Surprisingly, even to me, I’ve enjoyed learning about the Pure Land Tradition of Buddhism after buying a book by Taitetsu Unno four years ago. From time to time I pick up River of Fire, River of Water, liking the parts that resonate with me, downplaying the parts that don’t.
As I said in a title of a blog post earlier this year, “I enjoy Buddhism’s Pure Land tradition, but I don’t believe in it.” This is common among atheists like myself.
It’s possible to be moved by religious devotion without accepting the teachings of a religion. When I see a crowd of Catholics waiting for white smoke to come out of a Vatican chimney, then cheering when the new Pope shows his face for the first time, I’m touched by all of those joyful faces. Visitors to a majestic cathedral don’t have to be Christian in order to enjoy the architecture and artistry. Deep Tibetan chanting can send a chill up my spine even though I have no idea what they’re saying.
Similarly, when I read a book like River of Fire, River of Water, I mentally translate the parts that make sense to me into a non-religious way of thinking.
Pure Land Buddhism is pleasingly down to earth, compared to other forms of Buddhism. When I read about those other forms, my head (metaphorically) explodes with all the talk of the Eightfold Path, where you’re supposed to engage in Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.
Yikes! That’s a lot of rightness. I’ve got no interest in becoming enlightened if it takes so much to attain a state that may not even exist. So I heartily agree with these passages from Unno’s book.
The ideal of monastic Buddhism is transcendence of mundane existence, as if one were ascending to the mountaintop. In contrast, the praxis of Pure Land Buddhism takes place by descending into the valley, the shadow of the mountains. We find a similar contrast in Chinese civilization.
Like monastic Buddhism, the Confucian ideal may be symbolized by the soaring mountain peaks, manifesting the highest achievements of the literati. And like the Pure Land, Taoism is found in the valley and lowlands, a haven for those who do not fit into conventional society for whatever reason. But it is in this valley that life and creativity flourish.
…In Japan, traditional Buddhist monasticism — whether Tendai, Shingon, or Zen — aims at the transcendence of earthly passions. Its basic precepts consist of renouncing all family ties, maintaining celibacy, mastering rigorous disciplines, avoiding contact with the opposite sex, and engaging in elaborate rituals.
In contrast, Pure Land is the trans-descendence into the opposite world, the self-awakening to the immersion in the swamp of anger, jealousy, insecurity, fear, addiction, arrogance, hypocrisy.
It was only natural that Pure Land teaching was originally welcomed especially by those of the lower classes, seen as unredeemable in the eyes of the privileged.
Now we’re talking my sort of language. I’m supremely confident in my ability to manifest anger, jealousy, insecurity, fear, addiction, arrogance, and hypocrisy. Pure Land, here I come!
So long as this isn’t a supernatural place, but a natural habitation. I’m going to save my critique of the supernatural side of Pure Land Buddhism for another blog post, though. Here I’m focusing on what I like about Pure Land Buddhism, which includes:
The wonder of the nembutsu path is that it makes no demands upon a person to become wiser, better, or more perfect. But it does ask us to become authentically real as human beings by awakening to the boundless compassion that sustains us.
Compassion. This is my favorite thing about Pure Land Buddhism — its emphasis on compassion. Which comes in two forms: compassion for others and compassion for ourself.
This morning I had a TURP procedure scheduled for mid-January of next year by the Oregon Urology Institute. If you’re into bladder function details, I described how I became a TURP (transurethral resection of the prostate) candidate after initially not qualifying for the surgery in “After eight years of using a urinary catheter, TURP is planned due to improved bladder function.”
As I was exercising at my athletic club this afternoon on the elliptical trainer machine, I got to thinking about the possible downsides of the surgery. That’s the case with every surgery, complications. My mind was falling into some anxious grooves when some thoughts about compassion bounced me into an optimistic frame of mind.
All I did was tell myself what I already knew: that the TURP procedure has a decent chance of improving my urinary function quality of life. Not only would that make life better for me, but also for my wife, as I’d find it easier to travel and go places with her.
It really was pretty amazing. Simply firing up the self-compassion and other-compassion part of my mind markedly changed my outlook about the surgery — which had come to seem considerably more real once the surgery had been scheduled. Compassion was an anxiety killer. Well, not completely, but compassion definitely weakened the anxiety I’d been feeling when I focused on what could go wrong, rather than what could go right for me and my wife.
Again, I disagree with the supposed supernatural source of compassion in Pure Land Buddhism. However, I heartily agree with the importance of natural compassion, directed toward both ourself and others.
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I think, looking back, it was my association with animals that first aroused my sense of compassion. We always had dogs and cats, as well as a tortoise and white mice. But it was when working in the countryside in the 60’s that my compassion was tested. Often, I would come across rabbits infected with myxomatosis. The Myxoma virus was deliberately introduced into healthy burrows to control the population. It caused the rabbit’s head and eyes to swell, go blind and be quite mushy. My first encounter was when a blind one ran into a wire fence, opening its head even more. I could have ignored it, have it treated (none used then) or dispatched it. Without hesitation, I dispatched it – and quite a few more during the outbreak.
Compassion, as far as I’m concerned manifests on recognising or feeling a sense of a kinship, an interconnectedness. I guess this could apply to our planet, people, animals and plants. Robert Saltzman sums it up when he writes: – “Compassion is not a moral posture. It arises naturally when the structure sees itself replicated everywhere. Each loop recognizes in others the same self-containment, the same isolation, the same impossibility of perfect understanding. [In Buddhism, Dependent Arising and what Saltzman calls the loop point refer to the same structure: everything appears through interdependence.] The heart softens not out of virtue but because the illusion of separateness has lost traction. In that light, compassion is an unavoidable response to ultimate aloneness. It isn’t an act or choice; it’s what the system feels when it sees its own architecture mirrored in others.”
The real lack of compassion then is the lack of realising our interdependence and connectedness to our planet, its environments, it’s creatures and plants – and of course, people of all types. Sadly, many people seem unconcerned about the ravages we are inflicting on the planet. To my mind, such are the uncompassionate.
Apart from the man-introduced myxomatosis and things like traps and snares, I don’t recall ever finding wild creatures ill or suffering. They don’t suffer through ageing or for very long through injury as the hunters and scavengers soon dispatch any sick or dying. In a sense this is nature’s compassion.
Historically, Pure Land Buddhism has much in common with Protestant Christianity. Martin Luther gave his all to perfect himself as a Catholic, but he failed to secure any confidence in salvation. He concluded that the Catholic path of perfection was impossible, and so he gave up on the perfection project and put his faith in Jesus’s promise of salvation to all who believed in him.
Hardly different from the origins of Japanese Pure Land. Shinran, who became a monk at 9 years old, was frustrated with his own spiritual failures and feared being unable to attain enlightenment. So he gave up on the conventional Buddhist way of perfectionism and put his faith in Amitabha’s promise.
Within the purview of Christianity’s original teachings (ie, the New Testament), I believe Protestantism is philosophically reasonable. I feel the same way about Pure Land. That is, looking at what we believe are the earliest Buddhist scriptures, the Pure Land method is philosophically consistent with the Buddha’s teachings.
But if Martin Luther declared himself a Christian Atheist, it would make no sense. Neither would it work for Shinran to declare that Amithaba is a myth and that the universe is nothing but matter with no Buddha Fields. That’s because an inescapable point of both Protestantism and Pure Land is survival from this world into a better life in a supernatural world.
The history of both Christianity and Buddhism is, in a sense, a chronicle of failure and reinvention. Early Christianity’s emphasis on the imminent end of the world failed, as did the prizing of martyrdom, as did asceticism, as did monasticism. The effort to achieve perfection faded, and was replaced by intellectualism and ritual. Then came Protestantism, which brought a new spirit of toleration and ironically a greater severity. The previous standards continued to fade over the centuries, leading to Joel Osteenism, today’s sage of Christian Purelandism.
Buddhism followed a similar trajectory, with sect after new Buddhist sect created and gaining popularity because the ideal was always just out of realization. And it led to the same conclusion: Effort avails nothing, but faith in the promise of salvation brings comfort.
By the way, we’ve seen the same thing in Sant Mat. A long evolution of failure in Hindu sects led to the creation of new sects, including countless hundreds of yoga schools, borrowing from Islam and Sufism, and Sikhism, and this gave us Shiv Dayal Singh and his idea that one could meditate oneself into heaven via a mystical sound that pervades the universe. Followers of Sant Mat know the punchline: That path of return really doesn’t work as advertised. Or it may produce experiences, but these experiences are fleeting and not truly life-changing. They don’t produce genuine confidence in salvation. But they do perhaps produce faith. And the locus of that faith is placed on the promises of the powers of one’s Sant Mat guru. Fail as we will in our quest for perfection, the guru will save us in the end.
And this is really no different from Martin Luther believing in what Jesus promised, or Shinran believing in what a scripture said of the salvific powers of the transcendent Buddha.
In short, be they Christian or Buddhist, or followers of Sant Mat, everyone ends up on the faith bandwagon. Whether they realize it or not, I suspect that deep down, everyone has faith that another world exists apart from this one.
Perhaps some truly have no faith. I guess that’s possible. There may be some people who are true nihilists. But if such people exist, there’s no way they can in good faith be calling themselves Christian or Buddhist or satsangis. If they do make such claims, or in any way practice in these religions, they are always at least saying they’re uncomfortable with their No-Belief declarations. By practicing religion, they’re demonstrating that they don’t truly believe in their No-Belief contentions,
Moreover, they’re showing that they deeply wish that the promises of religion were true. It’s a deep wish that brought them into their religion, a wish they can’t explain and let go of.
I like Rajneesh ( Osho) who had no specific teachings and had no desire to be remembered. His intelligence far outweighed Gurinderji and now that santmat has been diluted into several branches. I choose to forget Osho instead.
Create your own karma before you give God a chance to do it for you because all It will do it’s put you in situations to confront your fears.
When asked what he gained from meditation and enlightenment, the Buddha is said to have replied, “Nothing.” He continued, “However, let me tell you what I lost: anger, anxiety, greed, depression, insecurity, lust, pride, attachment and fear of old age and death”.