Orange County Buddhist Church
Orange County Buddhist Church
A WAY OF SEEING (Jodo Shinshu)
The founder of our way of seeing true reality, Shinran Shonin, was born in the month of May, 1173. During his 90 years of life, he went from an acolyte monk at around nine years old, to a disciple of Honen Shonin, to an exiled, “defrocked” monk in his 30s, to the one who put together and wrote down his understanding and realization of “the true intent, or purport, of the Pure Land teachings,” or Jodo Shinshu, for the last 30 years or so of his life, beginning in his early 60s.
Because of his writings, both in Japanese and in Chinese-style, i.e., without any kana (Japanese syllabary), we are able still to see true reality just as Shinran did, with the power of the naturalness of Suchness making it possible. However, as Shinran Shonin put it, in his Shoshinge, seeing true reality, even through the naturalness of Suchness, is “the most difficult among all difficulties.”
The primary reason for the difficulty is, perhaps, the fact that it, along with Amida, his Vow, Shinjin/Entrusting, and the like are all inconceivable. We might be able to see that they “work,” but we have no idea of how; nor do we have any idea what they are, at least not in any real sense. On the other hand, Shinran says there is no need to “understand” what it’s all about, because whatever we “understood” would be a figment of our imagination, as it were. It would be a construct of our hakarai, or calculation.
What, then, might the first step be that we could take on this, hopefully long, journey to becoming one, first with Suchness, then with Amida, (although there is no real difference in either substance or in time) in their ever on-going natural work to free us from suffering and enabling us to work in and through them to free all other sentient beings from suffering. Freeing ourselves and freeing others is, after all, what makes Mahayana Buddhism the great vehicle of compassion.
In the words of Shinran Shonin in his Hymns of the Pure Land Masters, in the last verse on Vasubandhu, “On reaching the land of the Vow, / We immediately realize supreme nirvana, / And thereupon we awaken great compassion. / All this is called Amida’s ‘directing of virtue.’”
The one question that needs answering is whether we truly want to be free from suffering, unless, fortunately or unfortunately, we are one of those who have indeed suffered, in which case it is probably the case that we do want to be free, at least for the time that we are disabled by that suffering. However, because we quickly forget, unless we actively seek the answers in the Buddha Dharma while we are suffering, many, maybe most, of us will be prone to quickly drop the search when we begin to “get over” it.
I hope you’ll give this a thought.
Gasshō,
Donkon Jaan
Rev. John Doami
May 2007
