Part One: Right View
When I first started attending the Buddhist Temple of Chicago, I heard Rev. Gyomay Kubose translating hongan as “the will to live.” He gave the example of a plant that grows from a crack in the city sidewalk as manifesting the strength of that will to live. Reading Shout of Buddha (trans. Saito and Sweany, Orchid Press, 1977), I thought Akegarasu was also explaining hongan, the Original Vow, as not only the will to live but my will to live. In the piece “To Live,” I identified with Miss T who proclaims, “I just want to live” despite all her sufferings, such as the loss of family members.
After Rev. Gyoko Saito left the Chicago temple to take a post in Los Angeles, I went through a phase of disillusionment with Buddhism and the teachings of Akegarasu, in particular. What good was having a strong will to live when my life was continual sufferings? All my intense listening to Rev. Kubose in Sunday services, the meditation sessions and in personal consultations wasn’t helping to relieve my sufferings and I decided I would quit the temple after it hosted the Eastern Buddhist League conference.
But it was at that EBL conference that I was led to Dr. Nobuo Haneda by Rev. Saito and his wife. In Dr. Haneda’s weekly class at BTC I came to learn why he and Rev. Saito translated hongan as “innermost aspiration.” It is not my simple will to live, but it is a desire gushing up from a deep, ancient consciousness shared with all beings, not confined by the constricting walls of my ego.
During that time I studied under Dr. Haneda, I realized I was reading Akegarasu wrong and that realization was made more clear when I read him in Japanese during my studies in Japan and later studying with Rev. Saito in Los Angeles.
In the piece “To Live,” the person I should identify with is Akegarasu, the one who clearly hears Miss T and respects her vibrant expression of being alive. I found this was exemplified by Rev. Saito – in his talks and in his writings, he was always the listener, the learner, the one who bows down to the lives he encounters. I saw in him the embodiment of Namu Amida Butsu.
So I can state that I was misled by Rev. Kubose saying hongan was “the will to live.” Hongan is not about destructively busting through the concrete as an urban dandelion. Hongan is the aspiration to recognize the organic life of the minerals in the concrete and to embrace their life as being as dignified as the flower. To hear and say Namu Amida Butsu is to recognize my connection to all lives, how much they have helped me, along with how much I’ve harmed them in my selfish pursuit of personal peace.
Part Two: Right Action
Here I also want to explain my recent break with Dr. Haneda, who I will always consider my important teacher. From him I learned Amitayus means all lives uncountable (mu-ryō) of past, present and future. But for me it is important to encounter some of these many lives, not just in Buddhism study groups and at Japanese American temples, but in the world that includes the ill and injured, the financially struggling, the demonized folks all around us and far away in all directions.
In Q & A sessions, whenever Dr. Haneda is asked about social justice activity, he answers that it is all “small compassion,” an individual’s efforts to feel good about oneself. It is a response I’ve heard often from Japanese scholars and an attitude some Buddhist Churches of America ministers also subscribe to. But for me, I need concrete experience of my interconnection with other lives.
Becoming involved in affordable housing campaigns has introduced me to people I would not encounter otherwise – men and women who lost their housing because of a sudden job layoff, divorce, serious accident or illness, and not because they are “too lazy to work.”
[Calligraphy of the beginning of Shoshinge displayed at the Kiyozawa Manshi Memorial Museum in Hekinan, Japan]
Now as I am involved in supporting efforts to end the genocide in Palestine, I’m learning how connected I am to people who are on the other side of the world from me. When we chant at the beginning of Shoshinge, Kimyō muryōjū nyorai, I know the Tathagata (“thus-come”) includes the uncountable lives being massacred in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. How can we not honor them as well as our teachers and relatives of the past?
The second line of Shoshinge is paying respect to the inconceivable lights (wisdoms) of the universe – those wisdoms include indigenous wisdoms as well as the insights expressed in Islam, Judaism and Christianity. It is the height of sectarian arrogance to think Amitabha (unbounded lights) only refers to Sino-Japanese Buddhism.
I am grateful that when the genocidal attacks on Gaza started, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship has offered Refuge Circles on Zoom, four days a week to give us a moment of calm to process our grief and outrage. In September they asked me to conduct two sessions. In the first session I explained a lot about Pure Land Buddhism (which not many BPF members are aware of) but in the second session as our shared contemplation, I read from the second chapter of Kyogyoshinsho, the series of verses where Shinran praises hongan. (Collected Works of Shinran, pages 66-67).
The Vow of Compassion is like vast space, for all its excellent virtues are broad and boundless. …
It is like the great earth, for it sustains the birth of all beings.
It is like the great waters, for it washes away the scum of blind passions [the selfish greed of oneself and others that causes sufferings].
It is like the great fire, for it burns the firewood of all [one-sided] views.
It is like the great wind, for it goes everywhere in the world and is without hindrances.
That is just a bit of Shinran’s description of hongan, the innermost aspiration to move us into caring and into action as part of this interconnected reality of all lives.
