MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
John Paraskevopoulos
Shortcomings
The difficulty with following a spiritual path is that it often makes demands on us which we find hard to accept or sustain. For those who pursue such a path consistently, there grows the realization that it is almost impossible to meet the high ideals that are expected of us. Compassion, humility, selfless love, wisdom and so forth are goals that are set before us to attain in order that we may flourish spiritually. Yet, how often do we fall short and what are the implications of this for our practice of the Dharma ?
Shinran was very conscious of our shortcomings in pursuing spiritual perfection and took great pains to demonstrate the hypocrisy and vanity that often accompany the efforts of those who seek to establish spiritual superiority over others. In fact, he saw the high ideals imposed by the Buddha-dharma as a way of showing up the fact that most of us are not as accomplished and wise as we think we are. This conclusion is more than just a defeatist position of despair. In making us aware of our human limitations, Shinran is pointing us to a dimension where we can be free to abandon our self-willed attempts to eradicate our imperfections, flawed as such efforts often are. But why should this be so ?
A fundamental axiom of the Buddha's teaching is the doctrine of anatta, or 'no-self'. It states that there is no individual core to each person which can be said to be immutable or enduring. The 'self' which we prize so dearly is said to be a mere fiction which is self-constructed in a state of delusion and which is the principal source of all our troubles and anxiety. At the heart of reality lies tathata, or Buddha-nature, wherein lies our true identity and felicity. The Buddha condemned the view that saw people as isolated and fragmented individuals who only believed in the ego as the foundation of their existence. Shinran took the logical next step and proclaimed that all efforts which sprang from this delusional and fictional self could bear no fruit. The effort of the self to transcend itself through jiriki, or 'self-power', was a contradiction and guaranteed to compound the illusions under which we laboured.
Shinran's solution was to encourage us to abandon ourselves and all our spiritual cares to Amida Buddha who constitutes true reality and therefore the 'true self' of all beings. In doing so, we find that this compassionate reality becomes one with our false reality which is thereby transformed into wisdom and a special kind of awakening known as shinjin. This is the realization that all virtue and genuine merits come from the Buddha and that by entrusting ourselves to his power, we are able to benefit by it and ultimately attain Nirvana. Shinran saw this as true practice because it is given by the Buddha, not generated by ourselves. For Shinran, this true practice takes the form of the nembutsu, which is the invocation of the Buddha's Name - Namu Amida Butsu. This practice, despite its appearance of being somehow too simple, is in fact the key to genuine practice because it has its origins in the enlightenment of the Buddha himself. It is only when his practice becomes our practice - through the nembutsu - can we really begin to shed the crippling fetters of ignorance and blind passion which have kept us bound to the wheel of samsara since time immemorial.