Shinran as Global Philosopher

Sarah Mattice

doi:10.3390/rel13020105

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.

Highlights

Gutoku Shinran 愚禿親鸞 (1173–1263) is one of Japan’s most creative and influential thinkers
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
One reason for the scholarly marginalization of Shin Buddhism is that it was not seen by early western scholars as “real” Buddhism

Summary

A History of Hermeneutic Failures

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. Major parts of Shinran’s activities philosophically undermine the entire operation of this common caricature—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.

Shinran

Writings and Language

Shinran’s Daoist Roots