let that Light lead you to freely live as one who enhances life rather than destroys it.”

 

                                                    [photo from Indiana Dunes website]

It is not that the Pure Land teachings are for making you feel bad about yourself – it is for seeing the limitations you have by insisting on yourself as the prime judge and beneficiary of the world. There’s a big difference between the joy of spiritual liberation that Shinran says the Larger Sutra describes as his experience and the cheap “feel-good” sound bites that people would rather hear. I am grateful that all of you who followed these sessions were willing to hear the words of the Buddha that liberated Shinran and Akegarasu.

When All Attain Birth - Sutra Study Class Session 19

For Part Two of the Larger Sutra we only looked at the beginning (section 22, pages 51-52) and the ending of the verse section known as Tōbōge “Eastern Direction Gatha” (section 27, page 58-59). The Akegarasu piece we looked at was “About Nature” (pages 97-99 in Shout of Buddha).

 

Although there are pages and pages of material in Part Two, I honestly have not read all of it and even Shinran only seems focused on the beginning part, the “Fulfillment Passage” and not much else.

 

In the first section of Part Two, the Buddha tells Ananda of the fulfillment of Dharmakara’s 11^th, 17^th and 18^th vows. In summary – the vow of all in the Pure Land are truly settled, the vow that all Buddhas will praise Amitayus and the vow that all beings hearing Amida’s Name will attain birth. One question that came up in the translation of this text is when does the attainment of birth occur. The Chinese character soku 即 in soku-toku-ojo could mean “is” such as in the Heart Sutra (“form is emptiness, emptiness is form”) and the English speakers in the translation committee argued for “immediately” but in the end, the text reads “they then all attain birth,” as if they have to first satisfy some conditions and sometime later they will attain birth in the Pure Land.

 

For Akegarasu, the theme in the Larger Sutra is awakening to the oneness of all beings and confronting our ego-centered judgments that justify exclusion of some people from our “in” crowd. His article “About Nature” is written in response to Soga Ryojin’s piece called “From the Future World.” (You can read an excerpt in English “From the World of the Future,” p. 239 in A Soga Ryojin Reader, translated by Jan Van Bragt. It is obviously an excerpt because there’s only one page of English but the footnote says the Japanese article Mirai no sekai yori is seven pages in the collection of Soga’s selected works.) Akegarasu criticizes Soga for making humans seem separate from “nature” when in reality we are part of nature, we are nature.

 

The Tōbōge is a long poem about the bodhisattvas from the east going to visit Amida’s land in the west, but I wanted us to read the last six verses just to emphasize the theme that true enlightenment is when we can perceive all beings in the Pure Land with us. The verses tell us that for that awareness we can’t rely on our own limited wisdom but must keep listening to the Dharma, listening to Buddha’s wisdom of non-discrimination. In a way, Akegarasu is saying that to Soga – don’t make Dharmakara seem so separate from us. Universal liberation symbolized by Dharmakara’s aspiration means we are all together in nature, in reality.

 

[From X/Twitter account Anndoe, anti-apartheid activist in Hiroshima]

I’m writing this seven months after we met for the online session. So many things happened that prevented me from continuing this post, but right now, I feel I need to get back to the Larger Sutra. I’m so sick of hearing these authoritarians talking of merit, hard work, law-and-order etc. to make their case that some people are worthless and anyone trying to help them is “woke” (deluded goody two-shoes bleeding hearts). How come we’ve witnessed over six months of tens of thousands of Palestinians, adults and children, being killed and maimed because they’re called terrorists, aligned with the Hamas group who killed and kidnapped a few hundred Israelis on October 7? How come we read about so many young Black men shot to death by police (the latest is Dexter Reed in Chicago)? How come so many homeless people are having their shelters and possessions trashed in “clean-ups” while more and more people are being evicted from their homes?

 

As Shin Buddhists we should not be expecting any of the marginalized people suffering now to have to meet some special criteria (such as “just say Namo Amida Butsu”) for us to see them as being born in the Pure Land simultaneously with each of us. It is for us to hear their cries and answer the call to help them when we hear “Namu Amida Butsu.”

Lights and Castes – Sutra Study Class Session 18

We finished up Part One of the Larger Sutra (sections 9-21, pages 31-50) at the August 15 session and related the Dharmakara story to the Akegarasu piece “The Solitary Pine” (pages 10-15 in Shout of Buddha).

I pointed out that the twelve lights listed in Section 11 (page 36) is what Shinran quotes in Shoshinge. It was when I was chanting Shoshinge for a memorial service that I felt the descriptions of the lights was like a bursting out of praise for the loved one – that she brought light into our lives in many ways.

 

Sections 18 and 19 (pages 46-48) presented the problem of caste discrimination. When Rev. Christina Yanko (from the Toronto temple at the time) gave a seminar at our temple, she pointed out these passages where the king is gloriously stunning and the beggar is disgustingly ugly. We have to see these kinds of passages as reflecting the times when the sutras were compiled – Buddhist institutions were heavily dependent on patronage from the royalty and aristocrats. There was the belief that good karma in your past life means you deserve to be powerful and good-looking in this life, while those who are struggling to get by are looking pitiful as punishment for bad karma in their past lives.

 

We don’t have to take such passages as the gospel truth because Buddhists early on recognized that all texts reflect the biases of the humans who recited and wrote them out. As Rev. Yanko told us, we can still look to the essential message of the Larger Sutra of equality and respect for all beings and take these discriminatory passages as add-ons not related to the central teachings of the text.

[Vasubandhu]

Much of the rest of Part One was made of descriptions of the Pure Land, the trees and ponds etc. We don’t have to take these passages as literally true – in fact, with Vasubandhu and his commentary on the Larger Sutra (Jodoron), we see people knew that these descriptions indicate deeper symbolic meanings. And to know that one of the first great Pure Land teachers in China, Tanluan, expanded upon Vasubandhu’s commentary (in Ronchu) means that the long tradition of Pure Land teachings in China was about metaphors from the beginning, not about painting a fantasy afterlife wonderland for people to believe in.

 

For the past couple Higashi ministers’ retreats we’ve been learning about Vasubandhu’s and Tanluan’s analysis of the Larger Sutra and the material is too complex for me to convey. In the weekly Kyogyoshinsho study group led by Prof. Proffitt, we started reading the fourth chapter “Realization” and Shinran quotes Vasubandhu and Tanluan to show his understanding of the Pure Land as a symbol. It’s a shame some Shin ministers are still stuck in literal readings of the texts when the wise men of ancient times knew that’s not how you read scriptures.

 

When I first read “The Lonely Pine” by Akegarasu, I took it as an ode to one individual’s inner strength and triumph. But if we look at it knowing how deeply Akegarasu was moved by the Larger Sutra, the Lonely Pine could be a reflection of Dharmakara’s aspiration and pure practice which led to benefitting uncountable beings, not just gaining a prize for himself. When the lumberjacks come to cut down the Lonely Pine, their axes and saws are turned away by a power emanating from the tree. When someone taps into an aspiration more ultimate than individual glory, there is no force with the power to cut down that aspiration.

 

Heavy Lifting Vows – Sutra Study Class Session 17

 

At the August 1 session we looked at Section 8 (pages 29-31), the verses called San Sei Ge aka Juseige, and two of Akegarasu’s pieces “Four Lives” (pages 93-94) and “Cicada” (page 105) in Shout of Buddha.

 

Higashi Honganji calls the verses San Sei Ge “Three Vows Gatha” because the first three verses are explicitly expressed as pledges, but the Nishi Honganji title of Juseige is more descriptive of the whole set of verses. The character jū can mean “repeated” (as used in many translations) and it can mean “add layer upon layer” (kasaneru) adding up to “heavy” (omoi).

 

I heard Dr. Haneda joke that Dharmakara came up with Juseige to sum up his vows so we didn’t have to chant all forty-eight at our temples’ Sunday services. In a way, Juseige is a summary of the vows, stating the essence of Dharmakara’s aspirations. That essence is not just in the first three verses but expressed throughout Juseige – his deep wish to include all beings in a shared experience of awakening.

 

 

[from Instagram – cicada with Shinran statue in the background at the head temple of the Koshoji sect of Jodo Shinshu]

 

I picked out the two Akegarasu pieces to show him quietly appreciating the lives around him – his friends and the insect. The Dharmakara story could be read as a grand drama but on a concrete level, it is about ochi-tsuite, just settling down into life as-it-is (or as Kiyozawa says, raku-zai, borrowing the Zen term “falling down into existence”). In our session I think I said something about expressions like “vow” and “aspiration” can sound so abstract, but the Larger Sutra is showing us Shakyamuni Buddha as a human being tapping into the deep wish inside all of us to feel a part of this whole universe of living beings. So the two Akegarasu pieces remind us of the concreteness of our moments experiencing simply being with other beings. Enlightenment doesn’t need to mean much more than that.

 

Dog Dogma – Sutra Study Class Session 16

At the July 18 session we looked at vows 36-48 (Section 7, pages 27-29) and Akegarasu’s “Indescribable Changes” (page 23-27) in Shout of Buddha.

I didn’t have much to say about that last bunch of vows except to point out that Vow 38 is the “fashion vow” – that makes us aware how judgmental we are about what people are wearing. The vow tells us to see all clothes as “fine robes” regardless of whether there are stains, rips, faded colors etc.

 

The last vow mentions the “three dharma-insights” which the Glossary defines on pages 113-114. What is usually translated in Shin texts as “insight” is actually nin, like in the third paramita nin-niku, “endure abuse.” Here’s a reference:

http://tibetanbuddhistencyclopedia.com/en/index.php?title=Three_Endurances_in_the_Dharma

 

In Shōshinge, Shinran praises Shandao’s commentary on the Contemplation Sutra which says all nembutsu followers can be just like Queen Vaidehi in attaining the three dharma-insights. Considering the story of Queen Vaidehi, she had to endure a lot of suffering to get to those insights, particularly the pain of realizing how one’s own judgments were gravely mistaken.

 

The third of the dharma-insights “insight into the non-origination of all existence” is what Akegarasu illustrates in his poem:

            When the large dog appeared at the entrance to the room

            The cats which were sleeping there

            Jumped up in surprise and escaped,

            By accident knocking over a small table:

            The rice bowl was broken.

            The housewife is putting the two pieces together.

            The dog watches her face as if to say,

            “What has happened?”

The web of causes and conditions is so intricate and stretches over vast periods of time but like the dog we wonder why some event suddenly occurred as if out of nowhere. To me “non-origination” means we can’t claim some direct cause like “The devil made me buy this dress” or “The earthquake came to punish the gays.” There is no creation story in Buddhism because how the present world came into being is beyond our knowledge and comprehension.

 

In the poem, though, the dog doesn’t realize he set in motion the sequence of events leading to the broken rice bowl. Even though in the larger picture there is “non-origination of all existence,” we shouldn’t be like the dog and act like we don’t know how some things got broken in our society. As I’ve seen over and over (such as in Piketty’s book on capital), policies were made in the early 1980s that led to a lot of the problems we now face, but we can confront those policies and hopefully turn some things around.

Pervasiveness of Patriarchy – Sutra Study Class Session 15

 At the June 20 session we looked at the 23^rd to 35^th vows and Akegarasu’s “Cross Section of Love” (Shout of Buddha, pp. 149-157).  I mainly wanted to discuss the 35^th vow but most of what we covered is what I wrote in my blog (https://windycityjodoshinshu.blogspot.com/2018/09/vertigo-and-thirty-fifth-vow.html) and the “Women in Buddhism” series (used to be on the West Covina temple’s website but it was picked up by other websites). The main takeaway is that all the translations of the 35^th vow by ignoring the nuances of the three separate terms (female-person, female-body and female-image) are perpetuating the incorrect notion that only males qualify for enlightenment in the Pure Land.

 

The Akegarasu piece was very problematic for me and others in the study group. No matter how wise a Dharma teacher is in many ways, they are not exempt from our pointing out their prejudices and shortcomings. When I first read the piece as a young (late-20s) single person, the idealism Akegarasu expressed sounded attractive to me, but now as an old married person, his descriptions of relationships are discomforting. I can see Joan Sweany, as a single woman finding agreement with the piece as I did when younger, but I wonder how Rev. Gyoko Saito could relate to it because of how I’ve gotten to know him and his wife Toshiko over the years. Maybe he was still thinking of his first love, the woman he fell in love with when he first joined Akegarasu’s group – her parents objected to his wanting to marry her and she left the group.

 

What Akegarasu describes in that piece is why in Buddhism “love” has the negative connotation of “possessiveness.” I know women can get just as obsessed over a man as a man can feel about a woman, but usually women don’t have the means to turn their obsession into possession (unless she’s the Kathy Bates character breaking James Caan’s ankles in the movie “Misery”). Even in the piece when Akegarasu imagines a man’s life being completely “killed” by the woman’s overwhelming power, to me it’s just a twisted expression of how the man controls the woman by putting her in the role of his dominatrix.

[Poster from Communist Student Union of Germany]

For Akegarasu in his time and place, the pervasiveness of patriarchy was deeply embedded in the culture and despite his knowing the Buddhist teaching of respecting the independence of each being, he may have treated some women in his life more like possessions, receptacles of his urges, rather than as fellow Dharma seekers. At least that’s what I heard one minister in Japan criticize Akegarasu for – stringing along his mistress (during his second marriage) who first came to him to hear the Dharma.

 

There are other pieces in Shout of Buddha where Akegarasu demonstrates respect towards his women followers and I believe his assistants such as Toa Nomoto had boundaries that they didn’t allow him to violate. But no matter who the teacher is, we should recognize that any human will exploit another as an object if society lets them get away with it.