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.

Bodhisattvas Everywhere – Sutra Study Class Session 14

At the June 6 session we discussed only the 22^nd vow and read Akegarasu’s “With Whom Would I Like to Live?” (Shout of Buddha, pp. 123-124).

 

Recently (I’m writing this on July 16) in the monthly Kyogyoshinsho online lectures by Prof. Michael Conway for ministers (to help us in talking about Shinran’s teachings to our members), Prof. Conway said the “vow” Shinran says was made “for me only” in Tannisho, is really four vows – the 11^th, 17^th, 18^th and 22^nd. We discussed the 11^th vow in Session 12 and in my last blog post on Session 13, I discussed the relation of the 17^th and 18^th vows, so here I’ll look at why Shinran felt the 22^nd vow was important to include as part of hongan (main vows) along with the other three.

 

As Prof. Conway and other teachers (Takami Inoue and Taira Sato come to mind) point out, in looking at what Shinran says, we should consider his experience in the nembutsu community of Honen and his followers and in the communities Shinran became a part of during his exile and in the Kanto area. The 22^nd vow talks of bodhisattvas – usually in Jodo Shinshu we don’t think of ourselves as bodhisattvas but we should remember that Shinran saw all the many beings around him as bodhisattvas and buddhas.

 

The 22^nd vow refers to the bodhisattva Samantabhadra whose name in Chinese is translated as “universally wise” but originally meant “universally considered worthy.” What Shinran witnessed in Honen’s interactions with people is Honen’s attitude of considering each person as worthy, no matter what their station in life, no matter what immoral acts they were judged as committing. As Akegarasu’s piece says, “he never showed a sour face to anyone,” and Akegarasu goes on to cite the historical Buddha as someone who everyone felt they got along with.

 

So Shinran saw this fulfillment of the 22^nd vow all around him in the bodhisattvas “disguised” as ordinary human beings. I mentioned there’s a book Bodhisattvas Everywhere where Rev. Sakakibara says when he was young he was at a service and thought all the old men and women repeatedly reciting nembutsu were just uneducated fools, but after encountering how powerful the nembutsu is for his life, he realized all those people were bodhisattvas bringing the nembutsu to his foolish heart.

 

 [cover from Tokuso Sakakibara’s book]

Much of Jodo Shinshu (and probably religion in general in our individualistic society) talks of each of us finding our own salvation as if shinjin was this gruel parceled out sparingly to only the deserving ones. But the 11^th and 22^nd vows remind us that Shinran needed to be told (“me only”) that the attainment of great nirvana is experienced in community, in awakening to the fact that we are part of the whole consisting of all lives.

Hearing and Saying – Sutra Study Class Session 13

This is a belated review of the May 16 session. In our reading of vows 14-21 (Larger Sutra section 7, pp 22-23), we went over a few different topics such as the Three-Vow Transition (sangan tennyu referring to the 19^th, 20^th and 18^th vows).

 

I said the 17^th and 18^th vows are like two sides of a coin and got this email about them. I thought instead of just replying to that person, I would use their inquiry as something for me to explore and write about as a follow up to our class.

 

From the email comment:

 

During this week’s class, the 17^th vow was described as “buddhas hearing the Name” and the 18^th vow as “sentient beings saying the Name.” However, Shinran taught that the 17^th Vow is “The Vow that all the Buddhas say the Name” (CWS p. 13) and the fulfillment of the 18^th Vow as “All sentient beings, as they hear the Name, … attain birth” (CWS p. 80). So I was wondering if the interpretation of the 17^th and 18^th vows given in class was perhaps from an earlier Pure Land teacher (Shan-tao or Honen?) who predated Shinran? Thank you for the clarification.

 

As we read in Akegarasu’s piece “Miscellaneous Words” (pp. 201-3 in Shout of Buddha), it’s no use discussing doctrine unless we acknowledge our interaction as actual human beings.

 

[the vows in Chinese and Japanese from the Higashi Honganji Seiten. I always thought it was planned that the 18th vow would fall on page 18 of the book]

The actual person who is telling the Dharmakara story is Shakyamuni Buddha. Through Dharmakara’s vows, he is telling us what the experience of shōgaku, the foremost kind of enlightenment, is. So in the 17^th vow, I think Shakyamuni is saying this story of Dharmakara encapsulated in the Name, Namu Amida Butsu, has to be something other buddhas are talking about, not just a story the one person Shakyamuni tells to the one person Ananda. It has to be a story that other enlightened people (“all buddhas”) relate to as echoing their experience of awakening, otherwise, it’s just a one-off thing for only Shakyamuni. For Shinran, he hears that all the teachers that move him are glorifying and praising the Name, the essence of how awakening is experienced. It wasn’t just Honen giving his version of what enlightenment is, but the same reverberation (“vibe”) as Honen’s expression of awakening is heard in the writings of Shandao, Tanluan et al.

 

For me somehow I was moved by the nembutsu I heard at the Buddhist Temple of Chicago – I really don’t remember which minister it was who was conveying Akegarasu’s words, but more and more I believe it was Rev. Gyoko Saito. I didn’t have much of a grasp of what the nembutsu was and why it moved me and especially after Rev. Saito left for Los Angeles, I felt I wasn’t getting much guidance at the temple about it. Then thankfully I was steered (by Mrs. Saito) to Dr. Nobuo Haneda who clarified what the nembutsu is about and I couldn’t help but be moved by his expressions of it. I wondered if I was just hearing Dr. Haneda’s version since there wasn’t much in the English language materials on Jodo Shinshu at the time (1980s) to support what I heard from him. Then when I went to Japan to study, I heard and read so many teachers (particularly Shinran and the Pure Land masters in their own languages) expressing the nembutsu the way Dr. Haneda did.

 

So in the email above, there is a discrepancy in what the writer thought I said. For me the 17^th vow is “all buddhas saying the Name.” And because those great teachers who came before us are saying the Name, we the beginning students with a long way to go are able to hear the Name. So the 17^th vow is about me and my fellow travelers hearing the Name that all buddhas are praising.

 

The 18^th vow is about us, the mass of beings yet to be enlightened, being able to contemplate the Name so we can say it as a meaningful expression. The word in the 18^th vow nen originally meant “contemplate, to think of, to remember” but as the Pure Land teachings developed in China, it took on the meaning of “to recite.” So by Shinran’s time, the 18^th vow was seen as “all beings saying the Name.”

 

Shinran points to the fulfillment of the 17^th and 18^th vows as described in the second part of the Larger Sutra (pages 51-52). Because the tathagatas of the ten-quarters are praising Amitayus (“immeasurable life”), the deluded beings are able to hear that Name and “with even a single thought of the Buddha,” they all attain birth in the Pure Land. That “single thought” is the nembutsu, which can come out as an audible recitation, in writing or in non-verbal ways.

 

So my clarification to the email writer is to point out that what I said is not a different interpretation from Shinran and his teachers. The two sides of the coin are: because I was able to hear the Name from those great teachers (17^th vow), it becomes meaningful for me to say the Name (18^th vow). And like what Dr. Haneda did for me, I hope that my efforts will help you to also hear the Name being praised by the great teachers (17^th vow) and the fulfillment of the 18^th vow is when you say the Name as something that has meaning for your life.