Apparently, by
saying that sentient beings cannot free themselves from birth and death by
their own power, it seems that Jodo Shinshu misinterprets or does not totally
accept the doctrine of karma. However, Jodo Shinshu accepts fully the teaching
of karma, just that it sheds light on a very important aspect that many Buddhists
usually tend to forget.
Yes, generally
speaking, we can change our karma and thus decide to act in such and such a
way, influencing our own destiny, but do we really always act as we wish?
Suppose a person who drinks a lot since childhood and has now 40 years of
alcoholism, can he give up alcohol just like that, by a simple act of will? Or
someone who smokes since early childhood, can he really give up smoking over
night?
We see from
experience that many smokers, alcoholics or drug abusers cannot give up their
bad habits so easily, some of them even ending their lives without being able
to stop their harmful behavior. How much more is the influence of the past
habitual karma!
This habitual
past karma is not what we did in a habitual manner in a single lifetime, but
what we did and were concentrated on in many lifetimes. If it is hard to put an
end to the habitual karma of smoking which lasts only for twenty or thirty
years, how much harder or even impossible would be to stop the various bad
karmic tendencies of many lifetimes!
So, Jodo
Shinshu doesn’t deny free will in changing karma, but it insists on the truth
that this will is so much weakened by the habitual karma of past lives that it
becomes almost incapable of really changing something.
When we have
became accustomed for many eons and long kalpas with living in ignorance, hate,
greed, jealousy, attachments, how could we not be influenced by this habitual
evil karma also in this life and how could we end all these perpetual miseries
just by force of will? We all know that a long time of drug abuse leads to
dependency, a state in which the personal will of change is extremely limited
and one needs immediate help from a specialist. But we took the drugs of
delusion for many lifetimes since the beginingless past!
Jodo Shinshu
teaching and method doesn’t start by staring at the ideal: we all have
Buddha-nature and we can all become Buddhas, or at least do pure deeds and gain
merits, but from the state of mind in which we dwell in the present moment.
Entering the
Jodo Shinshu path is like saying: “Hello, I am Josho Adrian and I am an
alcoholic”. The Jodo Shinshu Buddhist doesn’t say: “Hello, I am Josho and I
have Buddha-nature”, but “Hello, my name is Josho and I am ignorant and full of
blind passions, incapable to heal myself (attain Nirvana)”.
So, first in
Jodo Shinshu we recognize our own incapacities and then we accept the medicine,
which is the Primal Vow of Amida Buddha. We recognize that we are so sick that
we can no longer rely on ourselves. We agree to apply the only treatment that
works in dependency cases like ourselves.
Someone who
says, “I can become a Buddha in this lifetime because my true nature is
Buddhahood itself” is someone who “fails to understand the influence of good
and evil karma of past lives” and “that every evil act done - even as
slight as a particle on the tip of a strand of rabbit’s fur or sheep’s wool -
has its cause in past karma.”, as Shinran said in the thirteenth chapter of
Tannisho.
In the same
way as someone who abused drugs for many years thinks that he can give up
immediately his dependency, and after a few tries he ends up taking a super
dose, also “a person may not wish to harm anyone and yet end up killing a
hundred or a thousand people”. This is the heavy influence of karma from
past lives. And this is exactly why we need Amida’s salvation.
This
salvation, as promised in his Primal Vow, doesn’t depend on our own will, which
is influenced by our good or bad karma from past lives, but it depends solely
on Amida’s Power of curing our illnesses and transforming us into Buddhas: “it
is by the inconceivable working of the Vow that we are saved”.
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