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.

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.

The Strange Phenomenon of Religious Practices Developing Simultaneously in Remote Cultures and an Example from Buddhism and Christianity

I am often intrigued by the way in which religions that have had no historical or intellectual contact in the developing of their traditions nonetheless develop their traditions along similar lines and arrive at similar conclusions. Anthropologists and philosophers who study cultural movements and glance bigger picture dynamics have commented on the way scientific, social, ethical, and religious movements trend to develop synchronically over periods. One can point narrowly to the rise of new religious movements in the 18^th century when new scientific discoveries challenged traditional orthodoxies as a key contributor to the emergence of new religions from North America to the Far East against a period directly prior where there was mostly stagnation and status quo expressions.

Or one can point to the broader historic pictures of a Bronze Age or Karl Jasper’s famous term “Axial Age” which reinforced the teleological notion that history had a goal from the suggestion that new ways of religious thinking and ethical behavior corresponded to a relatively small window from the 8^th to 3^rd Century BCE.

Oftentimes, these similarities are not limited to a broad ethos towards progress, but remain eerily myopic in scope despite the fact that they are treated at best as generic placeholders meant for context, even while they do not suggest a conclusive scientific worldview.

Most of the books written in the past century about Christianity and Buddhism that reflect positively on the two as conversation partners often take the view that similarity cannot be overstated. From those with deeper comprehension to those with minimal interest, Western thinkers from Karl von Hase to Marcus Borg have engaged the topic of similarity, often without reference to Jasper’s Axial Age theory. My examples here are one directional, primarily because the rigid dogmatism of Christian thinkers in the past has often detracted from their ability to be open to Buddhism. Conversely, Buddhists historically have often been open to syncretic treatments of their religion and giving honor to other religious leaders standing outside. In particular, Japan Buddhists who operated under the tradition of honji suijaku have lived comfortably within a Shinto-Buddhist worldview that has only temporarily been challenged in modern times.

One similarity comes from the writing of Rennyo Shonin, a Japanese Buddhist monk writing in the 15^th century. Speaking on the topic of entrusting oneself to Amida Buddha as a means of salvation in his Pure Land sect, Rennyo notes how his message of shinjin (trust) is open to all peoples both male and female, young and old. Feudal Japan’s legacy as a patriarchal society, a fact common in most societies around the global, meant that the place of women was often structured to a more subservient role. The declaration that women had the same rights to salvation as men was radical and “foreign” to such a culture, and its development was unprovoked by Christianity and the work of St. Paul who also made pivotal and radical statements about the social standing of Greeks, Jews, men, and women in Christ Jesus. Christianity did not touch the Japanese mainland until the 16^th century, and for about 200 more years its contact was limited to the extreme South in Kyushu. Like Christianity, these changes were not preempted by social change in the culture (e.g., from a broader push for equal rights) but seem to come directly from within the workings of the religious writing of which they were a part.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of similar stories of “axial” phenomena, and I am not offering a thesis as to why this happens. The fact that it does happen should be taken at face value until some better theory arises. We cannot appeal to supernaturalism despite its attraction. Any such appeals are tacitly appeals about greater meaning. And one might challenge any such attempt at meaning by introducing a reductio ad absurdum in which two movies with similar themes are released one after another despite the fact that in prior years, public interest and consumption of such topics is nowhere to be found. Why does this occur? We can posit reasons. We can suggest “studio espionage” in such cases with no proof since conspiracy theories help us cope when information is limited. But in such cases, we would be cautious to attribute cause to supernatural forces. The temptation towards meaning reminds me of a scholarly debate I once watched between historian Bart Ehrman and theologian William Lane Craig, in which the latter noted that despite what we cannot say in the academy without committing career suicide (a riposte against Ehrman), what we think and do in the privacy of our homes is quite different. And so it is.

Yet the problem persists as cultures with no contact, one with another, progress to views that often seem borrowed from each other. While the topic is not popular in academic circles today, it remains one of those “energies” found beneath the current of anthropology and philosophy, for which we, as post-moderns, are either too quick or too slow to attribute causation and develop meaning.

Jodo Shinshu: The Gateway from Christianity into Buddhism

When Christianity first appeared on the Japanese mainland in the 16^th century, it took a little while for Francis Xavier to understand why the Japanese people of Kyushu (the Southern island in the Japanese mainland) were so open to the foreign religion and its god. While supernaturalists might disagree, the primary reason was not the miraculous nature of the message or God’s Holy Spirit moving over the masses. There were first  and foremost more practical explanations. The daimyo (warlord) in the South named Sumitada was in desperate need of defending his lands, so he found himself making deals with Portuguese merchants for weapons to use against other enemy daimyos. This period of time was known as Sengoku (a time of internal conflict among warring territories), and so out of cultural politeness, the daimyo gave the Portuguese missionaries a stage on which to speak. Both were using the other to get an advantage. But as time wore on, it became apparent to Xavier that much of the Jesuits’ success had to do with the confusion of the Dainicchi he preached. Dainicchi was the word that Francis was given as a suitable translation by a recent Christian Japanese convert named Anjiro for the Christian god, not knowing that the same word was already part of the canon in Shingon Buddhism for Buddha. Furthermore, it was assumed that Francis, who had come from India, was a native of the land of Shakyamuni, i.e., from India, the place from which the historical Guatama Buddha arose. The Japanese, who had little scruples about blending their own Shintoism with Buddhism simply supposed that Jesus was just another piece of a very large Buddhist worldview, and so their curiosity was often misinterpreted as religious zeal.  

Despite where scholars like Harold Bloom may object for finding common ground between Shin Buddhism and Christianity, it can be forgiven if a person who is of Christian background sees striking similarities between Amida Buddha, the worshipful being in Shin Buddhism, which is the largest sect of Japanese Buddhism today, and the Evangelical Protestant model of Jesus as the pathway and channel of salvation. This has been a touchstone between the two religions for the past 150 years, and has allowed for a somewhat non-confrontational introduction of Buddhism into American culture, notably the Buddhist Church of America, which represents the Nishi Hongwaji-ha school of Jodo Shinshu and is the largest, though most invisible, Buddhist sect in the United States.

When one takes the time to read the more important writings of Shin Buddhists, especially in the Jodo Shinshu sect where a clear distinction is made between self-power (the transient center of self-awakening) and other-power (the intransient center of self-awakening) one is reminded that the oft overemphasis on the self in no way represents the entire tapestry of Buddhism thought, life, and practice. Jodo Shinshu’s uniqueness is perhaps the reason why Christians have felt attracted and drawn to its precepts and energies, despite the fact that not many have sought conversion. Indeed, most self-enlightening forms of Buddhism are thought to be so radically different than Christianity, that for those converting, there is often a clear break with one’s past life in the Church. Prayer is replaced by Meditation. Intercession is replaced by self-realization. Repentance and reconciliation are replaced by a self-awareness of one’s imperfections for the purpose of self-enhancement. God is replaced, at least in practical terms, by the self.

This is not the case in Jodo Shinshu, at least historically, although there has been a movement, especially since the Dobokai Schism, to demythologize the more supernaturalistic elements of Amida’s intercessory action (it should be mentioned that in the larger framework of Mahayana Buddhist, the same could be said for many of the ancient scriptures in the Tibetan and Chinese traditions that speak of gods, demons, and otherworldly locations that have suffered demythologization at the hands of Westerner practitioners and reformers). Despite this, Jodo Shinshu still remains unique in that one may sum up its dimensionality as an ideology and practice that sees all religious duty through the filter of gratefulness. When practicing Jodo Shinshu Buddhists speak today, they supplant meditation for gratefulness. While enlightenment is still found in the pulse of Jodo Shinshu, self-awareness is not as important as it is in other sects. It is thought that Amida spent five kalpas (very long periods of time) to achieve enlightenment. So Jodo Shinshu Buddhists, much like their Western religious counterparts, do not think that perfect enlightenment is achievable in this space-time continuum.

It’s not until one gets into the writings of Jodo Shinshu thinkers and monshu that one truly appreciates the similarities found between the two religions. And in some cases, the Japanese thinkers surpass the channels of religious experience asserted by their Christian counterparts by presenting a more open and welcoming convocation. Let me end with one example where Jodo Shinshu goes beyond the promise of Christian salvation.

Perhaps one of the largest theological battles in Christianity consists between whether one is saved through Jesus or through some variation of Jesus and his own righteous works. This leads to the question of whether one remains in the faith or one can lose his salvation. Nobody has solved these questions, and depending upon your denomination, say, e.g., Assemblies of God vs. Presbyterian, the answer is likely different. When I was in a non-denominational church, I remember a conversation with a Calvinist who informed me that despite what I thought I had received in my “born again” experience, if I had backslidden (showing evidence of moral degradation), there was no way I could have ever received the salvation of Christ or that my confession of faith was in any way meaningful.

The Tannisho, a 13th century text that confronts the divergences in the sect only twenty years after the passing of its founder, Shinran Shonin, presents Amida as the Jesus that Christianity wants, but fails to give us: one who not only unconditionally accepts the validity of our antinomian confession of faith, but requires it, unlike the experience of Christian faith, in which confessionalism is never too far isolated from works righteousness, both in the scriptures and in the church's ritualism and emphasis on moral conduct becoming of the Christian. The salvation of Amida is wholly of Amida's own doing (tariki, other-power), a grace which Yuenbo, the writer of the Tannisho, deliberately goes out of his way to emphasize by continually providing illustrations how intellect, status, and one’s moral compass are no obstacle to Amida’s salvation--and not simply in the invitation but also in the keeping of oneself in the safeguard of Amida. One can infer that this is because Jodo Shinshu rejects the notion of perfectionism or perfect enlightenment (samyaksambodhi) as a possibility in this life. Jodo Shinshu in fact comes forward at a time in feudal Japan when corruption in Buddhism is thick and when sohei (warrior monks) of the Tendai school roamed the land like Christian crusaders, punishing enemies who disagreed with their schools principles.

This is just one, but perhaps the most important, way in which Jodo Shinshu inteprets salvation life. The call to all is truly a call to all and sweeps up all people despite their resistance or acceptance. The Tannisho is also very clear that is no good work worthy of one’s salvation or evil work worthy of damnation. It should be said that Jodo Shinshu, while a much more simple message, comes out of sutras that are very much mixed with other Buddhist sects, so that the translation of these ideas remain much a part of the identity of the sect without any larger claim on the tradition as a whole, but there is nothing like it in Christianity, for there is simply no antinomianistic faith that exists outside of some intimated works righteousness model, whether that be as a means of justification or as a manifestation of sanctification. And it should be said that even in the strictest of confessional models, the moral component of one’s fruit (or behavior) is never far behind. It remains a stumblingblock for so many who find themselves psychologically crushed under the weight of certain pretexts and conditions that come from within the Christian tradition, that not only model moral behavior for us as evidence of our faith, but place incredible pressure on how we should be growing in Christ. It’s enough to make one ask when one is not growing: what’s God’s part in all of this?

Jodo Shinshu has an answer:  It’s all God’s part.

 

 

samyaksaṃbodhily goes out of his way to emphasize by continually providing illustrations how intellect, status, and one's moral compass are no obstacle to Amida's salvation, not simply in the invitation but more so in the keeping of oneself. One can infer that this is because Jodo Shinshu (The True Pure Land) rejects the notion of perfectionism or perfect enlightenment (samyaksaṃbodhi) as a reality in this life.

The Beloved Dog in Japan

            Not many animal rights activists are aware of the deep-abiding love for dogs in countries outside the Western world. Especially in Asia, the Chinese in particular get a bad rap. We hear stories about the consumption of animals that are domesticated and beloved as pets. There is certainly truth to this.

             But despite that, there is also a sensitivity for animals that has not been cultivated through the religious traditions in the West that have in the East, primarily in their greatest religious export to the Western world: Buddhism.

Some of the earliest efforts towards animal rights came from Tsunayoshi of the Tokugawa Shogunate, known affectionately as the dog shogun.  Tsunayoshi was the great-grandson of Tokugawa Ieyasu and lived in seventeenth-century feudal Japan. He was born in the year of the dog and was known to Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician who wrote early Western observations on feudal Japan.  Tsunayoshi’s sensitivity towards animals came by way of Confucianism. Inherent to this Chinese-born tradition is the idea that humans cannot bear the suffering of other sentient beings and so they must be humane towards their non-human neighbors.  The shogun wrote edicts later titled Edicts on Compassion for Living Things, which were read daily, in which he encouraged the population to be kind to animals. Tsunayoshi’s is remembered for the rescue and kenneling of thousands of stray and unwanted dogs, especially those mistreated, abused, and left to die in the capital Edo. A fund was established from the general population tax, which provided fish and rice for the dogs that were kenneled and it became an enforceable crime to abuse dogs, an action that upset many and lead to the pejorative name “Inu Kubo” or dog shogun.

A second story comes from modernity, showing at least one dog to be most noble of all creatures. In a culture enamored with the Shinto ideal of ancestral remembrance, Hachikō’s unwavering loyalty became a symbol for national identity, unity, and faithfulness to the country. The story goes that the dog was taken in by a local professor who travelled back and forth from his home to Shibuya Station in the heart of Tokyo. The dog grew to the pattern of this routine, and so when one day the professor, who had a cerebral brain hemorrhage, did not return, the dog continued to wait for him - and waited, and waited for a total of nine years. The story played to the popular imagination when it was tabloidized on October 4, 1932 by the Asahi Shimbun, a large circulation newspaper serving Tokyo. Each year on March 8 in Tokyo on the spot where a statue honoring Hachikō was erected, dog lovers gather to pay tribute and remember the dog whose loyalty was said to be matchless.  There is no single dog that has been given as much attention as Hachikō. And the ideals of honor and loyalty and respect combined with the ideas in Confucianism and Buddhism of the innate worth of all living things plays well into the Japanese cultural conscience that teeters on an undefined line between the secular and sacred.

Christian Language and the Reality of War

Karl Barth’s response to those critics who denounced him for not equating the Cold War with the war waged by Hitler against Europe is an important insight into the way continental theologians determined to interpret war as a metaphysical concept.

Karl Barth

 One such example of Christian language at odds with secular application is in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s definition of war and peace, in which peace was deconstructed into two possible responses: one that acknowledged peace in the world reality (Wirklichkeit) and one that acknowledged the relationship between God and humanity as the summa bonum of peace. The fact that the former could not be reconciled to the latter attenuated the relationship between the two concepts of peace in such a way that the former was diminished to something done in imitation of the latter. Unless one was ready or even capable of operating within the language provided by theological context and accepted Bonhoeffer’s worldview; namely, that true and abiding peace meant “Christian peace,” only the possibility for greater distance between a worldly and sacred context remained.

Years later, when Barth was called to comment upon the Cold War, his hesitation to describe the current situation between the West and Soviet Union as one of war reechoes the dialectical language of his German tradition. Barth’s acknowledgement of Hitler’s aggression, not delimited to hypothetical fears, was part of a stock response that became ingrained in Protestant theologians during the last half of the twentieth century. Behind Barth's analysis is a discernible principle-based ethic at work in comparing Hitler and communism, the danger of which sets up one circumstance as the absolute condition for identifying aggression.

Like other Protestant theologians of his time, Barth seems to reecho the theme of war in terms of its metaphysical understanding. True war is not simply a human concern, one of a number of ways to collate information within a range of possible responses, but the ultimate response (what Barth calls ultima ratio). War goes beyond physical aggression between countries and acts as a rejoinder against life itself. As he writes:

Today we must continue to insist that war is identical with death in the sense that it is inevitable only when it has happened. In 1938 war was an actuality, but it could have been nipped in the bud with the right kind of determination. Russia has not created a similar situation today.

He goes on to write: A war which is not forced upon one, a war which is any other category but the ultima ratio of the political order, war as such is murder. . . . Every premature acceptance of war, all words, deeds and thoughts which assume that it is already present, help to produce it. For this reason it is important that there be people in all nations who refuse to participate in a holy crusade against Russia and communism, however much they may be criticized for their stand.

The force of true war is compulsion. When society finds itself unable to resist an enemy, war is the outcome. Yet Barth claims that compulsion can be resisted “with the right kind of determination” and war avoided, though he spares us any details.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

War is initiated in a various ways, the most dangerous of which is presuming war where war has not materialized. Hysteria and suspicion serve to antagonize the conditions towards war. And aggression is intrinsically connected to war. Yet the danger of war perhaps lies in the fact that one can have war without declaring it.  In the past century, for example, the Congress of the United States has been bypassed in its authority to declare war by presidents who send troops into global conflict zones. War without war has been the result.


The orchestration of a war is more than physical ravages, but a process in which countries formally assent to actions. Rather than create a more open understanding of war as violence, Barth creates a competing structure on the grounds of compulsion, denying the  language of technicality often referenced in political theater. One might assume that this movement is simply too rigidly fixed in the continental Europe of the 1940s to have any range of effect when pointed towards subsequent global conflicts.

A helpful analogy that gives us a view into the type of distinctions drawn by theologians when faced with secular and sacred crucibles comes in the form of Bonhoeffer’s distinction between murder and destruction of the individual (with implied reference to the assassination of Hitler). For Bonhoeffer, the physicality implied by the term “individual” presents a reality beyond its physical limitations. Bonhoeffer introduced the term “destruction” to assert the elimination of the person in a way that denies the very concept of personhood created in God. While murder is the physical destruction of the body, it is secondary to the destruction of the person. In this idea, Bonhoeffer seems to imply that the murder of an individual is not enough to kill his ideas, his political revolution, or writings, movement, etc., that beyond the physical remains a general existential order. In contradistinction, destruction accomplishes the elimination of the person, for it is the complete eradication of the individual’s person and as such a denial of God who created the natural order. Why this microcosm of destruction does not expand far enough to include all individuals who have this “personhood” may be as simple as an acknowledgement that the physical contains the universal mandate of God. The concept has a certain Aristotelian appeal, yet it also recalls Bonhoeffer’s similar analysis of original sin as a communal event and not an individual sin. This discussion in his writings, I believe, was an intellectual exercise that helped Bonhoeffer overcome his own misgivings about assassination.

Barth, however, is too much a pragmatist to assign war completely to some ethereal plane of contemplation. In the end, he levels six charges against the Germany people in opposition to war.  Despite his clarion call that war is murder, a charge that those in Western democracy abhor combining and grant such actions of physical violation as a necessary evil, Barth is not altogether opposed to the reality of wars, justifiable or not. His concern for war against Russia is the inevitability of dragging Germany back into the fray after having stripped them of their militaristic powers. He adjures that there is something morally suspect in demanding a country re-engage in war which has been told to abandon war. Towards the end of the letter, this pivot from high-minded Christian ethics to the realities of the Germany people fails to create a moral bridge between the two worlds of existence. In fact, Barth outright denies the need for a “Christian word” in our day since the political system has been until now keen enough to prepare in the event of a war, a sharp derivation from Bonhoeffer who felt that despite the current political climate, God speaks. It would almost seem that Barth and Bonhoeffer mixed up their own traditions with Barth adopting the more optimistic Lutheranism of human agency while Bonhoeffer falls under the Reformed dependency on the agency of God.       

Barth’s view is clearly not contained and controlled by the conditions imposed by a wanton pacifism that has not seen or does not know the terrible reality of war. It is certainly less optimistic about an intervening God, having lived through the aftermath of WWII, than Bonhoeffer’s whose years during the 1930s were consumed with God’s place in the world and his voice leading up to war.                                                                                                                                                                                                           

How Christianity adapted to survive Buddhist Persecution in Japan

Recently the movie Silence appeared in American cinemas to little fanfare despite Martin Scorsese’s name being attached to the project. The 40 million dollar project only netted about 15 million in theaters and is set for home release on March 28, 2017. The movie is based on a historical fiction book by the same name written by Shusaku Endo.

Most Christian scholars and lay people I know didn’t even acknowledge this movie’s existence, unlike Mel Gibson’s The Passion, partly because the few trailers that made their way to advertisement did not portray the religious crisis in a way that would pique curiosity and even fewer knew about or had ready Endo’s novel to be interested in the historical connections. The real story of the Shimabara Rebellion, Hara Castle, Amakusa Shiro, and the Kukure Kirishitans (hidden Christians) can be found in books and amply online. It is one of the most underrepresented periods of Christian history and rarely finds its way into historical survey courses at seminaries and universities primarily because interest in Asian Christianity is so few and far between and Eastern religious courses connected to Japan tend to focus on Taoism, Shintoism, and Buddhism.

What is interesting about Kakure Kirishitans (the emphatic syllabic resemblance to “Christian” is part of the Japanese system of borrowed words, also known in its written style as Katakana) is represented in their art and cultural forms. Despite heavy pressure from the Society of Jesus and Catholic Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century to convert the native population of Nagasaki and beyond in exchange for weapons, guns, and tactical assistance during the Edo Period in Japan where warring factions fought for supremacy, the missionaries surprisingly left their Japanese converts to their own customs. Since traditional Shintoism and Buddhism were intricately woven into cultural norms, Christianity was introduced as a form of syncretism among locals and daimyo who did not distinguish religious duty and practice as something superimposed on cultural practices.

When the Takugawa shogunate outlawed Christianity in 1620 and forced many underground, the Japanese Catholics, like their Roman spiritual ancestors before them, found interesting ways to represent their faith. What I wanted to display here were a few photographs I found around the internet during this time with captions about the significance of the object in the photo.

  

Votive altars like the one pictured here were popular among Kakure Kirishitans.  The altar itself resembled the more Japanese kamidana, a small shrine dedicated to an ancestor spirit (mitama). While there are obvious Renaissance images in the shrine's belly that are undeniably European, the structure of the votive was enough to convince authorities of its Japanese utility. 

 

The netsuke was an artistically fashioned carrying pouch that was hung on the belt of a kimono or yukata. The one displayed here is of Jesus. The absence of arms and cross may have likely been intentional so not to draw too much attention in public when worn during the ban of Christianity.

This Buddhist statue has a clever placement of a Christian cross on the back of the statue (murti) hidden from the view of prying eyes.

Perhaps one of my favorite devices for hidden Christian worship was the use of native bosatsu (enlightened beings) as substitutes for Christian figures. Since Catholicism openly supported the role of figurines/statues in worshipful experiences, native Japanese saw similarities and responded accordingly. This statue of the Japanese goddess of mercy, Kannon holds a child. It is actually based on its Chinese counterpart Guanyin. However, Kakure Kirishitans honored the statue as a representation of the virgin Mary. Disguising its true intent as such behind its obvious depiction, the Japanese Christians could openly display such a statue without fear of being revealed as Christians.