京都に散らばった遺体の記憶The Memory of Corpses Along Kyoto’s Roads

Countless corpses scattered along the roadsides of a city. The old memory carried by Kyoto, which today puts on the appearance of a tranquil place, was a world of misery beyond our imagination. Against the despair of ordinary people confronted with a daily life in which one person after another collapsed and died, the existing forms of Buddhism, already centuries old since their transmission to Japan, could offer nothing.

All religions, not only Buddhism, carry a certain limit. Whether that limit is covered over by drowning in the lust for power that comes with expanding the faithful, or confronted head on, depends on the person and the institution. This was precisely the challenge that the history of Japanese Buddhism faced after the end of the Heian period and the beginning of the Kamakura. The reality of people dying at a pace that overwhelmed the intentions of powerful monks who had seized control of politics, economics, and military power through the authority of the existing religious establishment could only expose their limits to the world.

It is in circumstances like these that the communal illusion disintegrates. The more entrenched a communal illusion, the more sudden its disintegration and the more devastating its impact on the people within it. Because they believed the illusion was the world. And as I have traced through the historical overview in this series, the movement to search for something outside the communal illusion began from within the Tendai school at Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei, one of the driving forces that had shaped the communal illusion of Heian-kyo for centuries.

Some monks who left the incubator of the communal illusion on Mount Hiei and entered the city were confronted with a world beyond words. They faced the fact that secluding themselves on the mountain to practice was an act of selfishness that ignored the world entirely. They grew disillusioned with themselves. And they began to ask whether there was anything they could do to stand alongside the suffering of the people. The foremost figure in this history was Honen, but given the era, others must have emerged as well.

Why the most important lineage in this context moved toward what would come to be called Jodo (Pure Land) Buddhism is not easy to understand. In terms of the actual force that drove the expansion of this tradition, Shinran of Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land) contributed more than Honen. Both schools share the word Jodo in their names, meaning they belong to the same broad lineage of Pure Land faith. But the problem is that the crisis of faith in this era was so deep that the relationship between master Honen and disciple Shinran cannot be treated as a simple succession. It was precisely because the situation was so muddled that Shinran alone was able to see through to the essence.

Because we cannot avoid viewing these movements as history, we tend to conduct our examination of Jodo in a continuous line from Honen to Shinran. But I believe the issue lies elsewhere. If the problem of Jodo had simply been a matter of doctrinal gravity, the Jodo tradition would never have achieved its overwhelming position in Japan. What then is the thing that must be perceived in this era? It is in fact not a complex problem. It comes down to answering a single simple question. That question is death.

The movement of a new Buddhist lineage from Honen to Shinran was born precisely to think through this simple question of death with total rigor. Put differently, in the thoroughness with which they engaged the problem of death, the religious worldviews of Honen and Shinran diverge at the root. They cannot be equated. Shinran was certainly influenced by Honen, who had likewise grown disillusioned with Mount Hiei and begun his own independent teaching in Heian-kyo. But to call Shinran the legitimate successor of Honen on that basis is precarious. It is better to consider Shinran as having created an entirely different religion. In what is commonly described as his negation of the Jodo tradition, he pushed the gaze upon Jodo further than anyone.

From Shinran's perspective, even the master Honen's thinking about Jodo was sloppy and soft. Shinran systematically negated the Buddhist tendency to reify death, prayer beads, the nenbutsu, and Jodo. This is an ultimate and final position for a religion to take. When everything has been negated and pushed to its furthest point, what form of religion remains at the end? This is the world Shinran challenged, and in this respect he stands alone.

On the banks of the Ganges, huts were built. The dying were brought in and monks cared for them, preached to them, and staged a performance as though they would be ushered into Jodo. This Buddhist custom was replicated in the area along the Kamo River in Kyoto after Buddhism's arrival in Japan. Heian-kyo at the time treated the Kamo River as a boundary. To cross the river was to enter the world of the dead. The Kamo River was a place where life and death merged. The aristocrats of Heian-kyo never set foot there, and most citizens refused to go near it. Today crowds gather along the Kamo River day and night, but those who know the history, and those born and raised in Kyoto, still do not approach. Ignorance of history is a truly terrifying thing. Honen is said to have begun his teaching on the Higashiyama side across the river. Shinran negated even this practice in its entirety.

Because everyone acts as though they know about death when in fact no one can answer the question. Religious figures have walked through history carrying this problem, yet not a single one has ever answered the question of death itself. Every religious figure has spoken about "something resembling death." Not one has spoken about "death itself." This is not because a savior has yet to appear. It is because human beings carry an inherent limit in their capacity to speak about death from beginning to end. This limit cannot be surpassed by anyone so long as they are human.

Japanese Buddhism was shaped from its earliest days by the intellectual class. In every era intellectuals assume an air of knowing everything, pronounce upon everything, and believe they must know everything. This posture of ornamentation was the only boundary line that separated monks from everyone else. That it was a lie is self-evident at the limit of being human. And Shinran displayed a ferocious reaction against this. Shinran said, "Do not think about death. That is the best course." In an era when every Buddhist school and every monk pretended to know about death, he alone held to this position.

For the person in question, death may arrive at any time and in any form. Nothing can be done to predict it. This is not because we as humans are immature and therefore unable to predict. It is because essential death exists in a domain that has absolutely nothing to do with "human prediction." As I will discuss further, "human prediction" is a fabrication of the subject. To attempt to predict death is itself a fundamental error. What is inherently unpredictable must not be predicted. Death exists in a domain adjacent to the human being. It is not an entity that can be grasped by the human being. It operates according to an entirely different principle. No matter how hard human beings try to know it, it will never be known. And yet the world is endlessly populated by people who speak as though they understand death.

Modern people who pride themselves on their advanced civilization have changed nothing for all their self-regard. Everyone acts as though they know death. Someone must powerfully negate this. The reason it is pointless to try to understand death because it is not understood is that death belongs to an order entirely different from the categories and predictions in which we think. Shinran was more fully aware than anyone of this impossibility, of the limit of thinking about death, and of the meaninglessness of the attempt itself. He therefore insisted that one should not think about death.

Seven to eight hundred years after Shinran's appearance, humanity continues doing the same thing. The method of thinking about death has shifted from religion to medicine to science, but the activity itself has not changed. Medicine and science believe they know death, but from Shinran's vantage point their attitude is not one iota different from the Buddhist schools of his day. A doctor's declaration of death is no different from the pronouncement of an arrogant monk. Medicine and science do not know death. Yet they act as though they do and deceive people. And Shinran's argument was entirely different from anything in the Japanese Buddhism that preceded him.

If we take "death in the Jodo tradition" as the theme, Shinran declared that what people called death, the thing they said would bring them to Jodo after they died, was not actual death. This was a penetrating insight into the fact that the death guaranteed by Amida in Honen's Jodo teaching was not actual death. Certainly human beings know the premise that after death one goes to Jodo, to heaven, to utopia, to whatever is imagined or promised. This has been known historically through philosophy, religion, medicine, and science. But when or in what form one will die is entirely unknown. The reason everyone misses the mark when they say something about actual death is that they have not made this distinction. Even now, whenever death is discussed, the critical perspective that must be raised is that actual death is not being seen. No one is speaking about actual death. They are speaking only about alienated death. Because it is not actual death, no amount of discussion amounts to anything. The person who stared into this fact with absolute thoroughness, negated it, and brought the problem of actual death to the surface was Shinran. He was a figure fit for the summit of a turbulent era. In all of Japanese Buddhist history there may be no one as compelling.

The Jodo tradition devised the practice of dangling a five-colored cord from the hand of a Buddhist statue so that the dying person, grasping the cord and reciting the nenbutsu at the moment of death, could be ushered into Jodo. Shinran declared this a lie. He insisted that such a thing could not possibly be known and demanded to know why people did not realize that it was absurd to presuppose such a scenario in advance. He saw through the fact that this deception was leading vast numbers of people into confusion.

Shinran therefore taught that the Jodo tradition's emphasis on the nenbutsu at the moment of death was wrong and that true Jodo was not like that at all. On the question of Jodo, Shinran was excavating an entirely different world. From this perspective it is clear that Honen was simply imitating the conventional Jodo without criticism. The two were entirely different. The reason people were temporarily captivated by Honen's teaching was the current of the times and the novelty of his ideas. But for Shinran, Honen's Jodo was not Jodo. If that was so, what then was the Jodo that Shinran himself was gazing at? This was the question of his entire life. It was not a gentle question. It was pursued through a fierce introspection that consumed his very life.

After decades of intense internal struggle, what Shinran put forward was the character 料 (ryo). This thought is preserved in a letter from his final years, written at the age of eighty-six, titled Jinen Honi no Koto. In it Shinran recorded the wisdom he had reached at the ultimate horizon of Jodo.

Ryo is a word that Japanese readers will recognize from 料理 (ryori), cooking. It means a means, a material, an instrument. Shinran wrote: "弥陀仏は自然のやうをしらせん料なり." Because this is untranslatable I will offer my own interpretation. The original vow-power of Amida exists at the point where human deliberation and calculation have been nullified. There, with all human scheming and intention nullified, the working of jinen (自然), things as they are of themselves, operates. What is frequently misread, particularly in languages structured like English, is the tendency to read this as "transcendence" rather than muka (無化), nullification. This may be unavoidable, but if the reader holds in mind that what is meant is not transcendence but nullification, the horizon of Zen opens up. When D.T. Suzuki conveyed Zen to the English-speaking world he used words that approximated transcendence. But for people whose thinking is Eastern, what is being conveyed is better grasped as nullification. The very term transcendence causes the discussion to slide toward a horizon that is not Zen.

The word 自然 is read in modern Japanese as “shizen”, but from the medieval period two readings existed. When it was assigned as the translation of Nature after the Meiji period, it was stripped of its fundamental meaning and only the reading shizen survived. That is a convention of the post-Meiji era. Historically the reading is “jinen”. This is difficult, but 自 refers to a state in which subject, subjectivity, the grammatical first person, ego, and consciousness have all been nullified. 然 refers to the working or activity that manifests in the domain where the subject has been nullified. In other words, human beings possess no subject. The very idea is a lie. Despite its being a lie, intellectuals have caused people to believe blindly that a subject exists, and the result of this has been the destruction of the natural order. This is the typical story of modern history. The Japanese, who until the Edo period never imagined destroying nature, completed their Westernization under the banner of modernization and in the astonishing span of a mere 160 years systematically destroyed and annihilated the natural world of the Japanese archipelago. The lie of the subject destroys nature and unleashes an extraordinary aggression against its order.

Through negation, Shinran spent his life shattering the existing communal illusion at the level of thought. He nullified the commonplace Jodo that served as the premise of the Jodo tradition. From there he brought the essence of Jodo to the surface. Rather than placing Jodo on the side of death, he repositioned it in the space between life and death. What Shinran was doing was taking the Jodo that had been unilaterally subordinated to the side of death through the "separation of life and death" and restoring it to its original position of "the non-separation of life and death." Shinran grasped that Jodo was here. This perspective of non-separation was something Honen did not possess. Even though both schools share the name Jodo, the Shinran of Jodo Shinshu was fundamentally different in quality. Put differently, the Jodo of the Honen side is a "Jodo of separation." The Jodo of the Shinran side, Jodo Shinshu, is a "Jodo of non-separation." The essence lay on Shinran's side. But this perspective has long since been forgotten within present-day Jodo Shinshu, which has reverted to a "Jodo of separation." In effect Jodo Shinshu no longer exists in modern Japan. It has been absorbed into the Jodo school on Honen's side.

Jodo is not the far shore. It is a place, a vantage point from which both life and death can be seen. This was Shinran's redefinition. When you think of it this way, does it not seem that there is a great deal to learn from Shinran's thought?

And simultaneously with his dismantling of the communal illusion of Jodo, Shinran shattered the anthropomorphized Amida who had been reified as a personal deity. He nullified the commonplace Amida fashioned through falsehood and brought to the surface the original Amida, a nothingness without color or form. The essence of Amida, he taught, is nothing more than a means and a material, a ryo, for guiding human beings to the state of jinen honi (自然法爾). This is why the character ryo is used. This way of thinking is anarchism in the essential sense, something closer to an affirmative Laozi. But it is unreachable for anyone who does not already possess such thinking. For those who build their mission around the separated Jodo as the core of their faith, Shinran's thought is heresy and dangerous ideology. Because if everything is nullified, their vested interests and every boundary line that separates them from ordinary people will vanish, and the fact that those boundary lines were lies will be exposed. In every era, thinkers like Shinran are the figures that rulers fear most. And such figures invariably appear when a turbulent era reaches its peak.

In the conventional Jodo tradition, Amida was separated from human beings as an object of devotion. In other words, a "human being" prays to "Amida," or seeks salvation from "Amida." A separated relationship existed. My own conjecture is that this separation was already in place by the time Buddhism arrived in Japan, and I feel that Japanese Buddhist history needs to be reexamined from this perspective. Shinran categorically negated this separated relationship. He reinterpreted Amida not as the subject or object in a relationship but as a working, and by defining Amida as a material and a means he displaced the foundation of faith from substance to relation. The relation Shinran posits is not one of subject and object. It is a relation in which subject and object have been nullified. In that domain there is no subject, no ego, no self, no consciousness. The idea that the world is moved by such things is nothing but a lie. It is not subject-consciousness that moves the world. There is a consciousness that operates when everything including the subject has been nullified. This is not the unconscious as separated from consciousness on the premise of a subject. Unless one has carried out nullification to its absolute end, this working cannot be felt.

The fragility of idolatry within Buddhism was questioned in the early period after Buddhism's arrival in Japan, but because early Japanese Buddhist history played out within the context of power struggles among the ancient clans of the court, the perspective of separation within idolatry was never held. Thereafter this fragility went unquestioned. As faith expanded explosively, people lost even the meaning of the question. Shinran smashed it to pieces without mercy.

So long as human beings approach Amida carrying calculation and intention, the essence will never be opened. So long as human beings approach god or buddha carrying subject-consciousness, the essence will never be opened.

It is when Amida as ryo draws the human being toward the state of jinen that the essential domain is reached. In the modern era the separation of subject and object was made explicit, but the problem was already becoming critical in Shinran's time. Modern human beings unquestioningly presuppose the bad habit of regarding themselves as subjects. That such a thing is impossible is self-evident from the fact that the Japanese language has no grammatical subject. The subject is a lie. The self is a lie. No matter how finely these are sharpened and how grandly one performs the role of sovereign of the world, it is nothing more than a self-directed performance, and the fate of eventual destruction cannot be avoided. The enormous fraud of modernity, the self-directed performance of subject, grammatical first person, ego, self, and consciousness, is now receiving a ferocious backlash from nature. But it is too late to say anything about it now.

Shinran's wisdom may be the most important thing available to us at this moment. Everyone acts as though they are a unique and irreplaceable subject, holds no doubt about it, and then suffers from the problem that arises when the fabrication called identity crisis, a problem born of the nonexistence of the subject, is papered over. The reason death cannot be spoken of, just as Amida cannot be spoken of, is that it exists in a domain that can never be approached from the standpoint of the subject.

When everything has been nullified, what remains is jinen. Shinran simply called it Amida. But this jinen is not Nature. The problem surrounding jinen was pursued with particular intensity during the Edo period. When Western-led modernization arrived in Japan, the jinen that had been refined during the Edo period was presumably inconvenient from the standpoint of modernization. So the word was swapped from jinen to shizen and then, outrageously, defined as the translation of Nature. Lies of this kind constructed modern history and drove a nation toward its collapse. The problem that Shinran staked his life on remains unaddressed. Does the thorough rebellion against fixing things into words and concepts still carry meaning in the present? Shinran's question, it seems to me, continues to press powerfully upon the heart of each and every one of us.