A Short, Deep Dive into the Demythologizing of Shin Buddhism

In the last century, Christianity was stress tested like never before, going through and surviving a period of deconstruction by some of its most notable thinkers. Rudolf Bultmann introduced the term demythologize, asserting that the Bible is littered with parochial superstitions that concealed the true meaning of the gospel that he believed could be mined out of the structure without damaging the meaning of the story. Concepts like heaven and hell were rendered parts of a fiction no longer sensible to the modern day mind while the true Christian narrative was secure in what Bultmann called the kerygma, a compact and precise proclamation of God’s victory for the salvation of humankind located in the message of Jesus Christ. To this end, everything else was just white noise.  

Less known are those Buddhist scholars leveling the same academic scrutiny against Shin Buddhism. Paul Watt’s Demythologizing Pure Land Buddhism (2016) is a similar attempt at reading Yasuda Rijin (1900-1982) in an attempt to challenge the otherworldly reality of Amida Buddha when Japan was at the crossroads of modernization following World War II, when the social order had been stretched thin and the country was reeling, both socially and intellectually, in the wake of its defeat.

In this short article, I wanted to focus on one particular passage by Rennyo that lends itself to the project of demythologization. Rennyo was the 8^th monshu (spiritual leader) of the Jodo Shinshu school and has widely been accredited with returning the sect back to a position of prominence in Japan. His writings are considered on the same level as the canonical writings of Shinran Shonin or the three orthodox sutras that derive from the Pure Land Mahayana tradition.

Rennyo’s letters (ofumi) were similar to epistles in which he answered questions received directly from other adherents. In one a letter dated from 1472, Bunmei 4, Rennyo is confronted by a follower’s question about whether one is saved at the moment of faith or whether one must further prepare himself until the moment of death when Amida comes to meet the follower spiriting him away to the Pure Land.

The entrusting of oneself, writes Rennyo, is not a matter that must be obsessed over prior to the moment of death but is secured in the moment of conversion since Amida is revealed to us in the one “thought-moment” in which we have committed ourselves to salvation.

The letter bears with it the same entanglements that complicates kingdom of God theology most often associated with Christianity. Is Jesus living in the believer because the kingdom of God has come? Or is it a kingdom that will physically manifest at a latter time?  And if it is both in us and yet to come, what do we make of this dualism? In essence, none of these possibilities can be tritely discarded. They all are inferred in some way in the question of where, when, and how humanity encounters the kingdom of God. The demythologizing of such ideas that was so attractive to theologians of the last century attempted to sift these options. Physicality was jettisoned and replaced with existential meaning. Jesus did indeed come, but that coming was an experience of faith in which humanity is called to judge itself so that they might pass from inauthentic life to a genuine life buoyed in faith. The kingdom of God was not something you awaited or expected to materialize in reality. And so some theologians reading Acts 1, in which the disciples asked Jesus if the kingdom of God would be restored on earth, pointed to Jesus’ response, which in fairness deflects from directly answering the question, and instead instructs them to be mindful of their continued life in the spirit of God. The kingdom of God was demythologized as a place that literally breaks into our time and space continuum to a sign marker that points back to ourselves.

Similarly, Buddhists like Rijin saw a similar parallel in Amida. Rijin and others learned to read Rennyo’s emphasis in the letter as one where Jodo (Pure Land) Buddhism is primarily about the faith conceived in the individual. Talk about a para-physical encounter with the cosmic Buddha who like Charon ferries one to safe shores (a belief that persists in both Mahayana and Theravada traditions) are images meant to act as pointers symbolic of the deeper meaning of salvation, but not to be actual descriptions of the next world. Rennyo asserts that the coming of Amida to meet his followers (at the moment of death) is relegated when we think of the moment of faith and the coming of Amida as one complete moment in which faith resides in the follower. Read as a complete moment, in which no further independent action is needed, the emphasis on an intercessory who comes at the end of one’s life to usher him into nirvana becomes absorbed into the act of faith so that the meaning of the faith event whose fingerprint is left on all subsequent actions has the effect of shifting the emphasis away from Amida. Hence, we have a de-mythologized salvation in which Amida is seen as a motivation whose primarily reality exists in how his “presence” influences us, not whether he has any reality in himself.

The move in Shin Buddhism to a Buddhism that is as non-theistic as its other sibling sects of Buddhism is a distinct movement attributed to modern Buddhism, as some would argue Rennyo never imagined a Buddhism without material reality. In fact, one should note that Rennyo was not doing anything novel. Pure Land itself can be traced back further than Japan to at least the first century in China and beyond to Gandhara, India where Pure Land had a bhakti (worship) element to it, rather than a movement that formed through another series of ritualistic endeavors aimed at divine propitiation.  

This idea, however, that Pure Land ought to look more like its sibling sects, became enshrined in the concept of Jojakoddo (Buddhism in one’s mind), which has only recently gained traction in the last century and into this century against the more traditional concept of Raisejodo (Pure Land in Reality). Arguments that neither Shinran or Rennyo intended Jojakoddo are persuasive on the grounds that their works are littered with references to the Amida Buddha, not simply as a force or concept that compels us to self-realization or self-awakening (Japanese - satori), but as a divine embodiment that himself lived a human life over five kalpas (very long periods of time) as the king Dharmakara. The idea that Amida shared in the sufferings and pain of human beings, only later being elevated to a supreme being, has a touch of incarnation theology to it as well. Just as no one has yet taken to task all Bultmann’s primary argument and sought to demythologize every statement found in the New Testament, so the tradition of Jodo Shinshu, vast and expansive, would be quite difficult to demythologize. The fact that it has not or will never be requires us to consider whether it should be. What causes Jodo Shinshu to stand out from its other Buddhism siblings is not that it is a more sophisticated rendering of existential ideas concealing its true non-theistic roots. The fact is that its trajectory seems compelling distinctive. Having read here one of Rennyo’s most compelling explanations on faith and the physical intercession of Amida actually ends in a way that only casts more doubt on the project to demythologize Buddhism cannon sutras. For, when pressed on the question of what is left to do once one has decisively settled his faith, Rennyo writes the following:

The point is that we must not think of the nenbutsu [the vow to Amida] said after the awakening of the one thought-moment of faith as an act for the sake of birth; it should be understood to be solely in gratitude for the Buddha’s benevolence. Therefore, Master Shandao explained it as “spending one’s entire life at the upper limit, one thought-moment at the lower.” It is understood that “one thought-moment at the lower” refers to the settling of faith, and “spending one’s entire life at the upper limit” refers to the nenbutsu said in gratitude, in return for the Buddha’s benevolence. These are things that should be thoroughly understood.

While those engaged in the project of  demythologizing might read his summary statement as one that indeed articulates the sole importance of the decisive act of faith, where all other acts lose their meaning, others may read how the faith act (shinjin) is emphasized not above and over other acts so that the latter are absorbed, or collapse, into the former, but as the source wherein all other acts derive, so that the concern of competing loyalties (one to the faith act and one to the faith act done prior to death) that spurns the project of demythologizing in the first place never becomes a question. Thus, the question of Amida’s intercession at the end of one’s life does not become a question whose independent reality creates the scenario whereby the initial faith act is placed in tension. Likewise, it is not because Amida’s intercession has no reality beyond the initial faith act, but because its meaning does not become a competing intuition whereby a decision must be made in favor of one end of a dualistic reality. The act is accomplished because the notion of shinjin harmonizes where there is seeming contingencies.

Returning to our example from Christianity, the harmonization of the kingdom of God that is said to exist in and through the believer with the kingdom of God that exists as a supernatural para-physical reality that is rendered as an eschatological event need not be competing views. The person who has inherited the kingdom of God through faith no doubt inherits the kingdom of God as a material reality because that same individual has received the kingdom as a matter of faith, and so inherits the fullness of its multi-dimensional reality without the introduction of another conditional act. The speaking into being of the two realities as one that allows for intentional “contextual eliding” has different effects, at times confusing Jesus’ enemies, friends, but also lends depth and hope to his followers whose Holy Spirit moments are much like the character of satori moments experienced in Shin Buddhism when one gives himself faithfully to Amida Buddha.