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.
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.”
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