[We
are reminded] that within boundless compassion each of us is Number One,
whether in last place or not. In fact, it is the last-place finisher, the
foolish being, who is first in the eyes of Amida Buddha.
From
Shin Buddhism: Bits of Rubble Turn Into
Gold
Excerpted
in Tricycle as “Number One Fool”
Jodo Shinshu
lost its foremost spokesperson in the West when Dr. Taitetsu Unno passed away
on Dec. 13, 2014.
At one seminar
he mentioned he hated the cocktail parties he had to attend early in his
academic career. I thought to myself, “What’s so bad about cocktail parties?
Casual chit-chat with colleagues while sipping tasty alcoholic drinks sounds
fine to me.” But he explained the thing he hated was: everyone had to stand.
For most women
and especially Asians, there is a dread of situations where you know your short
stature will put you at a disadvantage. As scientific studies have shown,
humans like other animals tend to consider larger bodies as indicative of authority.
The shallowest thinker in the room will be looked at as the expert if he towers
above everyone else. I know at Buddhist gatherings I’ve felt invisible in
crowds of non-Asian women – the stout gal with the shaved head and brown robes
is looked up to as the venerable and this under-five-foot tall pipsqueak is too
far below everyone’s eye-level to be noticed even if I’m dressed in my fanciest
Japanese garb.
What Dr. Unno
developed was a way of making himself seem tall. His voice was deep and
deliberate. He carried himself in the way he stood, walked and sat as man of
unshakable confidence. One trait he had that bothered me in the past is now
something I envy. Although the professors in Japan enjoy being the sole speaker
in the classroom (students are to be seen and not heard), at American colleges,
students are allowed not only to ask questions but to challenge the instructor.
What I’ve seen Dr. Unno do at his lectures is sternly shut someone down if they
start to veer in a direction apart from his presentation. In some cases,
students are just voicing their comments, but I witnessed Dr. Unno in what
seemed a cruel stroke, put down a person who started to assert his opinion.
After the seminar I told Dr. Unno he didn’t have to be so hard on that person
because he was a long time temple member, not someone making an ignorant
generalization about Buddhism. But now considering how much that same person
has disrupted my presentations, openly questioning my qualifications to be the
teacher, I wish had Dr. Unno’s swift samurai sword of words.
It may rub some
of my fellow baby-boomers the wrong way, but Dr. Unno was like the Louie
DePalma character in the TV show “Taxi.” He knew if he didn’t gain the
upperhand and let people know he was boss, they would feel justified by their
height to rule over him.
The fact that
Dr. Unno spent most of his academic career at Smith College in Northampton,
Massachusetts, shows he was free of many of the ethnocentric pressures on Jodo
Shinshu scholars and ministers on the West Coast and Hawaii, who are used to
speaking to primarily Japanese American “baggage Buddhists.” Dr. Unno was the
key influence on dozens of people on the East Coast and beyond to become not
just “convert Buddhists” but to whole-heartedly embrace Jodo Shinshu as the
ultimate expression of Mahayana. Although many Buddhist writers have been
published by niche presses such as Wisdom and Shambhala, what an accomplishment
for Dr. Unno that he had two books published by Doubleday, a mainstream press.
I started reading Shin Buddhism: Bits of
Rubble Turn Into Gold again and I’m struck by the wide variety of Western
cultural references he brings into his presentation. Of course, he values his
Japanese heritage but he knows that to speak to an ethnically diverse audience
you have to go beyond “Bachan Jichan” (“Granny, Grandpa”) stories of old Japan.
At the last seminar I attended, I was impressed that he felt comfortable going
beyond the set phrases to describe Amida, and was stretching out into parallels
found in Western art and philosophy.
To be the Number
One Fool is to settle humbly (Namu) in the embrace of unlimited wisdom
(Amitabha) and to shout that message with a lion’s roar, unintimidated by anyone
who happens to be taller.
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