“Indeed it matters not
how vile we be whether in body or in mind. Whoever we are, we ought to put our
trust in Amida’s Vow, and bend our whole mind to the one way, and so we shall
assuredly be born into the Pure Land. Nevertheless, we must remember that many
men have many minds. There are some who look only for the pleasure and glory of
this present evanescent world, which is but a vision or a dream, and know
nothing at all about that afterworld. There are others again who have come to
dread the future, and accordingly bend their energies in that direction. Thus
their minds flit from this to that religious practice, and they do not trust
exclusively in the one and only way. Again there are some who, when they have
once made up their minds in a certain way, will not change them, but persist
therein in spite of everything they may hear. Then there are others who today
have a most excellent faith, and it would seem as if they could never deviate
therefrom a hair’s breadth, and yet they afterwards give it up entirely. Such
being the case it is very hard to find anyone who has really entered the gate
of Jodo (Pure Land), and is devoting himself heart and soul to the practice of
the Nembutsu alone. I seem to myself to be the only one who secretly grieves
over such a regrettable state of things, and indeed it is hard to find anyone
in this world, who gives heed to the Dharma itself, irrespective of the
character of the man who expounds it.”
Commentary:Amida Buddha wishes to save everybody. However, there are some
people He cannot save because they themselves refuse His salvation. Master
Honen described some of these people in the fragment above.
1
“There are some who
look only for the pleasure and glory of this present evanescent world, which is
but a vision or a dream, and know nothing at all about that afterworld”.
These are the atheists and materialists who believe that we
have only one life and that nothing exists after death. Because they don’t have
any desire to escape samsara, they can’t entrust to Amida Buddha or wish to be
born in His Pure Land.
To our surprise, we find many of this category in religion
too, and especially in Jodo Shinshu Buddhism! They are those scholars who treat
the Buddha Dharma like a mere object of study, who dislike the devotional
attitude of simple faith devotees, calling it folk religion, and who deny
rebirth and the existence of Amida Buddha, while insisting that the Pure Land
is in the mind and not
an enlightened place to be attained after death. I would
have no problem with these guys if they stick to their academic circles but
they wear the robes and kesa of priests and teachers, doing ceremonies in front
of temple altars, mimicking religion when they are actually nonreligious and
even disregard the very basics of the Pure Land school - Amida Buddha himself.
They bow in front of His image but
do not actually accept His existence and
they do funeral services without believing in life after death! I call this
category of people - spiritual perverts. They are frustrated by their empty
life as atheists and materialists and try to fill their inner nothingness
through religious status. Theirs is the most disgusting way of life as what
they do is spiritual thievery, dressing in the robes of a religion that they
deny every time they open their mouth, doing worshipping gestures towards the
images of Amida in whom they don’t believe and chanting religious hymns whose
content they don’t follow. The need to be praised and respected as teachers is
immense in such pitiful forms of life that they make so much efforts to be
ordained and reach the highest status inside religious institutions. Truly for
them,
“the pleasure and glory of this
present evanescent world” is all that matters. Not only that such people
cannot be saved but they condemn themselves to the Avici hell for
the evil act of slandering the right Dharma and shutting the door to liberation for others.
These worms inside the lion’s body
are
worse than mass killers because they do not destroy bodies, but the medicine
given by the Buddhas to liberate beings from birth and death. Their actions are
like killing all sentient beings again and again, ad infinitum. Ordinary people
who don’t believe in life after death or in transcendental Buddhas but stay out
of religion and focus on their material welfare and glory, although they too
cannot be saved by Amida, have an infinitely better karma than fake priests and
teachers who pretend to speak in the name of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism while
denying its basic doctrine and faith.
2
“There are others
again who have come to dread the future, and accordingly bend their energies in
that direction. Thus their minds flit from this to that religious practice, and
they do not trust exclusively in the one and only way.”
These are people prone to superstition who are ready to do
any practice that promises them safety. They are always scared of whatever may
happen to them and so they lose the right perspective that samsara will never
be safe anyway, and that the goal should be to escape it rather than trying to
fix it. They are sometimes afraid to leave monotheistic religions and join
Buddhism because they think that something bad might happen to them, like
a punishment from their god. I met many people like this. Unfortunately, they are
easily
misguided by various nonbuddhist religions and cannot follow the
“one and only way” which is the Primal
Vow of Amida Buddha.
3
“There are some who,
when they have once made up their minds in a certain way, will not change them,
but persist therein in spite of everything they may hear.”
These are people who will remain closed to the Primal Vow no
matter how much we strive to explain it, or even if they have in us true
examples of faith in Amida. Many practitioners will not be able in this life to
break away from the paradigm of
self-power Buddhism. And they don’t seem to
hurry to escape birth and death, doing what they do in a relaxed way like they
have all the time in the world. Some are also fixated in their preconceived opinions
of what spirituality and religion means and the idea of Amida’s help to attain
Buddhahood quickly is impossible to understand and accept especially because it
is too easy and simple.
4
“There are others
who today have a most excellent faith, and it would seem as if they could never
deviate therefrom a hair’s breadth, and yet they afterwards give it up
entirely.”
Some people come to Jodo Shinshu and they seem to have faith
but for some reason they cannot keep their shit together and constantly abandon
it for other practices. Then they come back only to leave again after some months
or a year. I have met so many in this category. They seem to have something
like a mental or spiritual illness as they are mature people from whom one
would expect some stability, but they simply cannot stay in one place (focused
on one Path) for long time. Many people like this also have some kind of
perverse wish to be in the front, speak publicly, and they even engage in
organizing things in a sangha, making everyone have high expectations from
them, until one day everything is over and they leave just like that, as if
nothing happened. Believe me, I know people who do this coming and going for
years and they never stop! They create chaos in every community they go and they
too cannot be saved by Amida because their instability proves that they don’t have
genuine faith (shinjin). Not all of them are that bad like people in the first
category, but still they are very evil as they too are searching for status and
public acceptance, talking about the Dharma when they should shut up, listen deeply
and train their minds to be stable. It is good to stay away from them just like
those in the first category.
Also, because the Pure Land Dharma is so simple and easy to understand
(especially in the style we teach it at Amidaji)
many people seem to have faith just because they understood it intellectually. Thus,
we can easily confuse momentary enthusiasm with faith which is another way to understand the above passage from
Honen.
In our times as well as Honen’s there is really hard to find
people who dedicate themselves exclusively to the saying of the Nembutsu and
who have true faith in Amida Buddha. Very few are really satisfied with the
simple requirements of the Primal Vow and many feel the need to add something
new or change the teaching so as to accommodate it to their personal opinions
or various worldly ideologies.
There is another important element
that Master Honen emphasized in this fragment:
“it is hard to find anyone in this world, who gives heed to the Dharma
itself, irrespective of the character of the man who expounds it”. This
means that when hearing the Dharma one should pay attention to the Dharma and
not judge the teacher for things he does in his private life. Especially during
this Last Dharma Age monks and nuns who act as teachers cannot be judged by the
standards of the monks and nuns of the Right Dharma Age when Shakyamuni or His
direct disciples were present in human form. I explained this (based on
passages in the sutras) in my article
Monks
and Nuns of the Last Dharma Age, which is the doctrinal base for Amidaji
ordination system. While no unenlightened being is perfect, the Amida Dharma which
is taught and proclaimed by all the Enlightened Ones is perfect, so anyone who
can clearly and faithfully transmit this Dharma is worthy of the respect of
humans and gods. A wise person is able to distinguish between the personal
blind passions of a teacher and the Dharma he or she transmits and will not
shut his ears when hearing the truth, no matter how sinful is the voice who
proclaims it.
Namo Amida Bu
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