“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.”[1]
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
[2]
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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