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| Approaching the Land of Bliss |
Religious Praxis in the Cult of Amitabha
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Extract :
Essay Summaries
Pure Land in Tibet
Matthew Kapstein’s contribution to this collection, “Pure Land Buddhism in Tibet?” locates the cult of Amitabha as an integral part of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition of Tibet. AmitAbha is central both to the mythohistorical creation of a Tibetan identity and to Tibetan Buddhist praxis, including tantra. As in East Asian Pure Land traditions, the goal of Sukhavati was promoted in Tibet as particularly important because of its accessibility. Other buddha realms may be limited to advanced practitioners, but AmitAbha assured even common foolish people access to Sukhavati. Kapstein outlines some important differences, however, between the Tibetan cult of Amitabha and Japanese Pure Land. While certain strains developed an antinomian interpretation in Japan, Kapstein’s Tibetan material consistently emphasizes the need for moral effort. The exclusivist orientation to Amitabha and Sukhavati that characterizes what James Sanford in this collection identifies as the normative mainstream of Japanese Pure Land appears to be absent in Tibet.’ Also missing is the sectarian identity that emerged in Japan in conjunction with this exclusivistic stance. As Kapstein notes, “there is no evidence that sectarian identity was ever peculiarly tied to the Pure Land of ArnitAbha. This was an inclusive cult, embracing Tibetan Buddhists overall.” The fluidity of Buddhist iconography is also apparent in the differences between Tibetan and East Asian representations. Kapstein mentions that in Tibet Amitabha is matched with Avalokitesvara and Padmasambhava, while Mahasthamaprapta is identified with VajrapAini. Kapstein’s essay clearly suggests that Amitabha and Sukhavati held a privileged position in the imaginal worlds of Tibetan religion.
Deconstructing the Patriarchal Lineage
In his “Shengchang’s Pure Conduct Society and the Chinese Pure Land Patriarchate,” Daniel Getz examines the identification of Shengchang as one of the Pure Land patriarchs. Following his review of the earliest records, Getz locates Shengchang more firmly in a Huayan context and views the purpose of his society not so much as propagating Pure Land praxis, but rather as a means of modifying the anti-Buddhist sentiments that Song dynasty literati had inherited from Han YU.
The importance of the ways in which lineages were created in East Asia is highlighted in Getz’s work. Early records regarding Shengchang and the society he established make only passing reference to Amitabha and the goal of birth in Sukhavati. These suggest a religious culture in which, as Gregory Schopen has discussed for Indian MahayAna, Sukhavati functioned as a generalized goal shared by many but without specific sectarian affiliation. After Shengchang two centuries would pass before Pure Land patriarchal lineages identifying Huiyuan as the founder and Shengchang as his lineal descendant were compiled.
Uncritical acceptance of these “late Song and subsequent biographies” has been the basis of more recent scholarship. According to Getz, this has led to the impression that Pure Land had more sectarian identity and coherence than can be supported by examining materials closer to Shengchang’s own period: “The silence of the sources in this regard suggests the absence of a distinct autonomous and continuous Pure Land tradition for Shengchang and the members of his society.”
At the Time of Death
Religious associations were also known in medieval Japan, and Jacqueline Stone begins her study of the practice of reciting nenbutsu at the time of death with a discussion of the Samadhi Assembly of Twenty-Five established on Mt. Hiei in 986. Unlike Shengchang’s society, this one was explicitly formed to assist its members with dying while uttering the nenbutsu as their last act. Genshin is one of the key figures responsible for codifying the practices of this group. Nenbutsu recitation at the time of death is often noted in passing as having been rejected by Honen, but Stone gives us an understanding of both the practices themselves and the logics that motivated them. For example, one view held that a final utterance of the nenbutsu at the moment of death could overcome the negative karma accumulated over a lifetime.
Many needed the assistance of a final nenbutsu to qualify for birth in Sukhavati, but the worst of the “evil people” were warriors. Not only did they engage in killing, but they were particularly in danger of dying in a state of anger or fear, making a final thought of the Buddha impossible. Camp priests assisted the dead and dying in the battlefield by chanting nenbutsu with or for them.2’
The dangers attendant upon failing to hold the nenbutsu in mind at the last moment led to extreme acts of merit accumulation. For example, if one recited the nenbutsu thousands of times a day, one would be better able to keep Amitabha in mind while dying. Even more extreme were attempts to avoid the vagaries of death by committing religious suicide. Dying at a time of one’s choosing increased the possibility of a good death. However, once deathbed practices had become routinized, they also became increasingly subject to contestation. Thus we have Honen’s suggestion that one should depend on the vow of Amitabha rather than on the ritualized recitation of nenbutsu while awaiting death.
Esoteric Pure Land
About a century after Genshin and the establishment of the Samadhi Assembly of Twenty-Five, the “Esoteric Explication of Amida” appeared. Its author, Kakuban, was the founder of the one major “schism” in the history of the Shingon tradition, the New Doctrine school. Kakuban held a radically non-dualist view, which extended to asserting not only such familiar identities as samsara and nirvana, but also the identity of Mahavairocana and Amitabha.
James Sanford places Kakuban into a typology of Japanese Pure Land thought. He identifies the first category as the normative mainstream—that set of conceptions that derives from the work of Honen and Shinran, and includes the familiar emphasis on exclusive practice of recitative nenbutsu and exclusive dependence on Amitabha. Sanford suggests that the lineages deriving from Honen (other than Shinran’s) form a second strain of Pure Land thought. A third is found among a group known as hijiri (holy men), who were often itinerant, such as Ippen. Nenbutsu practices within Japanese esoteric Buddhism, or “secret nenbutsu,” constitute a fourth form, and this is where Sanford locates Kakuban. The variety of “heresies” to mainstream Pure Land thought constitutes the fifth strain, while the presence of Pure Land thematics in other traditions such as Tendai and Zen makes up the sixth.
Like Kapstein’s examination of AmitAbha in Tibetan tantric Iraditions, Sanford’s translation demonstrates the importance of AmitAbha in the Japanese tantric traditions. Although East Asian Buddhism is generally not considered strongly scholastic in character, the four kinds of dhannakaya discussed by Sanford indicate the scholasticism of East Asian Buddhism that is deserving of further research.
Mothers and Daughters
The cult of Chujohime, which Hank Glassman examines in his contribution to this collection, constitutes what might be called a “subsidiary cult,” meaning, one that derives from the cult of Amitabha but grows to such importance that its central figure actually displaces Amitabha as the focus of worship. The technology that produced the cult included preaching performances illustrated by a mandara that itself held the status of a relic. The origins of these preaching performances have been traced back to Indian practices.
Chujohime’s cult focused on women’s salvation. The etiological myth of the cult concerns a daughter whose mother dies while she is an infant and includes a manifestation of Amitabha as a nun. The famous Taima mandara, which is central to the tale, visually recounts the story of Queen Vaidehi, and nuns played the central role in propagating the cult. The problematics of women’s birth in Sukhavati are directly confronted in the story’s finale: At the time of Chujohime’s death, she is taken in her own body by AmitAbha directly to Sukhavati; she does not need to be reborn first as a man.
The role of relics in authenticating the cult is matched by the importance of geography in locating the story in the physical reality of medieval Japan. Viewing the relics and hearing the story of Chinjohime had the ability to establish a karmic affiliation that assured one of birth in Sukhavati. Similarly, locating the events of the saint’s life in the local geography made her much more accessible than Amitabha in Sukhavati or Sakyamuni in India.
Transgression
In his examination of what he calls “radical Amidism,” Fabio Rambelli discusses a variety of different forms of Japanese Pure Land thought, which, as suggested by Sanford, constitutes divergences from the mainstream or normative forms. Avoiding the fixed categories of orthodox and heterodox, he describes instead a cycling between center and periphery in which interpretations by one group are reinterpreted by another in light of its own interests, and these latter return to be reinterpreted again.
The divergent forms discussed by Rambelli almost all share one version or another of the fundamental concept of the efficacy of a single thought (ichinengi) in achieving birth in Amida’s Pure Land. Not surprisingly, these movements drew on other strains of thought found in medieval Japanese Buddhism. The two Rambelli finds most influential are the concept of original enlightenment (liongaku) found in Tendai and a pansexualism found in some strains of Shingon, especially the little-studied Tachikawaryu.
From the perspective of mainstream Pure Land in Japan, one of the key heretical concepts was the notion of “licensed evil,” which threatened to bring the entire movement into disrepute and repression. From Rambelli’s perspective, however, “licensed evil” is part of a carnivalesque reversal of social and religious norms. This reversal is a critique of the repressive social order, including the dominant religious institutions.
Purification and the Politics of Lineage
As in China, sitting meditation and nenbutsu recitation in Japan were propagated by teachers who saw them as complementary practices. Richard Jaffe examines the work of Ungo Kiyo, who sought to match the kind of teaching he provided to the needs and capacities of his disciples. The poem Jaffe translates here was composed for the widow of one of Ungo’s daimyo supporters who had become a nun. The model of Queen Vaidehi as precedent served Ungo in this project, just as she played an important role in the ChujOhime cult discussed by Glassman.
Ungo’s interpretation of nenbutsu practice is clearly in keeping with Zen notions of the path to awakening. He describes the goal of practice as an “unattached, nondiscriminating nenbutsu”—in other words as an object of meditation similar to some uses of mantra. Also, Ungo’s understanding of the Pure Land is immanentalist and clearly comparable to Kakuban’s as discussed here by Sanford. Despite what one might expect from such a stance, Ungo resisted any tendency toward antinomian interpretations. His emphasis on the importance of the precepts is fully compatible with the attitudes of the Tibetan authors discussed by Kapstein—and fully at variance with the carnivalesque antinomianism found in Rambelli’s radical Amidist groups.
Where Rambelli examines the societal processes by which orthodoxy is defined, Jaffe explores the role of institutional politics in defining “true Rinzai.” When Obaku was introduced from China, it carried the panache of coming from the country that many Japanese considered to be the source of the most important developments in Buddhism. This created the feeling that it was necessary to contrast existing Rinzai with the more inclusive Obaku. By examining one of the specific locations where our contemporary understanding of Zen has been formed, Jaffe’s work highlights the historically conditioned character of our own expectations of what is proper to each of these traditions. As Helen Baroni notes: “It is from the retrospective view that the greatest contrast exists between Obaku and the rest of Japanese Rinzai in terms of Pure Land practice, as ‘purity’ became a major issue only in the later Tokugawa and modern periods.”
Death in Nepal
Todd Lewis opens his essay on Sukhavati beliefs in Nepal by noting some of the ways in which partial information about the history of the cult of Amitabha has created misleading expectations. Specifically he calls attention to his own expectation that devotion to Amitabha was exclusively an East Asian phenomenon (though having its origins in northwest India) and therefore not to be found in Nepal.
However, Lewis did discover that—as with the importance of the “Sukhavati orientation” Kapstein uncovered in Tibet—the hope for birth in Sukhavati is found in many different forms in Nepal. As in Tibet (but not Japan), this phenomenon does not constitute a separate sectarian identity. Attention to the cultic life of the Kathmandu valley reveals the goal of birth in Sukhavati to be an important stream of belief that might otherwise have been obscured. Lewis highlights the importance of understanding that rituals are integral to Buddhism. Western religious historiography is informed by the rhetoric of decadence, according to which rituals are at best merely vulgar concessions to the religious needs of the ignorant folk, or at worst manipulative creations of a venal priesthood. He emphasizes the pedagogic role of ritual as a means of acculturating people to the Buddhist path.
Lewis finds traces of the desire for birth in Sukhavati in four different cultic practices: in stupa worship, in cultic devotions to Avalokitesvara, in the founding story of the greatest Buddhist temple and festival of Kathmandu, and in a variety of lay Buddhist rituals. Interestingly, the bhajan style of group devotional singing imported from India within the last century has been adapted to Newari Buddhist use, albeit within the context that “Sukhavati rebirth remains an unsystematically articulated goal, merely one of many associations linked to venerating the stupas and bodhisattvas of the country.”
Seeking the Land of Bliss in Taiwan
Contemporary Taiwan provides an example of the way in which the cult of Amitabha continues in present-day East Asia. Charles Jones gives us a “thick description” of a one-day recitation retreat that is paradigmatic for longer retreats as well. In the course of his discussion, Jones highlights the understanding of Pure Land Buddhism as an “easy path” in contemporary Taiwan—a path that is in fact very strenuous. This understanding contrasts markedly with what Sanford identifies as the normative form of Japanese Pure Land thought, wherein the rhetoric of “self power” (jiriki) versus “other power” (tariki) has led to questioning the entire concept of practice per se.
Jones calls attention to the problematics of appropriating the concept of grace as a way of describing the workings of Amitabha’s vows (praizidhana). The theological connotations of grace (it is a freely given gift of the Creator to his creation) are radically different from those resulting from Dharmakara’s accumulation of merit, which works automatically, without Amitabha’s active involvement
Jones brings an issue of great importance in contemporary discussions of epistemological issues: the “ambiguity and interpretability of religious experience.” His discussion implies not only that experience can be interpreted in a variety of ways after the fact, but also—citing Clifford Geertz—that an experience can itself be constructed according to one’s expectations and the content of one’s practice. Far from providing an epistemologically irreducible ground, experience, whether “religious” or not, dissolves like every other construct. As Ivan Strenski has noted, “intuitions are not self-authenticating.”
Conclusion
Four themes that run throughout this volume are important in the field of Buddhist studies: first, the place of Amitabha and Sukhavati in the broad range of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism; second, the variety of practices directed toward Amitabha and Sukhavati; third, the importance of the way in which conceptions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are created; and fourth, the sociohistorical located-ness of religious practice.
Although commonly associated with the Japanese Pure Land sects deriving from Honen and Shinran, Amitabha is actually found throughout the Mahayana and Vajrayana. The essays collected here open up the cult of Amitabha in Nepal, Tibet, China, and Taiwan, as well as new aspects of Japanese Pure Land. They also indicate the historical depth of the cult. The cult of Amitabha involves a wide variety of practices other than simply devotional recitation of the name (invocational nenbutsu). There are many ways of “keeping the Buddha in mind” (buddhanusmrti), and many ways of understanding why one would do so.
The construction of orthodoxy is more than simply a matter of historical interest. Our own contemporary understanding of Buddhism has been informed by these orthodoxies, and it is important in our own critical reflection that we understand the historically conditioned nature of such conceptions—they were created as attempts to respond to particular challenges. Seen in that fashion it should be clear that they do not constitute an ahistorical essence that can be used to define any particular tradition within Buddhism over the course of its entire development. |
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