Buddha of Infinite Light (eBook)

FromChapter1: Infinite Light Thepure land tradition of Buddhism matured in China, but it accomplished its fulldevelopment in the Shin school of Pure Land Buddhism. The Shin school is theculmination of Pure Land thought that took place in Japan. The Japanese may nothave offered very many original ideas to world thought or world culture, but inShin we find a major contribution that the Japanese can make to the world andto all other Buddhist schools. There is one other Buddhist school thatoriginated in Japan—,Nichiren. But all the other schools more or less tracetheir origin, as well as their form, to either China or India. Nichiren issometimes confused with nationalism, but that is not its original intention.But Shin is absolutely free from such connections. In that sense, Shin isremarkable. Shinran(1173–,1263), the founder of the Shin school, lived in Kyoto, Japan. He issaid to be of noble lineage, but that, I suspect, is fiction. He must have beenmore than just an ordinary person and probably belonged to a relativelycultured family, but he did not belong to the nobility. He might have had someconnection with a noble family, but his training, his religious development,took place when he was exiled to the remote northern country, far away from thecapital, the center of Japanese culture in those days. He was a follower ofHonen, who founded the Pure Land school in Japan in 1175. Honen's influence wasextensive at the time, and priests of the traditional schools were not pleasedwith his popularity. Somehow they contrived to have him and his followers,including Shinran, banished to the country. Shinran'sreligious experience deepened during his period of exile. While living in theculturally deprived areas of Japan, he developed a profound understanding ofthe needs of the common people. In those days Buddhism was basically anaristocratic religion, and the study of Buddhism was confined to the learnedclass. Their approach was intellectual and rational, but Shinran knew that thatwas not the way to the authentic religious life. There had to be a more directway, a religious experience that did not require the medium of learning orelaborate rituals. All such things had to be cast aside in order for one tohave religious awakening. Shinran experienced this for himself, and hediscovered the most direct way to that awakening. Ofall the developments that Mahayana Buddhism has achieved in East Asia, the mostremarkable one is the Shin teaching of Pure Land Buddhism. It is remarkablebecause geographically its birthplace is Japan, and historically it is thelatest evolution and the highest point reached in Pure Land Mahayana. The PureLand ideas first originated in India, marked by the appearance of Pure Landscriptures probably about three hundred years after the time of the historicalBuddha, that is, about one century before the Christian era. InChina the Pure Land movement took place toward the end of the fifth century,when the White Lotus Society was formed by Hui-yuan and his friends in 403 CE.The idea of a Buddha Land presided over by the Buddha is as old as Buddhismitself, but the tradition based on the desire to be born in such a land, inorder to attain the final end of the Buddhist life, did not materialize untilBuddhism flourished in China as a practical religion. It took the Japanesegenius of the thirteenth century to further develop it in the form of the Shinteaching as we have it today. TraditionalPure Land doctrine is quite heavily laden with all kinds of what I callaccretions. These elaborations and appendages are not necessary for modernpeople to comprehend in order to get at...