Interfaith Theologian

Sunday, August 27, 2017

The Silent Survival of Jodo Shinshu and the Westernization of Buddhism


In this post, I wanted to examine the background of adversity which has silenced Jodo Shinshu Buddhists over the centuries, and especially address this through the lens of the modernization of Buddhism, which has effectively removed all sects from their supernatural (or superstitious) origins to forms that attain towards self-reflection and modesty.

Buddhism has not been apt to resist the incursion of Western rationalism. One likely reason has been that Buddhism’s lack of resistance is evidence of the absence of an intellectual heritage, which unlike in Christianity saw doctrinal disputes and intellectual showdowns as the norm. Of course it would be a somewhat simplistic effort to paint over disputations that occurred in Buddhism, and the sects that did form did not do so out of an abundance of encouragement towards self-expression. It does, however, seem that the Western assault by scholars of Buddhism was much fiercer than ever could be anticipated. One only has to look at the parallel incursion into Islam made by challenges to its origins, texts, and ideas that have been met with severe and even radical retaliations, including fatwas against Western intellectuals. The West has always done a tidy job of forcing its neighbors into conversations they didn’t want to participate in, and using language that isn’t always familiar or appropriate.

In Japan, Jodo Shinshu has been censored at numerous points in its history. During his own time Shinran, the founder, was persecuted and defrocked, and sent into exile. The sect rose to prominence again under Rennyo, but was shortly after persecuted by the Tendai school who used sohei (warrior monks) to oppose him. Rennyo had to flee for his life, but the Shin Buddhists found their own form of resistance in the ikko-ikki, a group of warrior monks that came from the ranks of the common people and fought back. Eventually, the Tokugawa shogun Ieyasu split the sect in two in order to diffuse the concentration of power. The West and East schools were formed as a result. Still in many places, Shin Buddhists were persecuted and had to go underground, practicing their strange nenbutsu in secret.

The swirling defeat of Japan at the hands of the United States had serious religious repercussions. Emperor Hirohito spoke to the people of his country directly and offered a surrender of Japanese forces to the Allies. For many in Japan who were hearing his voice for the first time, the revelation of the emperor was a painful and unbearable thing. The religious organizations around Jodo Shinshu suffered as well. Existential realities were laid bare:  the emperor who was thought to be a god living among his people, a descendant of the sun god Amaterasu, was not invincible. The Ohigashi Schism of 1962, urged by the Dobokai movement, which was itself in favor of joining the modern world, demonstrated how deeply divided the faithful (shinjin)were on issues relating to Pure Land doctrine. The Dobokai Movement (of the Eastern Jodo Shinshu) wished to scrub much of the superstition of the ancient order and replace it with a “thoughtful” alternative that enjoyed a kind of Buddhism a la carte, trying to undo the more tenuous doctrines of reincarnations and Pure Lands that exist on some otherworldly metaphysical plane. Like many of the Buddhist sects in Japan, Jodo Shinshu was able to escape annihilation primarily because nothing like the Western philosophy of a church and state architecture existed. The questions raised by secularism did not require an answer that required the takedown of the entire sect. If one looks deeper, it is worth mentioning that the full canon of Buddhist doctrines (issai-kyo) were never venerated in the community of Shin Buddhists who built their own path primarily on three seminal sutras. But the same was true of most sects. Yet, discriminating never took on the form of rejection that it did in the a la carte style of the West that ignored or invalidated material. Shin Buddhism again could transform without having to rebrand itself given and so it did.

Across seas, the situation was similar. In the United States, where Shin Buddhism was introduced on the West Coast in the 1800s, there were minor outcries and concerns that priests from Japan had come to convert. Despite this, temples stayed secluded in their respective immigrant communities. To keep suspicion at an absolute minimum, many temples were built to resemble churches, used pews and lecterns, and featured songs similar in style to Christian hymns. The Buddhist Churches of America, drew their name in 1944 for the purposes of not being singled out, but assimilating, after many Japanese had been interned under suspicion of loyalty to Japan during the war. Under the terms of their internment during the war, many Japanese were forced to sell their houses and businesses and shut down their Buddhist temples. So when they were released and others came to the United States, it was clear that blending in remained the only reasonable gamble.

Shin Buddhism, which is currently the largest sect of Buddhism in the United States, is perhaps the most invisible, since despite sharing Buddhism in its namesake, the sect carries on traditions that are quite different from the meditative components found in other Southeast Asian forms. The rise in popularity of meditation in the West and the move away from the more superstitious elements has caused Jodo Shinshu Buddhists to re-evaluate their fundamental core principles. Both immigrant and native Shinshu Buddhist populations have in one form or another surrendered to a more sophisticated aura that is enjoyed in the West. This has not been received as a defeat as the very nature of the Buddhist scriptures and the overwhelming amount of material meant that Buddhism itself was never a canonistic religion. There was never a New Testament canon that had to be venerated by all of the sects, so that each sect was free to hold onto those writings near and dear to its own understandings. In such a scenario, shifting emphases seemed to invite variation. The newfangled rise of psychological sciences over the past 100 years, gave Buddhism further leverage with which to work as the study of the brain became more sophisticated. Even today, those like the Dali Lama have embraced this relationship and expressed how psychology is a sibling of Buddhist practice, while scientists run observations or do brainwave scans on meditating Buddhists to give further credence to the performative structures that have long been a part of its methodology.  Given the lack of contemplation on a First Cause or Creator God, the faithful had as much a chance of enlightenment as the Buddha who offered it. Not even the moral exemplarist model found in Christianity could compare. All Buddhists had the ability to become buddhas. All could become enlightened. And since there was no need for a Creator God, even an atheistic Buddhism could be established in the a la carte Buddhism of our day. Books like Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor, a New York Times bestseller, demonstrated the potential of a Buddhism that is capable of recognition in a world that is increasingly hostile to religious belief and dogma. Nevertheless, where the West had created a Buddhism that could be appreciated for its secular flexibility, Buddhism in its various native contexts never fully extricated itself from its supernatural origins.