Amida Awakens Jason

Paul:

Just wanted to drop you a line to thank you for your blog. I discovered it for the first time about six weeks ago, and found it absolutely repugnant. (I was one of those who wanted Amida and the Pure Land to be only symbols.)

Your presentation of Shinran and the Sutras has challenged me very personally and very directly in a very sensitive place - my religious faith. Thanks to that challenge, however, I’ve discovered something profound and beautiful:

Faith in the abstract is powerless.

I’m an American living abroad in Norway (my wife’s country of origin). In the two years since I embraced (if only superficially) the Pure Land dharma, I’ve never had the opportunity to visit a Shin temple, or even meet another Shin Buddhist in the flesh - let alone say the nembutsu together with anyone. (The only Buddhists in my neck of the world are Theravada, Tibetan and Zen.)

It’s been a lonely journey…

The internet has been a critical link for me to others of faith. Thanks for offering your lively forum as a place for me to be challenged, prodded, delighted, distressed, and most of all, reminded to be grateful for the benevolence of Amida.

Namu Amida Butsu.

Regards, Jason

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Hi Jason,

Your words bring me great joy. Amida Buddha has done exactly as Shinran said he would. You have opened yourself up to listen deeply, and Amida Buddha has given you his SHINJIN.

Nothing else was needed. You simply listened.

Now you have had the one thought moment of true entrusting that Shinran speaks of.

That moment is filled with mystery…the mystery of having Amida’s infinite karmic merit now become yours…the mystery of you now being grasped, never to be abandoned.

Shinran calls this INCONCEIVABLE.

And so you too have reached the end of your journey…the journey of transmigration from life to life, as an ignorant being, lost in delusion, full of blind passions we cannot fathom, much less overcome.

This is the last stop on the train of suffering…for you, for me, for Eiken Kobai and George Gatenby…and others with the same simple true entrusting…the same SHINJIN.

INCONCEIVABLE.

We will meet, all of us, at the end of this life, in Amida’s Pure Land - because of his person, his work, his primal vow.

Not mythos…not symbol…but inconceivable reality itself.

NamuAmidaButsu! Thank you, Amida Buddha.

Paul R.

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