The SHINRAN Manifesto: Staying In Dialogue
Ray: hi paul,
well, there are certainly a lot of ruffled feathers at the shinlist (a Yahoo! egroup). i am surprised and disappointed at the personal and abusive remarks aimed at you.
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Hi Ray,
I’m neither surprised, nor disappointed. I expected it.
When I began this work, I anticipated this exact reaction from any number of people.
I’m hardly made of stone, but I have a very strong sense of vocation about what I am doing here. A bit of verbal abuse will not deter me from doing it.
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Ray: that said, i have yet to find a “cyber sangha” that does not implode in such a way. the same people seem to dominate every shin egroup that comes into existence! oh well.
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It’s a function of us each and all living an iceberg life of blind passions, truly. Beneath the thin veneer of civility, there is a reptilian brain at work (to use a modern concept) - or our ineradicable egotism, our endless cravings and aversions, to use Shinran’s recognition of ourselves as evil persons - spoken as a disciple of Shakyamuni Buddha.
The really valuable work truly begins when the veneer of religious piety, Buddhic serenity, etc. is stripped away, and we get to see just what a terrible ontological predicament we are in - each and all.
Only as we truly recognize that we are not only “foolish” (which is a word that has a sweet connotation - like the foolishness of a sweet little puppy) but potentially MURDEROUS - as Shinran pointed out to Yuien, who thought it impossible that he could ever kill somebody - that the depth of our endarkenment becomes radically apparent to us.
Yuien recounts his conversation with Shinran in the Tannisho - Lamenting Divergences:
Good thoughts arise in us through the prompting of good karma from the past, and evil comes to be thought and performed through the working of evil karma.
The late Master said, “Knowing that every evil act done- even as slight as a particle on the tip of a strand of rabbit’s fur or sheep’s wool- has its cause in past karma.”
Further, the Master once asked, “Yuien-bo, do you accept all that I say?”
“Yes I do,” I answered.
“Then will you not deviate from whatever I tell you?” he repeated.
I humbly affirmed this.
Thereupon he said, “Now, I want you to kill a thousand people. If you do, you will definitely attain birth.”
I responded, “Though you instruct me thus, I’m afraid it is not in my power to kill even one person.”
“Then why did you say that you would follow whatever I told you?”
He continued, “By this you should realize that if we could always act as we wished, then when I told you to kill a thousand people in order to attain birth, you should have immediately done so.
But since you lack the karmic cause inducing you to kill even a single person, you do not kill. It is not that you do not kill because your heart is good.
In the same way, a person may not wish to harm anyone and yet end up killing a hundred or a thousand people.”
Thus he spoke of how we believe that if our hearts are good, then it is good for birth, and if our hearts are evil, it is bad for birth, failing to realize that it is by the inconceivable working of the Vow that we are saved.
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Ray: i made a post there calling people on their behaviour, it is unacceptable. that said, i don’t agree with your position, but i will keep reading your blog with interest. i am after all, just another foolish being of wayward passion. namo amida bu.
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I really do appreciate the ability to stay “in dialogue” with you, Ray. The Shin Ugly Blog is, among other things, my sincere attempt to do that with someone who holds your position, whether cleric, scholar or layperson.
I believe that if we CAN stay in dialogue, we will each and all get the opportunity to wheel up our own memetic storehouse of ideas and beliefs, and take inventory of WHAT we believe, and WHY we believe it.
That is the preparatory work for doing a PRICELESS “compare and contrast” exercise with what Honen, Shinran, Yuien and Rennyo have in their memetic storehouses.
At the end of the exercise, you may well decide that:
- my understanding of our founding teachers is simply incorrect or incomplete, or
- my understanding is accurate, but as a modern person you do not see things in the same way, or
- my understanding is causing you to listen deeply and perhaps re-evaluate yours.
Any of those positions has integrity. I am just working right now to make the “compare and contrast” exercise very EXPLICIT, for the sake of many people, rather than keeping it implicit as it has been up until now - from what I have observed and experienced in the Shin Buddhist community.
Of course, some people will choose to ignore me altogether - or engage in vilification though I am doing nothing that is worthy of it, truly - simply because they strongly disagree with my position.
Whether that position of ignoring or vilifying me has integrity is for them to decide, not me.
What WOULD be very valuable for such people would be to look inside and discover WHY they are having such a knee-jerk reaction.
If and when they do such an introspection, no doubt they will find the usual suspects just as Buddha teaches: vectors of craving and aversion hidden below the surface of their public personas - the very vectors that can, given the right circumstances, lead us to become murderers in deed as well as in word, just as Shinran explained.
Truly we’re all in the same boat, at the end of the day, just as you say - wayward and foolish. Worst of all, we are all too often ignorant of just how wayward and foolish we are. Truly we don’t even know what we don’t even know, not just as individuals, but as a race in this age of Dharma Decline.
Which of course, is what Honen discovered about himself, and Shinran too. The awareness both astounded and appalled them. It made them desperate men, men who sought desperately for salvation entirely outside themselves, in the person and work of Amida Buddha.
We have, unfortunately, a knee-jerk reactivity against such languaging as well - many of us - due to our experience of growing up in a culture dominated by Jehovah and Jesus. I use the language directly, both to be true to our teachers, who used the very same language, and also to tease out of the hidden corners our common aversion to it.
For many of us, recognizing that particular vector of linguistic aversion is going to be key to becoming persons of settled Shinjin - where we are not longer afraid or ashamed to talk frankly about our need for SALVATION, and the fact that we trust this Buddha named Amida to deliver us from our endarkenment to his own enlightenment in his own Pure Land.
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Ray: i posted on the shinlist a piece referring to karen armstrong and her views on mythos and logos.
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I’ll take a good look at it, though I’ve read Armstrong and others - and understand the essential position already.
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Ray: i think you take a very literal view of the buddhist texts and that you think that that is how shinran and rennyo interpreted them also.
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I do indeed take a literal view, and yes I do indeed think that Honen, Shinran, Yuien and Rennyo did as well.
And I do see return to that perspective as the only hope for the Shin community that is declining at a remarkable rate - not the many and varied “church growth” programs that people in leadership are depending on.
But the survival of the religious organization is ultimately NOT my concern. My concern is the Triple Gem of Buddha, Sangha, Dharma, thusly:
- The sangha has one TRUE purpose.
- The TRUE purpose is to be a place where non-Buddhas like us can listen deeply to the dharma.
- The TRUE purpose of listening deeply to the dharma is to cease being non-Buddhas and become Buddhas.
- In this age of dharma decline, the ONLY dharma that can reliably lead us to becoming Buddhas is the TRUE Teaching, Practice and Realization of the Pure Land way.
That has nothing to do with any Buddhist organization - Shin or otherwise - and everything to do with us as beings who are otherwise doomed to endless cycles of re-birth in ignorance into lives of suffering, as Shakyamuni Buddha and Shinran both teach unequivocally.
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Ray: i am not sure about that (my literal view and my assertion that it was our founders view as well).
i don’t know.
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Ray, I admire you for saying “I am not sure…I don’t know”.
That really does provide fertile ground for both listening and responding as I continue to unfold what I call the “Shin Ugly” perspective.
As I do, and as you consider it, you may reject my position, which is fine with me and would not affect our dharma friendship in the least.
We can agree to disagree.
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Ray: but i do think that people of many cultures have found the mythos way of seeing the world a very important way of providing meaning to their lives. and in this modern age we have lost a lot of that. i think you may disagree with me here. that’s okay. at least we can do it respectfully and maintain a dialogue. 
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We absolutely can do it with mutual respect - and at the same time disagree assertively - and explain why we do.
In that regard, I am NOT interesting in changing minds. Why? Because changing minds is Amida Buddha’s business, not mine.
What I AM interested in is presenting the dharma of Shin Ugly - Shinran’s plain teaching for plain people - just as he himself did.
I have done so already with several people, and then engaged them in a deep dialogue that led them to
- awaken their aspiration to Buddhahood,
- come face to face with their terrible predicament of being evil persons unable to bootstrap themselves and
- hear the dharma of depending on Amida Buddha in a literal sense, just as Shakyamuni shared it with Ananda, and Shinran shared it with the world, and Rennyo shared it (once again) with the moribund Shin sangha.
With their doubts fully extinguished, these people crossed the threshhold of Shinran’s same SHINJIN (True Entrusting), just as Eiken Kobai explains. The True Nembutsu of simple gratitude without calculated thought of any kind emerged from their lips:
NAMU-AMIDA-BUTSU.
THANK YOU AMIDA BUDDHA.
I TAKE REFUGE IN YOU.
They became among those of the “rightly established group“, who simply entrust themselves to Amida Buddha: his person, his vow and his work. They look forward to the transition at the end of this life to the Pure Land, where they will attain, at last, the end of suffering.
Same as it ever was.
These people, my friend, are experiencing “salvation in the present” . This is, as Professor Eiken Kobai points out, the critical understanding that Shinran brought to the sangha, as he unpacked Honen’s Nembutsu in his major work KyoGyoShinShu (True Teaching, Practice and Realization of the Pure Land Way) and many other documents that we can each and all refer to.
And this was exactly what Rennyo restored, that drew in flocks of people who, regardless of their lack of sophisticated education - Buddhist, post-modern, or otherwise - simply rejoiced to know that they too were grasped by Amida Buddha, never to be abandoned, that they too were experiencing their LAST lifetime of blind passion and endless suffering.
I will unpack all this in more detail on the Shin Ugly blog, of course.
But I post to SHINLIST, and several other places because I KNOW that there are many people lurking there who are simply confused by the post-modern perspective of Shin Semiotics - or Mythos and Logos - or Process Theology, etc.
THOSE folks, lurking on SHINLIST, and BELIEFNET, and other places, often going to Shin temples if they live near one, deserve to hear the SHIN UGLY perspective that they would have heard if they lived in medieval Japan, and encountered Shinran directly as “village idiots”.
My vocation is to make sure that they do.
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Ray: i will look forward to any post where you expand on why you dismiss the “mythos” position.
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Thank you for your gracious invitation to continue the dialogue, my friend. I WILL expand, in great detail, using the words of my teachers. Just as important, I will give you, and anyone who cares to read, an honest window into my own life experience - particularly the great suffering that brought me to become a person of the same Shinjin as my teachers.
That experience, difficult as it has been, provides a cogent and powerful explanation of why divergences from the True teaching based on personal views - including Shin Semiotics and other modernist and post-modernist constructions - are so terribly harmful to plain people in dire straits who are desperately seeking the salvation that Amida Buddha offers us ALL.
So - now I will go back to doing the “compare and contrast” exercise I began the other day by describing to any who care to read the Shin Semiotics perspective on Amida Buddha, using examples from widely recognized and respected teachers in the Shin Buddhist community.
I bow to you as well.
Paul R