Shinran as Global Philosopher

Abstract

Gutoku Shinran 愚禿親鸞 (1173–1263) is one of Japan’s most creative and influential thinkers. He is the (posthumous) founder of what ultimately became Jōdo Shinshū, better known today as Shin Buddhism, the most widely practiced form of Buddhism in Japan. Despite this, his work has not received the global attention of other historical Japanese philosophical figures such as Kūkai 空海 (774–835) or Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253). The relationships of influence between Shin Buddhism in general—or Shinran’s work more specifically—and earlier Chinese sources, especially non-Buddhist sources, are complex, rarely examined in much detail, and often buried under layers of interpretive difficulties, made all the more challenging for contemporary Anglophone scholars by the ways in which Shin Buddhism has been marginalized in much of the philosophical scholarship on East Asian traditions. Exploring his work through a lens of connection to the broader Chinese philosophical landscape reveals new insights, both for our understanding of Shinran’s philosophical project, and for contemporary comparative engagement across East Asian traditions, helping to resituate Shinran as a globally significant philosopher.

1. A History of Hermeneutic Failures

Outside of Japan, Pure Land Buddhism in general, and Shin Buddhism in particular, have not received a great deal of philosophical scholarly attention. Dennis Hirota argues that there are two main reasons for this marginalization of Pure Land Buddhism. The first is:

the lingering assumption, vigorously asserted in the nineteenth century by Christian missionaries in Japan, that Shin is not only geographically and temporally removed from ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ Buddhism but removed fundamentally in philosophical outlook and soteriology.

(Hirota 2019, p. 415)

In other words, one reason for the scholarly marginalization of Shin Buddhism is that it was not seen by early western scholars as “real” Buddhism. When we consider how scholars in the nineteenth century were thinking about Buddhism, this begins to make more sense. Buddhism was introduced to the West by scholars such as Charles Hardwick (1821–1859), who had this to say about it:

What I intend by Buddhism is the system of metaphysical and social philosophy, organized by Shakyamuni or Gautama Buddha. Neither am I speaking here of Buddhism in its modern development, as modified by intermixtures either with the popular forms of Brahmanism, or with the older superstitions of the countries where it afterwards gained a footing: for that view of it will come more properly before us, when we pass from Hindustan to China, and the other regions where it still possesses a complete ascendancy. In different words, we shall be dealing now with a philosophy rather than with a religion.

(Hardwick 1882; Masuzawa 2005, p. 127)

A scholarly vision of Buddhism, imposed from this kind of starting point, would certainly struggle with Pure Land traditions, which differ in many key respects from the “authentic” form of Buddhism they were attempting to construct, which saw a historical Śakyamuni Buddha as the central figure, human but wise, meditating in calm repose, giving various teachings but never asking followers to do anything on faith. By contrast, in Pure Land traditions, the historic figure of Śakyamuni Buddha plays a sort of background role to the cosmic figure of Amitabha Buddha (often known in English as Amida Buddha), and the individual efforts of seated meditation (zazen) lead one not to liberation but further into ignorance. Moreover, when a number of nineteenth-century European scholars of Buddhism saw (or constructed) in Buddhism a tradition free of the failings of their home (Christian) traditions—Buddhism as free of ritual, free of violence, free of faith absent reason, free even of being a “religion”1—westerners in Japan noted what they found to be similarities between Pure Land traditions and Protestant Christianity. They saw similarities that included doctrinal emphases on “faith” and “grace,” the institutional structures of married clergy, and the general focus on meeting the needs of the non-literate peasant laity.2 Moreover, Shin Buddhism was further disparaged for its perceived admixture of so-called pagan, idolatrous, or “superstitious” elements.3 From this perspective, then, Pure Land traditions were seen as less “Buddhist” than other sects, less “other,” and so received less scholarly attention.

The second reason Hirota identifies for the scholarly marginalization of Pure Land traditions, in particular Shin Buddhism, comes from one specific way that Pure Land and Protestant traditions have been problematically identified as similar: “the imposition on Shinran’s Buddhism of a common notion of faith as simple credal assent” (Hirota 2019, p. 416). In other words, the idea that the whole thing is based on faith—for Shin Buddhism, faith in Amida Buddha, and faith in the nenbutsu, or the recitation of the name of Amida Buddha in order to get into the Pure Land. To unpack this a bit further, while Pure Land traditions trace their origins back to Nāgārjuna’s description of the “easy way” to bodhisattvahood—“think on the buddhas (J. nenbutsu 念仏) of the ten quarters and say their names in praise” (Nāgārjuna ca. 410, in Hirota 2019, p. 419)4—the Japanese Pure Land schools, beginning with Shinran’s teacher Hōnen 法然 (1133–1212), are associated with reducing what had been a rich and complex set of practices related to contemplating, visualizing, reciting, circumambulating, prostrating, meditating, and otherwise attending to many different buddhas and bodhisattvas (Ch. nianfo 念佛, Jp. nenbutsu/nembutsu) down to a single buddha (Amida), a single practice (chanting), and a single recitation: Namu Amida Butsu. For Hōnen the intervention was that one could—or should—simply chant the name, and that single practice, just chanting, was sufficient (if conducted appropriately). Shinran is then (problematically) associated with further reducing this down to a single recitation, the idea that if you just say the nenbutsu once, but with sincere “faith,” you will be reborn into Amida’s Pure Land. However, Shinran is a complex and nuanced thinker, and shinjin 信心, perhaps better translated not as “faith” but as “trusting mindfulness” or “entrusting heart-mind,” is one of his most difficult and complex concepts. Furthermore, major parts of Shinran’s activities philosophically undermine the entire operation of this common caricature—in fact, on his account of things, one is not, properly speaking, the causal agent for the saying of the nenbutsu at all, and the saying of the nenbutsu is not the cause for entrance into the Pure Land.

Both reasons for marginalization are hermeneutic failures—failures to let the text speak for itself, to set the conditions for the tradition to be able to give its own vocabulary and not the vocabulary of Protestant Christian Europe. Although not uncommon in comparative work, when the vocabulary from the home tradition (Europe, in this case) imposes itself so thoroughly on the new tradition that it cannot be seen as new, this is where translators and comparative philosophers are desperately needed, to articulate the ambient assumptions of the “new” tradition, to resist the pull of the “home” vocabulary, and to create opportunities for the “new” tradition to speak in a different language.5 If Shinran were simply expressing Protestant theology in Buddhist guise, that would be … very strange … but that is not what he is doing, and we do his work a disservice to not engage it on its own terms. As Hirota notes, that this scholarly marginalization persists, despite not only a substantial extant corpus of Shinran’s works, but full scholarly English translations of his works for more than two decades, must rest on a continued Anglophone misreading of the basic philosophical premises of both Pure Land Buddhism as it relates to other forms of Buddhism, and Shin Buddhism in particular. One of the challenges of reading Shinran as a philosopher of global significance, then, is seeing his interventions in Buddhist philosophy as significant in their own terms, not overwritten by Western Protestant assumptions. A second challenge, however, is not seeing his work as restricted to interventions in a local Japanese religious tradition. Although Shinran is associated with founding Shin Buddhism, and as such is a key figure in the Japanese religious landscape, his work is also deeply embedded in a broader East Asian philosophical context.

2. Shinran: Life and Selected Concepts

The general story of Shinran’s life is well known.6 He was born into a minor aristocratic family—the Hino branch of the Fujiwara clan—who were Ruist (Confucian) court scholars. This meant he likely had quite a good education as a young child, learning to read, write, and memorize various classics at an early age. However, by this time the Fujiwara were in serious decline, and in 1181 Shinran entered Enryakuji on Mt. Hiei. By the age of twenty-nine, after twenty years of practice, Shinran felt he had reached only a single realization, that he was “one for whom any practice is difficult to accomplish” (Shinran, Tannishō 2, in Ueda and Hirota 1989, p. 27). He then left the monastery for a 100-day retreat, where he had a vision that led him to seek out Hōnen (1133–1212), who had at that time gained significant fame for his radical teaching: the only effective practice is nenbutsu recitation. Shinran became a student of Hōnen, eventually authorized to copy his major work, before they were exiled—separately. From this point on, Shinran married and had children, preached, wrote, and developed his distinctive philosophical system.

Shinran was an incredibly creative philosophical thinker, although he sometimes does not get the credit he deserves. As he came into the picture, there was no “Pure Land Buddhism”—there were certainly Pure Land practices, but in China these practices were not a separate sect or school. While Shinran (following Hōnen) looked to first to Nāgārjuna, and then to Tanluan 曇鸞 (ca. 6–5th c.), Daochuo 道綽 (562–645), and Shandao 善導 (613–681) as Pure Land’s founding Patriarchs,7 as Robert Sharf and Daniel Getz, among others, have clearly demonstrated, in the medieval period in China there is no evidence for a separate “sect” (Ch. 宗 zong) of Pure Land Buddhism. There were no medieval Pure Land monasteries or mechanism for making monasteries, no official Pure Land monastics, no ordination rite or dharma transmission ceremony for Pure Land, no sense that the “patriarchs” thought of themselves as belonging to or founding a distinctive school, other figures who were important in China to the development of Pure Land thought and practice and yet not included as “Patriarchs” on this list, and, as Sharf explains, there was “nothing that could be construed as a Pure Land ecclesiastical organization in medieval China” (Sharf 2002, p. 284). As Sharf continues, “were it not for the legacy of Hōnen and Shinran, it might never have occurred to us to conceive of an autonomous Chinese Pure Land tradition with its own line of patriarchs in the first place” (Sharf 2002, p. 301).

In other words, although Shinran (and Hōnen) were actively interpreting the Chinese sources as if there were a distinct Pure Land school, it was more the case that Pure Land teachings and practices were largely intertwined with all the various schools, regardless of doctrinal affiliation. As Charles Jones notes in his recent monograph on Chinese Pure Land Buddhism,

Pure Land seemed to be the common property of all Chinese Buddhists. They all wore a small rosary (nianzhu 念珠) around their wrist…; they all replaced ’hello’ and ‘goodbye’ with the name of Amitabha Buddha (阿彌陀佛) when addressing one another as Buddhists. They recited the Buddha’s name to supplement whatever other practices they might have adopted.

(Jones 2019, p. xii)

That is to say, it is not that Shinran and Hōnen were incorrect in identifying relevant connections between the Pure Land texts and practices they learned at Enryakuji in a broad Tendai context and the earlier Chinese Buddhist landscape, but they assumed (or constructed) a lineage where none really existed.

During this period in Japan, Mahāyāna Buddhists in general were committed to the idea of mappō, that this was the Degenerate Age, the third age of decline, where liberation was difficult if not impossible due to the karmic burdens of the age and the distance from the enlightening wisdom of a Buddha. This was balanced, however, for practitioners who engaged in Pure Land activities because of Amida’s Vow, given when he was Hōzō Bodhisattva, which stated that should he become a Buddha, his Pure Land would be a place where all could achieve liberation, free from their heavy karmic burdens. Rebirth in Amida’s Pure Land meant the real possibility of liberation. And this was possible because of the nenbutsu, the act of calling the name of Amida Buddha, which anyone could do. Hōnen took this general framework, shared by most Buddhists of the time, and narrowed in on the Pure Land material, providing it with a philosophical grounding, a historical lineage, and a metapraxis.

Although Shinran maintained that he was firmly in Hōnen’s lineage, his work does diverge in some significant ways, many of which grew out of Shinran’s attempt to show that Pure Land Buddhism contains no residue whatsoever of self-effort or self-power, what he identified with “hakarai” or calculative thinking.8 As Thomas Kasulis explains,

Hakarai is not simply reasoning, but also an attitude toward reasoning, a self-confidence that you are on top of things and if there is something you don’t yet understand, you can figure it out eventually. For ordinary delusional human beings, hakarai functions as a form of intellectual hubris, a lack of recognition for the karmic circumstances and delusions preventing us from experiencing reality as it is. If we cannot encounter reality without our delusions, our thinking about reality will be no more than the reinforcing of those delusions.

(Kasulis 2018, p. 186)

One of the most radical ways that Shinran’s philosophy diverges from Hōnen’s is in his understanding of the nenbutsu as non-practice. Kasulis provides the analogy of a self-contained engine (self-power) and an electric (plug-in) motor (other-power) to help think through Shinran’s intervention. He suggests that through this analogy, we can see that both the engine and the motor generate power—that is, merit—but the electric motor has to be “plugged in,” or connected to Amida in order to generate merit. In the Degenerate Age, there is no fuel left for self-contained engines (self-power practices) to work, to generate merit of their own devices. This is why Hōnen suggests that other-power, and the nenbutsu (which plugs you into Amida and his merit, so to speak), is the only practice that works to generate sufficient merit for rebirth in the Pure Land. However,

Shinran’s opposing view is that reciting the nenbutsu is like neither a motor nor an engine because the nenbutsu does nothing at all. It is a ‘nonworking’ (mugi). For him, the problem with the view attributed to Hōnen is that it really distinguishes two kinds of agency in which you might engage. In both, however, you still do something… For Shinran the nenbutsu shows rather than does something. The nenbutsu is more like a pilot light indicating you are plugged in to an external power source rather than a merit-producing machine. The saying of the nenbutsu is for Shinran not a means to an end, but the sign that you have achieved the end, that rebirth in the Pure Land is already assured or settled (shojo). In other words: for Hōnen, the nenbutsu is a necessary cause for attaining rebirth in the Pure Land, but for Shinran it is the result of one’s rebirth being assured.

(Kasulis 2018, p. 190)

This, then, is one of Shinran’s most creative and important philosophical interventions. The nenbutsu is not a practice at all, not something you do that is causally efficacious for your rebirth in the Pure Land. As Hirota explains, “Because the nenbutsu arises from the Buddha’s enlightened mind “given” to or awakened in persons, it is the Buddha’s practice” (Hirota 2019, p. 433). Shinran is clear that the nenbutsu, the saying of the name of Amida Buddha, is true and real, that it is a result of Amida’s wisdom/compassion being enacted in/through/as the practitioner, but that it is not the practitioner’s practice.

This makes sense because Shinran has identified hakarai, calculative thinking, as one of the key problems that reinforces the false, egoistic notion of a separate and permanent self; it reinforces the idea that “I can do it on my own, I can figure this out myself, I’ll just do one more nenbutsu, or ten more, or a hundred more, or say it this way, or that way, or…”. As Shinran writes, “The reason is that since the person of own-power, being conscious of doing good, lacks the thought of entrusting the self completely to other-power, he or she is not the focus of the Primal Vow of Amida” (Shinran, Tannishō 3, in Kasulis 2018, p. 200). If the nenbutsu were the sort of thing that we did—practiced—as a means to the end of liberation, then it would necessarily end up part of the calculation that feeds the delusion, in one way or another. Kasulis explains,

For Shinran the quality of the entrusting mindful heart is crucial. It is a spontaneous utterance of awe and gratitude accompanying the moment of fully entrusting yourself to the power of Amida’s vow. Rather than a mantra chanted to accomplish some end (whether that chanting is understood to be ultimately from ourselves or from a buddha), Shinran’s nenbutsu is more like shouting ‘Hallelujah!’.

(Kasulis 2018, p. 191)

In other words, such as shouting Hallelujah, or perhaps even more concretely, bursting into genuine laughter, the nenbutsu is a spontaneous exclamation of fulfillment. Shinran is very clear that “True and real entrusting faith [shinjin] is unfailingly accompanied by the nenbutsu” (Shinran, “Chapter Three: Shinjin,” Teaching, Practice, Realization, in Kasulis 2018, p. 191). The reverse is not necessarily the case, however: “The nenbutsu, however, is not necessarily accompanied by [the] entrusting faith that is the power of the Vow” (Shinran, “Chapter Three: Shinjin,” Teaching, Practice, Realization, in Kasulis 2018, p. 191). That is, there is a phenomenological quality of experience of non-self that is the cause of the nenbutsu, and the nenbutsu may or may not be related to the conditions for that quality of experience. Shinran notes repeatedly that he does not have a method for enacting shinjin, and that he himself does not know what the outcome will be for him—perhaps he will even end up in hell.9

One of the other particularly interesting interventions Shinran makes has to do with his understanding of cosmology—who, what, and how, precisely, is Amida Buddha? Shinran writes that “we speak of two cosmic embodiments of ‘[Amida] buddha,’ the cosmic embodiment in itself as the nature of reality and the cosmic embodiment as heuristic expression” (Shinran, Notes on “Essentials of Faith Alone”, in Kasulis 2018, p. 202). There is the cosmic embodiment of Amida Buddha as heuristic expression (hoben hosshin), which is Hōzō who took the vows and became the Amida Buddha that we can (heuristically) distinguish from ourselves in the world—the personal Amida Buddha who has a backstory and an appearance and such. Then, there is the cosmic embodiment of Amida Buddha as the nature of reality as such (hossho hosshin), the formless cosmos as light, “another name for the compassionate universe itself” (Kasulis 2018, p. 203). For Shinran, in the moment of entrusting faith, the personal Amida merges into Amida as cosmos-as-light-as-compassion, and in as much as we fully participate in that process, we as separate entities also merge into the self-expression of the cosmos itself as light-as-wisdom/compassion (see Kasulis 2018, p. 204). Kasulis explains it thus:

the Amida-for-you disappears as your “I” disappears. Then, there is only, as Shinran puts it, Amida’s ‘working (gi) ‘that is ‘nonworking (mugi)’. Neither Amida nor you cause things to happen; they just happen of themselves. Shinran identifies this spontaneous function as ‘happening of its own accord’ (onozukara), or as a ‘naturalness’ or ‘spontaneity’ (jinen). There is no longer even a discrete person to be enlightened so there is no need for a heuristic Amida. That is true enlightening—Amida as reality’s universal self-illumination.

(Kasulis 2018, p. 204)

Even here, in some of Shinran’s most creative philosophizing with the nenbutsu and the cosmic buddha, there are resonances of a broader East Asian philosophical sensibility that would help us to situate Shinran as a more global thinker. We will return to these resonances in Section 4.

3. Writings and Language

What does any of this have to do with China? From Shinran’s perspective, there are two ways to think about this. First, he is very clear about his debt to certain Chinese Buddhist thinkers and texts. He readily acknowledges that Pure Land Buddhism comes to him from China, by way of Genshin and Hōnen—even if he is in some ways constructing that lineage—and is happy to engage with certain Chinese sources as serious and legitimate expressions of dharma or truth/reality. Shinran wrote several different kinds of texts, including systemic prose works in Chinese such as Teaching, Practice, Realization (Kyōgyōshinshō «教行信証»), “a compilation of sutras and Pure Land writings of India, China, Korea, and Japan,” and Passages on the Pure Land Way (Jōdo monrui jushō «浄土文類聚鈔»), but also hymns or verses in both Chinese and Japanese, and works that are Japanese commentaries on Chinese passages (Ueda and Hirota 1989, p. 48). In these, “the sentences of the brief scriptural passages are taken up individually, each character defined, and the entire sentence given in paraphrase. In this way, Shinran develops nuances that often depart from the literal meanings of the passages, but that reveal important aspects of his teaching” (Ueda and Hirota 1989, p. 51). Shinran was also a prolific letter writer, and had several other miscellaneous writings, including compilations of Hōnen’s work.

Shinran not only seriously engaged a variety of different Chinese sources across these different works, writing himself sometimes in Chinese and sometimes in Japanese, but also used common Chinese categories of composition for some of his major works. For instance, “in the Kyo-gyo-shin-sho Shinran’s own words amount to no more than one tenth of the whole volume, showing that Shinran thereby intended to make the centuries-old tradition speak for itself” (Bandō 2002, p. 19). That is, the work largely consists in Shinran’s selected passages from canonical Buddhist sources in Chinese, translated into Japanese and annotated, with commentary. In one sense, this was a very standard academic genre of the time—monrui, or collected passages, common in Song China, meant to show that one’s opinion is not arbitrary but is based on evidence from the canon (See Bandō 2002, p. 19).

Shinran upended this common genre. He took classic, canonical passages and not only re-interpreted them, but re-read them to the very limits of what the grammar and syntax of the passage allowed, which given the nature of classical Chinese in some cases produced dramatically different readings. In a sense, his way of engaging these passages was incredibly modern—even post-modern. As Bandō puts it, “his thought was, in reality, drastically revolutionary” (Bandō 2002, p. 19). As contemporary thinkers, we might see what he does here as presenting a kind of distinctive hermeneutic and translation theory, one that takes earlier Buddhist (and perhaps also Daoist/pan-Chinese) philosophies of language to their absolute limit and then reappropriates them in a context that at the same time holds “authoritative” texts to be capable of expressing truth and yet not bound by traditional interpretation.10

A clear and also radical example of this is with a passage from the Larger Sutra. The passage is commonly read as if beings sincerely direct the merits of their good acts toward attaining birth in the Pure Land—from Shandao’s early canonical interpretation all the way to Hōnen. “Shinran, however, by inserting honorific auxiliary verbs and particles in Japanese into the reading of the Chinese text, indicates that the agent who ‘directs’ is not the practitioner but the Buddha: Amida ‘directs his sincere mind’ to beings” (Hirota 2019, p. 433). This is perhaps grammatically possible, and it is consistent with Shinran’s larger interpretive picture, where human beings would not have any pure merit to give to awakening, but “sincere mind” could clearly refer to the Buddha’s enlightened wisdom and ability to act on beings. The passage, rendered into English from Shinran’s interpretation, reads: “All sentient beings, as they hear the Name, realize even one thought-moment [of] shinjin and joy, which is directed [to them from Amida’s] sincere mind, and aspiring to be born in that land, they immediately attain birth and dwell in the stage of nonretrogression” (Shinran, “Chapter Three: Shinjin 61” Teaching, Practice, Realization, in Hirota 2019, p. 431) As Hirota explains,

In this reading, Shinran found expressed in the sūtra the means by which the act of practice selected and fulfilled by Amida becomes the practitioner’s own. Through bringing beings to ‘hear’ his name or vow, Amida Buddha awakens wisdom-compassion in them. Through the action of this wisdom, they come to apprehend the flawed, constricted nature of their judgments and their discriminative grasp of self and things in the world, and the obsessive energy that had impelled their calculative thinking falls away. This is simultaneously the emergence of Other Power in their existence; hence, they rejoice and utter the name.

(Hirota 2019, p. 433)

The way that he pushes the limits of translation and interpretation in this passage sets the stage for key aspects of his entire philosophical project—the non-practice of the nenbutsu, the going-and-returning of merit transfer, and much more. Shinran’s development of his own creative philosophical position relied extensively on his engagement with Chinese language materials, and although he said of himself that he was not a good scholar—which was in a sense true, as he was certainly not doing scholarship in the traditional manner—he was not haphazard about it either. He had a dedicated hermeneutic practice that engaged the underdetermined nature of classical Chinese—compared to Japanese, classical Chinese has a very minimal and more flexible grammatical structural.

This hermeneutic practice was based in a very particular account of language as both capable of expressing truth or reality and as generally limited by the way in which humans tend to impose their own false discriminations onto the world (See Hirota 1993a, 1993b). We can think of language as being true, or capable of expressing truth or reality, because Amida’s Vow is in and through language. In a commentary, Shinran states,

“True and real” (shinjitsu) refers to the Vow of [Amida] Tathāgata being true and real; this is what the term “sincere mind” [in the Eighteenth Vow] means. From the very beginning sentient beings, who are filled with blind passions, lack a mind true and real, a heart of purity, for they are possessed of defilements, evil, and wrong views.

(Shinran, Notes on the Inscriptions on Sacred Scrolls, in Hirota 2019, p. 435)

Truth, then, is not propositional, nor is it something that occurs in our ordinary modes of experience. Rather, as Hirota explains, truth for Shinran is “reality itself, as things free of the imposition of discriminative, reifying conceptualization and verbalization” (Hirota 2019, p. 435). Our experience, however, is so generally self-directed, or tainted by self-oriented frameworks, that it is not in truth. However, as Hirota notes, truth “may be said to emerge in the realm of human apprehension and become manifest in words and concepts” (Hirota 2019, p. 435). Although language is deeply problematic, for Shinran, it is also precisely through language, through the dharma, through the words of a true teacher, through genuine dialogical engagement with others, that we can enter into relations with reality, with truth.

Shinran’s engagement with texts, his reappropriation and reconstruction of them, is in service of constructing the conditions for moments of transformation. These are not non-rational transformations; although Shinran is explicitly critical of calculative thinking as a root of self-attachment, he still uses recognizable methods of argumentation with logical structures. Instead, the transformation that he is looking for is “a fundamental shift in stance, a transformative event in which the self is dislodged from an absolute standpoint and made aware of its conditioned nature. Truth is the emergence of self-awareness of one’s existence as finite and delusional” (Hirota 2019, p. 436). Shinran’s “post-modern” engagement with the classical Chinese of the canonical Buddhist texts in his major works was in the service of this larger, existential-pedagogical goal. Hirota further explains that “For Shinran, only in an existential encounter with otherness through dialogical engagement can the delusional attachments of everyday life be broken. A reasoned or determinedly resolute adherence to the Pure Land teaching cannot bring one beyond the limits of an ego-centered stance” (Hirota 2019, p. 437). Simply continuing to interpret the texts as they have always been interpreted is insufficient to prompt the sort of realization that might, might, prompt an encounter with reality, truth expressed in our linguistic medium.

In addition to his general engagement with Chinese language materials, Shinran had significant engagement with Chinese Buddhist figures and texts, especially but not exclusively those associated with Pure Land concerns. He was particularly influenced by Tanluan 曇鸞 (Jp. Donran)—in Teaching, Practice, Realization (Kyōgyōshinshō «教行信証») Shinran designates Tanluan as a bodhisattva.11 In addition, Shinran quotes extensively from Tanluan’s Wangsheng Lunzhu (Ch. «往生論注», Jp. Jodo Ronchu), which is a commentary on Vasabandhu’s Treatise on the Pure Land. Hōnen identified Tanluan as the first of the Chinese Patriarchs of Pure Land Buddhism, and Tanluan is particularly important for many of the key developments in Chinese Pure Land concerns and practices. As Bandō notes, for Shinran,

we find that at the very beginning of the Kyo-gyo-shin-sho Shinran introduces the key term of ekō in its dual aspects, going and returning, which is none other than Shinran’s inheritance from T’an-luan. All these facts are clear evidence that T’an-laun’s position in Shinran’s thought is predominant.

(Bandō 2002, p. 20)

Ekō, going and returning, is a very interesting part of Shinran’s larger intervention in traditional Pure Land thought, and the fact that he is initially inspired in this by Tanluan is significant.

Tanluan is a very interesting figure to consider, however, as we think through Shinran’s relationships with Chinese materials. Not only was he a Buddhist monk and scholar of Pure Land materials, but he was also a scholar and practitioner of various Daoist contemplative and medical arts. Although the traditional story is that he took up Daoist practices after he became gravely ill in a search for life-extending elixirs, and abandoned such things after meeting Bodhiruci and learning of the Pure Land, more detailed historical evidence suggests that this is unlikely.12 As Roger Corless argues, “there are many Taoist elements remaining in T’an-luan’s Buddhism…[and] he can be, and perhaps in fact was, regarded as a Taoist master (Tao Shih) to the end of his life” (Corless 1987, p. 37). In Tanluan’s work, he draws not only from Madhyamika figures such as Vasabandhu, but in his commentary he also references the Daodejing, Zhuangzi and other non-Buddhist sources.13 In reading and engaging with Tanluan, then, Shinran not only was influenced by Tanluan’s interpretation of Vasabandhu, but also by his engagement with the Chinese sources of his time, including explicitly non-Buddhist material.

On the other hand, however, Shinran is also very clear in terms of what he thinks about some non-Pure Land aspects of the Chinese Buddhist tradition, and some parts of Daoist and Ruist (Confucian) traditions as well: “Confucius is spoken of as a sage, but his accomplishment are far surpassed by the Buddha” (Shinran, “Chapter Six: Transformed Buddha Bodies and Lands 105,” Teaching, Practice, Realization, Hirota 1997, vol. 1, p. 284). Shinran is not shy about engaging in intense and explicit polemics when it suits his purposes. For instance, Shinran is repeatedly and intensely critical of various texts and practices that were in his day associated with Daoism, which was very much a part of lived religious culture of the time: “Discard the wrong teachings of Lao-tzu and enter the true teaching of the dharma!” (Shinran, “Chapter Six: Transformed Buddha Bodies and Lands 106,” Teaching, Practice, Realization, Hirota 1997, vol. 1, p. 286). This includes not only things having to do with Laozi, for instance, but also popular practices of geomancy and astrology. He seems especially concerned with Buddhists who are caught up in what he deemed to be “non-Buddhist” sorts of pursuits, and wrote extensive polemics against various Daoist sorts of activities he suggested were in the end unlikely to be as effective as promised, since from his perspective, the stars and natural forces are all under the control of various buddhas, not Daoist gods. As Michael Conway explains, Shinran was extremely critical of Daoist practices such as geomancy and astrology, “arguing that the person who had attained shinjin 信心, with real trust or genuine understanding of the nembutsu 念仏, would be protected naturally by such unseen forces” (Conway 2015, p. 126).

Shinran begins the second fascicle of the Transformed Buddha Bodies and Lands Chapter (Keshindo 化身土) of Teaching, Practice, Realization by stating, “Below, based on various sutras, the true and the false are decisively distinguished and people are cautioned against mistaken attachment to the perverse falsehoods of the non-Buddhist teachings” (Shinran, “Chapter Six: Transformed Buddha Bodies and Lands,” Teaching, Practice, Realization, in Conway 2015, p. 128). The non-Buddhist teachings he has in mind here are explicitly Daoist—teachings such as Laozi’s immortality, which is a direct problem for making sense of Amida—Buddha of infinite light and infinite life—and his Pure Land. However, Shinran’s strategy for discrediting this non-Buddhist (Daoist) material is not, as it would be later in Japanese history, to suggest that it was Chinese and therefore insufficiently Japanese. Instead, his strategy is to use a Chinese text, Falin’s Bianzheng Lun «辯正論», which itself is a Buddhist polemic against Daoism, as the core of his argument. As with his general hermeneutic/rhetorical technique, he radically appropriates from this text in ways to suit his own purposes, sometimes in ways that are perhaps violently at odds with the text itself. Nonetheless, even in the case where he is arguing against Chinese influence, his argumentative technique involves a re-appropriation of Chinese source material.

4. Shinran’s Daoist Roots

To what extent can we determine if he was really intending to malign the philosophical concerns of texts that we today would identify as “Daoist,” in a philosophical sense, based on these and other similar remarks? It seems clear that he was concerned about certain kinds of contemporary, local practices, such as geomancy, and certain kinds of narratives that might steer Buddhists away from the Pure Land, such as those concerning Laozi’s immortality, but that is not a wholesale rejection of a broader Chinese philosophical sensibility that is steeped in certain kinds of loosely “Daoist” philosophical concerns, nor of more narrowly focused “Daoist” philosophical vocabulary or problematics. Indeed, what I suggest is that as with a great many Buddhist thinkers in East Asia, Shinran’s work is also deeply influenced by—and builds on in important, creative, and distinctive ways—the Chinese philosophical landscape, especially early Daoist ideas concerning language, ethics, and spontaneity. While scholars readily acknowledge the debt of traditions such as Chan/Zen to early Daoism, such a connection is rarely discussed in the context of Shinran’s thinking. Yet some of his most distinctive philosophical interventions are most sensible when read in this larger geographic-philosophical context.

In particular, the Daoist sensibilities connected with concepts such as wuwei and ziran, as well as critiques of language and morality, seem philosophically relevant to Shinran’s project. Practices that are not practices that no one does and yet things are accomplished, Amida-as-cosmos-as-compassion-expressing-itself, language that problematically discriminates and yet also beautifully expresses something true, a way of living well that has no pre-determined moral code/principles (in one sense, at least) and yet still values people caring about and being “good” to one another: these are all meaningful connections we can draw between early Chinese Daoist philosophies and Shinran’s work.

One key point of connection between early Daoist philosophical sensibilities and Shinran’s work is the term 自然 (Ch. ziran, Jp. jinen). This term repeatedly appears in the Daodejing and in later Daoist philosophical materials as well. The first character, zi, means “self” as a reflexive grammatical term, and the second character, ran, means something such as “so” or “as it is.” Often translated into English with a range of terms from “nature” or “natural” to “spontaneous/spontaneously so,” the term has also been more literally translated as “self-so-ing,” what or how events/processes are of themselves, where events and processes are understood as interdependent and mutually co-creative.14 We see this term for instance in Daodejing Chapter 25 “as a kind of categorical yet always contextualized dispositional spontaneity that is more fundamental that any specific expression of order” (Ames and Hall 2003, p. 68). Roger Ames and David Hall translate the relevant section of that chapter of the text as:

Human beings emulate the earth,

The earth emulates the heavens,

The heavens emulate way-making [道],

And way-making emulates what is spontaneously so [自然].

(Ames and Hall 2003, p. 115)

In this passage we see one way that this term is commonly used in the early Daoist material as part of an account of how things are such that humans ought to pattern their conduct on what is natural/spontaneous. Ziran is not something different from or other than dao 道, “it is the movement of the Tao as the Tao, namely as the underlying unity of all things as well as the underlying source of the life of all things” (Cheng 1986, p. 356).

Another key term for early Daoist sensibilities is wuwei 無為, often translated as “non-coercive acting” (Ames and Hall 2003, p. 67) or “non-controlling action” (Lai 2007, p. 334). Wu is a negation, meaning “without,” and wei is a particular kind of action. Chad Hansen has argued that wei has two primary meanings, one being to act to bring about defined goals, and the other, most relevant here, to deem, judge, evaluate, or take on a particular perspective (Hansen 1992, p. 212). As Karyn Lai further explains, this sort of wei is the “interpretive glasses with which one views the world,” and a key concern of the Daodejing is “to reject all forms of ‘deem’-ing that are conditioned by conventional values and norms. According to this argument, to wuwei is to act without deeming—to act in a manner that is not conditioned by, or restricted to, conventional norms and values” (Lai 2007, p. 333). We see this repeatedly throughout the text, in its concern for how conventional language and categorization is inadequate to the richness and provisionality of our experience and the world, beginning with the opening lines of the text: “Way-making (dao) that can be put into words is not really way-making, and naming (ming) that can assign fixed reference to things is not really naming” (Ames and Hall 2003, p. 77). We also see it as a repeated concern with the Ruist/Confucian tendency to want to put labels onto our experience, deeming some things better than others (for instance this criticism of the Ruists in chapters 18, 19, and 38).

Lai argues that these two terms together, ziran and wuwei, form the conceptual basis for an ethic in the Daodejing: “The commitment to augment the spontaneity of individuals necessitates the application of methods that are sensitive to it. This is the Daoist ethic of ziran-wuwei” (Lai 2007, p. 334). Furthermore, in her argument, this is an ethic that “originates in conjunction with the Daoist concept of interdependent self” (Lai 2007, p. 334). She argues that this way of looking at this world and human action, while rejecting certain kinds of conventional morality, sets up the possibility for a more genuine engagement with others:

At the practical level, wuwei ethical action is a response to the immediacy of the situation and to the needs of the interdependent other in situations…Allowing for spontaneity in the other is a much more risky exercise than one that relies more substantially on norms and expected behaviors. Yet, a spontaneous response—and the allowance for it—is a true exercise in ethical behavior, as compared with one which works within the boundaries of convention.

(Lai 2007, p. 336)

This kind of immediacy or responsiveness is, in a sense, “pre-reflective in that it involves direct apprehension of the other before one’s perception of the situation has been clouded by preconceived notions of acceptability and normativity. It is a mode of perception untainted by wei standards: “As soon as everyone in the world knows that the beautiful are beautiful, there is already ugliness (Daodejing 2; in Ames and Rosemont, Jr. 2003; p. 80)” (Lai 2007, p. 336).

Lai draws her account of this directly from the text, based on passages su Daodejing 64, which Lai presents in selected form:

He who takes conventionally prescribed action (wei) fails.

He who controls things loses them.

Therefore the sage takes unconditioned and non-controlling action (wuwei) and therefore does not fail.

He seeks not to control anything and therefore he does not lose anything…

He learns to be divested of conventional norms and their associated conditioned perspectives [xue buxue 學不學],

And returns to the original multiplicity and specificity (of individuals).

Thus he supports all to be spontaneous and not to act according to learned and conditioned responses.

(Lai 2007, p. 335)

Although this is a particularly challenging text to translate, and it supports a variety of readings, even a somewhat different reading of the same sections of the passage still supports the larger point about the ziran-wuwei ethic:

Those who would do things ruin them;

Those who would control things lose them.

Hence because the sages do things noncoercively (wuwei)

They do not ruin them,

And because they do not try to control things

They do not lose them…

It is for this reason the sages in leaving off desiring

Do not prize property that is hard to come by,

And in studying not to study

Return to what most people have passed over.

Although they are quite capable of helping all things (wanwu) following their own course

(ziran),

They would not think of doing so.

(Ames and Hall 2003, p. 178)

This broadly Daoist sensibility is often expressed in the phrase from Chapter 48, 無為而無不為也 wuwei er wu buwei ye, which we could gloss as “doing nothing and yet nothing is left undone,” or “doing things non-coercively and yet leaving nothing undone.”

While perhaps the connections between some of these early Daoist philosophical concerns and Shinran’s work are becoming clearer, a few direct connections may be in order. There are (at least) three significant points of connection between these early Chinese sensibilities and Shinran’s work: ziran and Shinran’s account of the cosmic Amida’s spontaneity (jinen), wuwei and Shinran’s account of the non-practice of the nenbutsu, and the critique of language/deeming and Shinran’s critique of hakarai and ordinary morality. To be clear, these Daoist philosophical sensibilities made their way into a great deal of the later Chinese philosophical landscape, including later Buddhist traditions, so this is not a claim that Shinran himself was mining early Daoist texts in any explicit manner, nor it is to say that Shinran was not building on these and other concepts, in genuinely unique and creative ways. However, given that the philosophical relevance of the early Daoist tradition is well established, one benefit of seeing these points of connection is that it helps us to see Shinran’s work as part of, and relevant to, much larger conversations—not only Shin or Pure Land Buddhist conversations, or East Asian Buddhist conversations, but conversations that cross the boundaries of different traditions, establishing Shinran from the start as a global thinker.

Over the course of his career, Shinran used a variety of different terms to refer to reality as such, but toward the end of his life he started to use the term jinen (自然). Shinran writes,

The word ji means ‘of itself’ rather than through any intentional action by the practitioner. It signifies being made so. Nen means ‘made in a certain way.’ What makes something in a certain way is not any activity on the part of the practitioner but the pledge of the Tathagata, and that is why this is called honi or ‘the dharma as it is’.

(Shinran, “On Jinen Hōni,” Hymns of the Dharma Ages, in Heisig et al. 2011, pp. 254–55)

Shinran straightforwardly identifies jinen as how we are “naturally…in accord with the cause of birth in the Pure Land and…drawn by the Buddha’s karmic power,” and writes that “The spontaneous working (jinen) is itself the fulfilled land” (Shinran, Notes on the Inscriptions on Sacred Scrolls, and Hymns of the Pure Land Masters: Shan-tao 82, in Hirota 2019, pp. 438–39). He also writes that “Supreme Buddha is formless, and because of being formless is called jinen 自然” (Shinran, “On Jinen Hōni,” Hymns of the Dharma-Ages, also “On Jinen-Hōni,” Lamp for the Latter Ages,” in Hirota 2019, p. 438). As Hirota explains,

In using this term for suchness or supreme nirvāṇa, Shinran expresses both the ultimate, inconceivable attainment of the Pure Land path and also his vision of reality as inherently dynamic, actively giving rise to the working of wisdom-compassion. Jinen or naturalness is true reality that transcends all conceptual grasp and, at the same time, is always vital, functioning as the liberating force that encompasses and fills the lives of ignorant beings. Shinran defines jinen with regard to the stance of the practitioner as “being made to become so of itself”—that is, being brought to awakening through Amida’s working and not through one’s own designs and endeavor.

(Hirota 2019, p. 438)

This is not only the same term from the early Daoist philosophical context, it also bears considerable traces of that context, albeit now identified as the workings of Amida as cosmic buddha instead of Dao.

Once we see that potential connection, Shinran’s discussion of the two cosmic Amida’s—personal/historical Amida and cosmos-expression-Amida—takes on another light. Recalling the idea that in the moment of full entrusting faith, the individual and Amida-for-you both disappear, and there is only “Amida’s working (gi) that is nonworking (mugi),” where things just happen of their own accord, spontaneously (jinen).15 This is the naturalness or spontaneity of the Dao, the cosmos, given self-expression as Amida’s compassionate activity, happening without being caused to happen: Amida as compassionate Dao.

When we consider Shinran’s intervention in how we understand the nenbutsu—as a non-working, not as a practice at all—considering this in context of early Daoist philosophical sensibilities makes this radical departure from Buddhist doctrine a bit more sensible, and more in line with other radical departures related to practice happening in other Buddhist traditions influenced by certain Daoist concerns. Consider, for instance, the way that Chan/Zen traditions take up the sudden/gradual enlightenment debates on the relationship between practice and liberation—if we already have/are buddha-nature (Ch. foxing 佛性), why do we need to engage in practices at all? Chan/Zen thinkers from Linji (d. 866) to Dōgen come down on this question in radical ways, seeming to suggest that there is no special “doing” that acts as a means to the end of liberation. It is uncontroversial to see these thinkers as having had to engage in various ways with broadly Daoist sentiments such as that found in Daodejing 48—do nothing and yet leave nothing undone.16

Shinran’s work too makes sense from this context, although his framework and the solution are certainly unique. In the Tannishō, Shinran is reported to have said: “It is impossible for us, who are possessed of blind passions, to free ourselves from birth-and-death though any practice whatever. Sorrowing at this, Amida made the Vow, the essential intent of which is the evil person’s attainment of Buddhahood” (Shinran, Tannishō 3, Hirota 1997, p. 663). In emphasizing that the nenbutsu is not a practice, Shinran still had to construct an account of how it is that liberation does occur, and he did so through rethinking ekō, or merit transfer, as the action of Amida Buddha, not individual beings. And his rethinking of ekō drew heavily on the work of Tanluan, a thinker immersed in both Buddhist and Daoist worlds.

Finally, Shinran’s extensive critique of hakarai, calculative thinking, finds particular resonance with the critiques of language and the ziran-wuwei ethic of the Daodejing, with its emphasis on an unmediated, immediate responsiveness to the needs of interrelated others. His passage below could have been taken from out of the Daodejing, and echoes the early Daoist concern with the ways in which carving the world up with moralizing distinctions tends to lead to less genuinely caring behavior:

Anyone who cannot write the Chinese characters for the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’

Has a genuine heart17;

Whereas those who show off their knowledge of Chinese characters

Are grand examples of meaningless vanity.

(Shinran, Hymns of the Dharma Ages, in Heisig et al. 2011, p. 251)

Kasulis writes that “Shinran’s position is that the good action is done with no calculated purpose at all. If I do something only because I think it is right, then I am acting on my own power—my power to distinguish correctly right from wrong and to act on that distinction” (Kasulis 2018, p. 200). There are several reasons that the “good” action is one that is without calculated purpose—one that is spontaneous, or immediately responsive—from Shinran’s perspective. One reason is that my very framework for making judgments about what is right and wrong in any sort of substantive way is itself problematic; it is a framework from within a delusional system, so my ability to build “good” calculations off of it is unlikely. Furthermore, the buildup of karmic afflictions is such that I will tend to identify myself with it in ways that continue to reinforce my sense of self/ego, which will tend to reinforce the delusional/false framework, making the whole operation a feedback loop of problems. Even if “I perform an act, however altruistic my self-avowed motives might seem, if I understand my act as my altruistic act, it is not egoless after all” (Kasulis 2018, p. 200). However, Amida’s compassion expresses itself through us as spontaneous moral activity, as acts of care and concern for the needs and suffering of others as they arise in the moment. “Consciously trying to help others by figuring out moral principles or devising some plan of moral action would be, according to Shinran, only another obstruction to the working of spontaneous, natural compassion” (Kasulis 2018, p. 201). For early Daoist philosophers as well as for Shinran, our path to genuine moral engagement with one another is not through predetermined rules or categories, be they Ruist/Confucian or Buddhist, but through openness and responsiveness to others that lets us experience our interconnection and displaces our tendency to put ourselves at the center of the universe.

In conclusion, if we return to the hermeneutic challenges raised at the start of this article, we can see that Shinran is a complex thinker embedded in layers of relationship with Pure Land, Buddhist, and Chinese philosophical contexts. Seeing him as such helps to resist various hermeneutic failures that have led to his marginalization and prevented him from being treated as a global philosophical thinker on par with other historical Japanese philosophers. Furthermore, as a global philosophical figure, Shinran’s work is also relevant not only for the sort of unidirectional analysis in this article, but also for more creative contemporary inquiries—what might a Shinran-inspired reading of the Mengzi reveal? How might Shinran’s account of a compassionate cosmos’ self-expression intervene in discourse relevant to the Daodejing? What does Shinran’s account of enacting Buddha’s virtue have to say to Aristotelean virtue ethics? What are the relevant philosophical nuances or differences between his account of non-dualism, or non-practice, or sudden enlightenment, and Dōgen’s? Does Shinran’s hermeneutic and translation theory give us a different way of making sense of the Lotus Sūtra’s discussion of expedient means (Sk. upāya, Ch. fangbian 方便)? Examining Shinran’s connection with a broader Chinese context reveals his global philosophical relevance.