How to Read Shinran

Abstract

Gutoku Shinran 愚禿親鸞 (1173–1263) maintains his status today as one of the most consequential religious thinkers in Japanese history. The tradition stemming from his thought and teaching activity, Shin Buddhism (J. Jōdo Shinshū 浄土真宗), has been a significant force in Japanese society since the fifteenth century and remains one of the largest Buddhist movements in the world at present, with over twenty thousand temples in Japan and a century-old institutional presence in North America. His writings have been studied in a commentarial tradition going back to his early descendants in the fourteenth century, burgeoning during the Edo period, and continuing in recent times with prominent nonsectarian philosophers such as NISHIDA Kitarō西田幾多郎(1870–1945), SUZUKI Daisetsu 鈴木大拙 (1870–1966), TANABE Hajime 田辺元 (1885–1962), MIKI Kiyoshi 三木清 (1897–1945), and NISHITANI Keiji 西谷啓治 (1900–1990). Shinran’s concern in his writings is less to impart doctrinally validated teachings or methods of proper conduct than to articulate and enable a fundamental transformation of awareness. This is because it is precisely such an “overturning” of ordinary awareness and entry into a transformed mode of existence that signals the authentic encounter with enlightening activity that lies at the core of his Buddhist thought. His focal issues are, therefore, the nature of a person’s interaction with the Pure Land path and the distinction between provisional and genuine modes of engagement. He recognizes that it is usual for persons initially encountering Pure Land teachings to seek a coherent intellectual understanding of the doctrines from the perspective of the conventional self and to pursue means to assimilate the advantages of the path into their ongoing lives. Shinran, however, views such efforts as a continued assertion of the false discrimination and self-attachment that propel ordinary human life in anxious and painful existence. Thus, he seeks in his writings to precipitate a shift in apprehension that leads to authentic engagement with, and indeed itself arises from, the working of the Pure Land path. In other words, Shinran views the distinctive accessibility and effectiveness of Pure Land Buddhism as rooted in its transformative functioning within the realm of mundane, illusive thought and language. In this essay, I focus on aspects of reading Shinran, first taking up the overarching issues of Mahāyāna and Pure Land Buddhist thought that contextualize the basic problems in doctrinal understanding he feels compelled to address in his own writings. I then go on to consider the character of his methods of composition in formulating and communicating his own religious awareness. I close by highlighting several of the major philosophically relevant themes and issues in his thought.