道元論13The Essence of Death: From Mount Hiei to Honen, From Honen to Shinran

Reconsidered from a distance, Mount Hiei in the Heian period appears as something deeply strange and enigmatic. As the head temple of the Tendai school founded by Saicho and home to Enryaku-ji, Mount Hiei was one of the pillars of Japanese esoteric Buddhism. Throughout the Heian period it held absolute hegemony centered on Heian-kyo. It was the shadow ruler of the Heian-kyo system. While co-opting the aristocrats and imperial family who served as the public rulers of the system, Mount Hiei formed networks of extraction across the entire country to consolidate its dominance. To view it as a mere religious organization is to misread the era entirely.

Even today, people who have lived for generations in certain small districts of Kyoto speak with pride of the city's thousand years of history. Within Japan this is generally interpreted as Kyoto pride, but in reality it is the pride of a world confined to an extremely small number of blocks. It cannot be spoken of as Kyoto in general. And even now, as if guarding this small world, Mount Hiei stands to the northeast in the direction of the demon gate.

Throughout this series I have surveyed the powerful system that Mount Hiei built across the Heian period, and I have shown that it possessed dimensions too complex to be dismissed simply as a breeding ground for corruption. The reason Mount Hiei's history cannot be overlooked is that it served as the matrix from which the Pure Land school emerged, the school that has exerted the greatest influence on the centuries that followed down to the present day. Honen, founder of the Pure Land school (Jodo), was a monk of Mount Hiei. Shinran, founder of Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land), who as Honen's foremost disciple elevated the Pure Land school to an immense stature, was also a monk of Mount Hiei.

The people of Kyoto do not understand this, but it is a fact that the seeds born on the stage of Heian-kyo, a world that amounts to a single small block when seen against the full expanse of Japan's territory, became a vital driving force in shaping the thousand years of history that followed. To view this through the spatial frame of present-day Kyoto Prefecture or Kyoto City is already to misread it. The true Kyoto is an extremely small district. Everything outside it is not Kyoto.

Honen and Shinran both founded their religions on the premise of the Pure Land. But in what respects did the two differ? Honen lived from 1133 to 1212 and Shinran from 1173 to 1263. The two lived roughly forty to fifty years apart. In an era when Heian-kyo had collapsed, political authority had been seized entirely by the warrior class, and the shogunate had been established in the distant eastern city of Kamakura, half a century was literally the span of an entirely different world.

The rapid transformations of the age could not fail to exert a powerful influence on the Pure Land faith that connected Honen to Shinran. For Shinran, Honen was the person he respected above all others, yet there may also have been a strong sense that certain aspects of Honen's teaching no longer fit the times. It was around 1207 that Honen's faith began to be treated as a serious problem by the old Buddhist establishment centered on Mount Hiei, and campaigns of obstruction and efforts to bring about his downfall commenced.

By the early thirteenth century roughly twenty years had passed since the events around 1185 that became the founding moment of the Kamakura shogunate under Minamoto no Yoritomo, leader of the Minamoto warrior clan. The first shogun Yoritomo (r. 1192–1199) had already died. The second shogun Minamoto no Yoriie (r. 1199–1203) had also died. The era belonged to the third shogun Minamoto no Sanetomo (r. 1203–1219).

Ironically, internal disputes were already erupting with alarming frequency within the warrior faction that had only just seized real power from the aristocracy and the imperial family. The Minamoto, who had destroyed the Taira and were attempting to build a new era, saw succession struggles over the supreme position of shogun intensify. Yoritomo's own sons were set against each other through political scheming. What is revealing is that the legitimate Minamoto line may have already lost its grip on real authority. The power of the Hojo clan, the lineage of Yoritomo's wife Masako Hojo (1157–1225), was growing within the shogunate, and the ambitions of rival clans were entangled in the struggle for succession.

Yoriie inherited the household headship upon Yoritomo's death and became the second shogun, but it has been suggested that the Hojo prevented him from governing by his own discretion. Meanwhile Yoritomo's backing had come from a separate clan called the Hiki. The Hiki were positioned within the lineage of the Fujiwara, the aristocratic clan that had built the Heian era. In other words, the dynamics of the old clans formed in Nara were exerting a deep influence on Kamakura through the conduit of Heian-kyo. Grasping these shifting dynamics is extraordinarily difficult.

Yoriie fell ill while still young. The Hojo faction on his mother's side did not miss the moment the Minamoto dynamics wavered and launched an immediate offensive. While Yoriie lay in critical condition, a single report was delivered to the Kyoto side. Political authority at the time rested with the Kamakura shogunate, but the remnant forces of the aristocracy and the imperial family were effectively confined to Heian-kyo. According to this false report, Yoriie had died of illness on September 1, 1203, and authorization was requested for his younger brother Sanetomo to succeed to the shogunate.

The report reached Kyoto on the morning of September 7. During the days the message was in transit, a coup had taken place in Kamakura. A force led by Tokimasa Hojo, the head of the Hojo clan and father of Masako Hojo, attacked and annihilated the Hiki faction. In other words, Kamakura was playing host to a power struggle that looked like an extension of Heian-kyo. By around 1207, when Honen's growing influence in Kyoto was colliding with the vested interests of the ruling class, political instability on the Kamakura side had already reached its extreme. In 1219 Sanetomo was assassinated in an act of vengeance rooted in these power struggles, and Yoritomo's bloodline was extinguished after just three generations.

East and west alike, the dynamics of power were doing nothing but setting factions against each other from within. That the people despaired in these circumstances was only natural. In the midst of this, Shinran in 1201 resolved to leave Mount Hiei in disillusionment, sought out Honen, and became his disciple. But the instability of the Kamakura shogunate had allowed the old ruling class on the Kyoto side to catch its breath and begin maneuvering in the shadows to reclaim power. The old dynamics were showing signs of restoration within the city. Under this influence, Honen's doctrine, which had already gained a large following and considerable momentum, was branded as heresy. Within the power dynamics of Heian-kyo, ensuring that the people feared the authority of Mount Hiei was an absolute condition.

But the people had lived through an era of upheaval and no longer trusted Mount Hiei. More than that, they knew from direct experience that the doctrines of every existing Buddhist school were useless. What the people of that time wanted to know was not whether spiritual power to protect the imperial family and the aristocracy resided in Buddhist faith. They wanted to know in concrete terms what would happen to them as they lived through this age of Mappo (the Age of the Decline of the Dharma). This became urgent as a question of death. The old establishment led by Mount Hiei had no answer that could satisfy the people of this era on so elemental a question.

This is in fact the crucial point. The limitation of the Buddhist establishment at the time, the fact that they possessed no answer about death, was not merely their problem. It exposes the essence of death itself. No matter the religion, the science, the philosophy, when confronted with this simple and elemental question no one can actually answer it. In the entire history of humanity no answer has ever been given to this supremely simple question. Religion, medicine, science, philosophy, none of them have truly answered it. When we come to know that it cannot be answered, we finally stand on the ground from which it becomes possible to think about death.

Honen took as the object of his critique a Mount Hiei that could not answer this question. He reframed the matter by asserting that salvation after death was guaranteed by the compassion of Amida Buddha, and he taught a faith in which anyone regardless of age or gender need only recite "Namu Amida Butsu." From the perspective of the authoritative Buddhist establishments such as Mount Hiei this was unforgivable, because if a method so easily practiced by anyone were to spread, their own vested interests would clearly lose credibility and collapse. When we consider that Honen's teaching did spread with enormous influence among the people of Heian-kyo and captivated even the aristocracy, we can say that Honen offered something that connected to the answer the people of Heian-kyo had been seeking.

Honen's teaching, however, did not offer the answer. It offered only one possibility attached to the periphery of the answer. Honen's teaching did not see through to the truth of death.

This question belongs to no country and no ethnicity. I ask readers to draw on the historical overview presented across this series, to imagine standing in that era and searching for faith, and to relive the question. The question is one that may seem straightforward and familiar. What is death?

Within the confines of Heian-kyo, great numbers of people began moving toward the Pure Land faith that anyone could practice. But I believe there was a problem within Honen's faith. The disciple who perceived that dissonance was Shinran, the most gifted among them. The difference becomes most pronounced on the question of death.

As I wrote in On Dogen 11, Honen's teaching is grounded in the eighteenth vow among the forty-eight vows known as the Original Vow (hongan, 本願) made by Amida Buddha when he was still the bodhisattva Hozo (法蔵菩薩) during the course of his own practice. That vow declares, "When I attain Buddhahood, if all beings throughout every world who sincerely believe in me and call upon my name even just ten times are not born into my land, then I shall not accept enlightenment." The name of Amida Buddha referred to here is "Namu Amida Butsu" and Amida's land is gokuraku jodo (極楽浄土), the Pure Land. In other words Honen concluded that since the preparations for salvation had already been completed on Amida's side there was no need for human beings to agonize and struggle in pursuit of effort or talent. One need only board the vessel that Amida had already prepared.

Honen reinterpreted the teaching to mean that those living in this present world need only continue reciting "Namu Amida Butsu," the name of Amida Buddha. He grasped this as the sole truth capable of saving the countless people who had been driven to despair in a world that could only be described as a living hell. He established the idea of entrusting everything to Amida Buddha as tariki hongan (他力本願), salvation through the power of the Other.

Certainly this thinking appears lucid. Simplified, it means that anyone who dies, whether good or evil, goes immediately to the Pure Land. This suggests that through death the countless notions of good and evil and the innumerable truths that we the living have arbitrarily decorated around death all dissolve, and nothing remains but the bare fact that a person has died. Whether the world after death is the Pure Land or heaven or utopia or hell varies by religious doctrine, but on this point there is no disagreement. Even now when most people think about death in some fashion they inevitably confine their thinking to this dimension alone. But people do not ordinarily realize that they have not truly thought about death. The arrogance of the modern mind might even lead one to assume that because intelligent people have discussed death in so many ways the matter has already been settled as self-evident.

In truth I believe this way of thinking is valid and accords with what religious figures across all times and places have taught. But the problem lies elsewhere. Whether or not one perceives this may be what fundamentally divides one's view of life.

A person dies and goes to a world variously conceived as the Pure Land, heaven, utopia, hell. Regardless of the name, so long as the framework is religious the question almost always returns to the same dimension. But this is simply stating the obvious as obvious, and because it is obvious it looks like truth. Put differently, truth can be disguised. Because what people since the modern era have failed to understand is that truth possesses no universality to begin with. Truth always exists in a place. Move the place or the time and truth inevitably changes. That is the nature of truth.

What they taught was indeed death, but it must not be thought of as death in general. I believe death has a multiplicity. Religion extracts a narrow sliver from among the many dimensions of death and universalizes it through its own ornamentation. If this were not the case there would be no need for the vast canons of scripture, the denominations, the statues, the temples. I suspect this sensibility was most vividly present in the resistance that greeted Buddhism when it first arrived in Japan.

The problem must then be concentrated into this. Their perspective on death is sound and no one can disagree with it. But do they know anything beyond it? In fact, just as Honen generated his own teaching by taking Mount Hiei as his object of critique, it was Shinran who, using Honen as the medium, saw through this perspective critically and began to develop an independent thought of his own. To discern the movement from Mount Hiei to Honen and from Honen to Shinran, a vantage point is needed that approaches the essence of death, the very thing we have completely convinced ourselves we already know. But we think of death as so self-evident, so thoroughly understood, that we do not know that we know nothing about real death. Religion, medicine, science, and philosophy have still not answered. The fact that they continue to debate only the periphery while concealing the essence of death itself tells us something.

Honen thought about human death in terms of a transition to a world guaranteed after death. That in itself is valid beyond question. But Honen did not speak about actual death even once. Then what does it truly mean to think about death?

When we confront this question, the figure we must look at is not Honen but Shinran. They are often discussed together under the banner of the Pure Land school, but on the treatment of the problem of death they occupy different dimensions entirely. In the next piece I will examine Shinran's groundbreaking thinking on the problem of death within Pure Land Buddhism. I hope readers living through the Mappo of our own time will take this as an occasion to think about death once more.