道元論 12On Dogen, Part 12

In 1175, as the Heian period entered its final phase, Honen left the Kurodani valley on Mount Hiei where he had spent so many years, descended the mountain, and entered the streets of Heian-kyo. For a monk who had renounced the secular world and gone into seclusion at the age of eighteen, this must have felt like plunging into an alien dimension. He had spent roughly twenty-five years living near a remote valley deep in the mountains, his days consumed entirely by ascetic practice and reading.

During the quarter century of his seclusion the face of Heian-kyo had been utterly transformed. As I have surveyed throughout this series, the city had fallen to the brink of chaos amid the dizzying acceleration of the times. Urban chaos becomes violent confusion for the people living inside it. People who had lost their bearings roamed the capital. The imperial family and the aristocracy who had controlled the court had lost their power. Seen from another angle the city had become a vast human swarm drifting through a small world without leadership. For Honen, who had fled the secular world to hide in the depths of Mount Hiei, this was the reality that existing Buddhism could not reach. Waking from his long dream, Honen recovered his own will.

The people of Heian-kyo in this era believed that Mappo (the Age of the Decline of the Dharma) had arrived. The capital had entered an age of destruction in the most literal sense. Kamo no Chomei's Hojoki, which I have already mentioned, records in detail the events that struck Heian-kyo over the roughly ten years from 1177 to 1185. According to the text, a great fire in 1177 burned a third of the capital to the ground. In 1180 a massive tornado inflicted devastating damage on the city. Approximately one month later Taira no Kiyomori forced through a declaration relocating the capital to Fukuhara, and Heian-kyo was temporarily reduced to a ghost town. The Fukuhara relocation failed and by November the capital returned to Heian-kyo, but from this point the era of upheaval began in earnest.

In 1181 drought and epidemic led to famine, and the Hojoki records the wretched scene of corpses left lying throughout the streets of Heian-kyo. The year 1181 was also when Taira no Kiyomori, the man who had single-handedly achieved the ascendancy of the warrior class, died in March. Heian-kyo was violently shaken. These relentless visitations of Mappo culminated in the unprecedented great earthquake of 1185, which brought everything crashing down. The years 1180 to 1185 also coincided with the Genpei War, the head-on collision between the Taira and the Minamoto that is called Japan's greatest civil war. The misery of daily life in Heian-kyo during this period is beyond anything we in the present can imagine. The calm tourist destination that is today's Kyoto gives no hint of what it once was.

When we align Honen's timeline of propagating the Pure Land teaching against these events, the people's loss of faith in the established Buddhist powers becomes starkly visible. Holding the sensibility of this era in mind is essential for understanding the background against which the Pure Land lineage, leading from Honen to Shinran, came into flower, and for seeing why Jodo Shinshu (founded by Shinran), the largest denomination by number of adherents in Japan, came into existence. Furthermore, I believe it was in response to the rapid spread of the Pure Land movement that Dogen appeared, emerging like a counter-force.

Let me trace the timeline in provisional dates. After descending Mount Hiei in 1175 and establishing a small hermitage near Yoshimizu in Kyoto, in the area where the present-day Chion-in stands, Honen began preparing to teach. Around 1177 he started propagating his doctrine to the people of Heian-kyo. What Honen preached was [南無阿弥陀仏] ”Namu Amida Butsu." This was a time when the great fire had just destroyed a third of the city, and the people's distrust of the Tendai school at Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei, long regarded as the spiritual guardian of Heian-kyo, was deepening. Yet even as distrust grew, there was no alternative denomination or doctrine available to ordinary people. Honen opened a new possibility of faith by asserting that anyone, regardless of age or gender, could be saved simply by reciting "Namu Amida Butsu."

Honen's teaching was of course heretical, and for the Tendai school to which he had originally belonged it amounted to a new cult. For Mount Hiei, which had accumulated power on the premise that decades of rigorous training were required, Honen's movement could not be overlooked. Considerable obstruction of his mission is likely to have occurred. But Honen, who had spent virtually no time living among ordinary people until his forties, had made up his mind the moment he decided to descend the mountain. His mission was to bring his teaching to the people. Seen from another angle, Honen's actions were the only means of saving Heian-kyo itself. And to be precise about the scope of what is being discussed here, this movement, centered on Heian-kyo, cannot be equated with the history of Japan in the modern national sense.

The great fire triggered a rapid increase in followers among the common people, but it was not only commoners who were moved by Honen's new teaching. Not all aristocrats were power brokers. During this period Honen gained followers among the nobility as well. The decisive events came in 1180 with the massive tornado and Taira no Kiyomori's forced relocation of the capital to Fukuhara. These two events occurred within the space of roughly a month, and we can see how the people lost all sense of direction in the violent confusion. Kiyomori had already been transforming the entrenched power structure of the old Heian-kyo establishment, and the inevitable result was a growing number of people left adrift in their faith. Honen served as the crucial vessel to receive them.

Then in 1181 famine struck. Kamo no Chomei records that in just two months this famine killed 42,000 people within Heian-kyo alone. That figure, moreover, covers only the left half of the capital, the area called Sakyo, and counts only the corpses visible on the roadsides. The number is said to have been recorded as a result of the efforts of a monk from Ninna-ji named Ryugyo Hoin, who continued to perform memorial rites by writing the character [阿] on the foreheads of the dead whose bodies overflowed the streets and could not be disposed of. The estimated population of Heian-kyo at the time was between 100,000 and 200,000. Even if we limit ourselves to the death toll in Sakyo alone, it means that between a quarter and a fifth of the capital's population perished in just two months.

Honen's teaching expanded amid the upheaval of the Genpei War, and the symbolic great earthquake of 1185 that declared the end of the Heian period, together with the conclusion of the war, brought a further surge of followers. During this process the major Buddhist establishments were themselves in a state of disarray. They had assumed that a teaching begun by a single man like Honen could never gain a foothold in Heian-kyo, and so their response had amounted to little more than harassment. But when Honen's teaching entered a phase of genuine expansion and grew into a force that could no longer be ignored, fierce suppression from the Buddhist side began to intensify. This is thought to have started around the early thirteenth century, after the most turbulent years had passed. In 1207 the practice of Honen's teaching was formally prohibited. He was sentenced to exile in Shikoku and expelled from Heian-kyo.

He was pardoned in 1211 and permitted to return to Kyoto, but the following year, in 1212, Honen died. By that time, however, a disciple who would carry forward his will had already appeared during the years of upheaval. That disciple was Shinran, the man who would deepen the Pure Land school that Honen had started, reshape it, and expand it across the whole of Japan. I will write about Shinran on another occasion, but in 1201 he descended Mount Hiei, sought out Honen, and became his student.

Considered in this light, it was precisely because Honen walked alone through an era of upheaval that the extraordinary talent of Shinran was able to flower in its time, and Jodo Shinshu became the denomination with the largest number of adherents in Japan to this day. What matters, however, is not simply separating out the historical overview. We must simultaneously discern how faith was born within the hearts of the people and how it came to be practiced.

If I were to distill the significance of Honen's existence into its most extreme terms it would be this. He demonstrated vividly that all the self-satisfaction, all the knowledge accumulated by seeking answers outside oneself, would be blown away and burned to nothing the instant Mappo arrived, and that none of it had ever meant anything. The symbols of this were the fall of the rulers of the old system, the fires, the tornadoes, the war, the earthquake, the famine. But it should be noted that the movements of this late Heian period became the wellspring of a great era that extends all the way to the Japan of today.

What becomes visible at the core of why Honen's teaching resonated with the people is the worldview he offered. It surfaces particularly in his understanding of the present life. Put broadly, against the prevailing view that the present world was a place where one could become a buddha through the right kind of practice, Honen made a radical shift. He declared that salvation in the present life was absolutely impossible. The older view was embodied in the Shingon doctrine of Sokushinjobutsu [即身成仏], becoming a buddha in this very body as taught by Kukai, founder of the esoteric school that shared the same Mikkyo (Japanese Esoteric Buddhism) lineage as Mount Hiei, as well as in the worldly benefits pursued through the rigorous training and study of the Tendai school. But these worldviews were fundamentally for the elite. For the common people who could not read, for those who had no time for ascetic practice, for those condemned as evildoers, this was not an open world.

Likewise, the conventional Buddhist method of building temples and erecting statues was ultimately an attempt to make the present world resemble the Pure Land [浄土]. Honen harbored deep misgivings about this approach. So he discarded from the very outset the premise of salvation in the present life and offered instead a worldview in which everyone, without exception, would attain birth in the Pure Land after death. In an era as unstable as the one the people of Heian-kyo were living through, the promise of salvation in this life was transparently empty. It was, to put it differently, a lie. Honen abandoned the very hope of salvation that had been the premise of every existing school. He reframed life as the act of accepting a clear-eyed despair and continuing to live within it. And when that acceptance was not left as meaninglessness but was replaced with the assurance that absolute peace after death was guaranteed by Amida Buddha, the rise of the Pure Land lineage that would become Japan's largest denomination had begun.

Yet for all that, Honen was still imagining a world after death. His reflections on that postmortem world would become the next great problem, and the figure who wielded absolute influence in addressing it was his disciple Shinran.