Violence and Nonviolence in Shinran
by
Dennis Hirota
Abstract (excerpt)
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…
1. Introduction (excerpt… 1 of 11)
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… 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 Japan and provides an alternative model for considering moral judgments and issues of violence today.
As an offspring of the Hino, a minor and waning branch of the Fujiwara clan, Shinran experienced how aristocratic privilege and ambition reached into the great monasteries during his twenty years as a Tendai monk… on Mount Hiei. Late in life, in hymns for laypeople, he decried the widespread degeneracy of the Buddhist orders…
Shinran is among the “wandering monks” (hijiri) of the period who discarded their temple affiliations and monastic careers, some after achieving considerable rank, to seek a genuinely liberating path as “neither a monk nor one in worldly life” (Collected Works of Shinran, hereafter CWS, I: 289). At twenty-nine, Shinran descended Mount Hiei to become a follower of Hōnen (1133–1212), who advocated the practice of saying the nembutsu (“Namu-amida-butsu,” the “name” of Amida Buddha), entrusting oneself to Amida’s Vow to bring all beings to awakening.
After six years with Hōnen, Shinran was banished from the capital together with his master and a number of other followers. Four others were executed. Persecution of the new Pure Land movement that was spreading among the general populace continued periodically throughout Shinran’s life, including by manor lords and ruling warriors in the countryside. In the postscript to his major work, A Collection of Passages on the True and Real Teaching, Practice, and Realization of the Pure Land Way (hereafter Teaching, Practice, and Realization), Shinran denounces the violence instigated by a hostile ecclesiastical establishment and perpetrated by the court to suppress Hōnen’s Pure Land teaching:
The emperor and his ministers, acting against the dharma and violating human rectitude, became enraged and embittered. As a result, Master Genkū [Hōnen]—the eminent founder who had enabled the true essence of the Pure Land way to spread vigorously [in Japan]—and a number of his followers, without receiving any deliberation of their [alleged] crimes, were summarily sentenced to death or stripped of their ordinations … and consigned to distant banishment. I was among the latter. (CWS I: 289)
This chapter considers Shinran’s view of violence as a mode of human action. How is violence, whether inflicted or suffered, to be understood and managed by Shin Buddhists? And what does Shinran’s thought offer for our understanding of violence in the world today?
2. Violence and Codes of Conduct
Modern discussions of violence commonly pursue rules of conduct rooted in universal norms. As the philosopher Charles Taylor points out, “a great deal of effort in modern liberal society is invested in defining and applying codes of conduct.”. He further notes the widespread assumption that such codes “can be generated from a single source or principle,” such as a “mode of calculation of utility.” We seek a unitary standard that will enable a shared determination of appropriate action in specific situations, thus fostering a just society in which individuals enjoy both communal order and freedom, unfettered by either the threat of violence or undue constraint.
Religious traditions are often understood to have served in the past to provide such foundational principles. In most Buddhist traditions, an ethicized notion of karma and the various formulations of virtues and precepts for monastics and lay practitioners may be seen to have offered such support. Recent efforts by Buddhists to reinterpret such guidelines for practice as the six paramitas or the five precepts in terms of contemporary social life reflect the modern demand for codes of conduct that Taylor identifies.
The Pure Land tradition may also appear to embrace a clear prohibition of violence at its core. The crucial Eighteenth Vow of Amida Buddha... (Please click on link below for the entire paper).
Excerpt in gratitude from: Hirota, Dennis. 2018. "Violence and Nonviolence in Shinran" Religions 9, no. 6: 178. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9060178
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