Abstract
This article examines the Pure Land Buddhist thinker Shinran (1173–1263), from whose teachings the Shin Buddhist tradition emerged. Shinran’s ideas provide an alternative model for considering moral judgments and issues related to violence. Since Shinran viewed violence as a mode of human action, the author asks how violence, whether inflicted or suffered, is to be understood by Shin Buddhists. This article further discusses how practitioners engaging the Pure Land path might deal with it, and the relevance of Shinran’s understanding here and now. This line of inquiry expands to consider how Shinran’s approach relates to norms used in modern discussions of violence. It scrutinizes the double structure of ethical awareness, discussing in particular how usual judgments of good and evil action can be contextualized and relativized. In the section dedicated to defusing the violence of ignorance, the author introduces Shinran’s nonviolent, nonconfrontational response, and analyzes how Shinran recasts the Buddhist stories of Ajātaśatru and Aṅgulimāla in relation to his understanding of the “five grave offenses”—specifically murder and near matricide—usually understood as excluding practitioners from the benefits of Amida Buddha’s Vows. The author shows that Shinran focuses on saving even the evil, not solely the worthy, thus rejecting the exclusion provision of the Eighteenth Vow.
Highlights
The Pure Land Buddhist thinker Shinran (1173–1263) lived in a time of widespread social turbulence and conflict
For Shinran, it is the person who has been brought to apprehension of the pervasive self-attachment that conditions their entire existence who is in accord with Amida’s Vow, for it is precisely such awareness that enables the freedom from calculative thinking that characterizes a genuine encounter with the teaching
In relation to moral judgments, this impulse evolves into the psychological seed of righteous violence. Shinran expresses his stance as a Pure Land practitioner: “How joyous I am, my heart and mind being rooted in the Buddha-ground of the universal Vow, and my thoughts and feelings flowing within the dharma-ocean, which is beyond comprehension!” (CWS I: 291, 303)
Summary
The Pure Land Buddhist thinker Shinran (1173–1263) lived in a time of widespread social turbulence and conflict. The incessant rivalries and armed clashes among various court, temple, and warrior factions during the Heian and Kamakura eras have been described in telling detail by Mikael Adolphson in his contribution to this special issue. Through his years of writing and disseminating Buddhist teachings, Shinran’s life was strictly circumscribed in scope and opportunity—. A defrocked and formerly exiled priest, openly married even while wearing monk’s robes, living as a preacher in the countryside or with relatives in the capital as he transmitted a proscribed teaching Despite such constraints, he articulated a mode of thinking that continues to influence social life in. Whether inflicted or suffered, to be understood and managed by Shin Buddhists? And what does
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