All posts by Perennial Jodo Shinshu

The “Easy Path”: A Way for “ordinary people”

Jodo Shinshu Basics

Do you consider yourself an “ordinary person”? I certainly didn’t. Without wishing to inflate myself with my own uniqueness, I have always found that because I have no affinity with or interest in current Western culture, sacred or profane, I have very little in common with most other Western people, which does not feel “ordinary’.

In the light of Jodo Shinshu, however, we need to consider this word “ordinary” a little differently. The term bonbu（凡夫) means a person who is still mired in bonnou (煩悩）- the worldly passions and desires, the fact that we want this and dislike that, the fact that this makes us happy and that makes us angry, all the ordinary things that tie us to the world-illusion, the samsara.

Ridding ourselves of bonnou is the same thing as experiencing satori (悟り) – liberation from the everyday world-illusion – and experiencing (or as we say in Japanese “opening”) the Whole.

Opening satori by our own power is a huge undertaking beyond the reach of “ordinary people”.

Jodo Shinshu is not just tariki (他力 – other power) like other Pure Land schools, including its nearest rival in popularity in Japan, Jodo Shu. It is zettai tariki ( 絶対他力 – absolute other power).

This makes it the easiest path for the “ordinary person’, the final flowering of the Pure Land school.

If you take an interest in the lives and views of the great Traditionalist / Perennialist scholars, from Guenon to the present day, in videos, articles, books etc., you may be surprised at the difficult path so many of them have chosen*.

What we have to ask ourselves is “Are we capable of such a path?”

If not, we can place ourselves entirely in the hands of Amida-sama and the power of Her/His** mysterious Primal Vow. Some may ask, “Is this really a Path that one is following or is one simply passively waiting to be saved?”

It is in fact a Path, even though it is the “Easy Path”. Our part is to say the Nenbutsu “Namu Amida Butsu” and to listen to the Jodo Shinshu teachings.

As we do so, we start to realize how hard it is to let go of the jiriki mentality. We think, for example, that when we say the Nenbutsu or make some improvement in ourselves, we have done something toward our own salvation. But we haven’t. We are absolutely dependent on Amida-sama.

This realization of complete dependence teaches us that our own inability to open satori and rid ourselves of bonnou is absolute. This is zettai tariki.

But we will continually keep slipping back, continually keep congratulating ourselves on our own power.

Also, as we listen deeply to the Dharma, we become increasingly aware of our own bonnou, of the fact that even the “good” things we do and think are motivated by our own convenience, our own inescapable likes and dislikes, angers and pleasures.

As our self-assessment plunges ever downward, we become more and more fully aware of the debt of gratitude we owe to Amida-sama, on whom we are absolutely dependent.

And we become aware that even this debt of gratitude we don’t come anywhere close to repaying. Most of the time our thoughts are almost exclusively dominated by bonnou and our clinging to the samsara.

There is very little we can do about this. We are absolutely dependent on Amida-sama.

This is zettai tariki, absolute Other Power.

Of course, we could try saving ourselves (jiriki), but remember what that entails. We are “ordinary people” and there is only One who can save us.

And as we enter ever more deeply (slipping at every step) into this realization, we inevitably begin realize the vastness and mystery of the Way we have entered. We are just a tiny part of an unfathomably huge process by which Amida-sama is saving every sentient being in the universe(s).

In Amida-sama we have found the Absolute in its most compassionate form. Or rather that compassionate Absolute has found us.

Beside this immense reality, our small selves fade even from our own consciousness (at least for a few enlightened moments). The vastness of that Absolute, Who has grasped us, never to let us fall back into the terrible waters of the samsara, overwhelms our small self-calculations. And even at other times, more and more, the overwhelming feeling that guides our lives is gratitude.

Gratitude for everything. Because everything in our lives has been a step leading us toward our final absorption in the Absolute.

And while, to the individual Western mind, “absorption” may seem like the annihilation of the individual, it is in fact the total fulfillment – in its true form – of everything we have ever desired.

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* Most of the great writers and scholars of the Perennial / Traditionalist movement, starting with the founder, Guénon, have gravitated toward severely ascetic initiatory paths of jiriki (Self-Power) Realization, the majority within Islamic initiatic organizations; a substantial minority (probably the largest after Islam) in the ascetic Hesychast traditions of Mount Athos in the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church. (From About Perennial Jodo Shinshu)

** Her/His – Obviously the Absolute is beyond human gender. In everyday usage in Japan Amida-sama is often referred to as Oya-sama (親様) meaning the Supreme Parent – containing all the compassionate qualities of the eternal Mother and all the protective strength and wisdom of the eternal Father.

Evolution in Western, Vedantic and Buddhist Traditions

Evolutionism, History of Ideas

Part I: The West

Evolution is a concept that has many different kinds of relation to religion, metaphysics and tradition.

In the eyes of most Western people and those in other countries who have adopted the current Western world-outlook, it is simply a factual description of the way biological species came into being.

However, in the first place we must remember that this aura of factuality/neutrality was won over time by the triumph of the “scientific world-outlook”.

Upon its introduction to the world, the theory of evolution created a seismic shift in the way Western people thought about the very nature of existence. Until that point, the culture as a whole was dominated by a theistic/Platonic view of being.

In other words, all entities were created by God or from the Platonic point of view were the earthly reflection of eternal Forms. These two concepts are closely related and have cross-influenced each other in many ways.

The theistic/Platonic tradition posits a world in which all entities, all creatures, from a mouse to a star, hold some form of meaning for us.
Evolutionism, at least apparently, posits a world in which these things have no meaning for us.

I say “apparently” because the world posited by evolutionism had a very definite, though completely unscientific, meaning to many of the people who embraced it. And this, to a considerable degree, accounts for the early popularity and triumph of the theory.

This meaning was tied up with the idea of “progress” in the sense of human technical, social and other forms of progress.

Clearly, this ascribing of human meaning to a purely biological process had no scientific basis, but in the minds of many, “progress” and “evolution” became practically synonymous.

These people were only too delighted to overthrow what they saw as the old, rigid, outdated notions of the theistic/Platonic model.

However, there was another strand contributing enthusiasm to the new model. And this consisted of people who had long believed that the universe was a purely mechanistic environment driven by laws that had no relation whatever to human wishes or feelings. These people were the real precursors of the modern “scientific world-view”.

Often the two groups merged at the edges and cross-influenced each other. For both of them the new model was their fundamental mythos, their “creation story”.

Because all human beings, however “scientific” they may believe themselves to be, live by narratives.

The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of the Traditional Model

A somewhat mysterious phenomenon surrounding the huge paradigm shift that took place during the mid to late nineteenth century is the rapid and near-complete collapse of the forces in support of the traditional model.

At first the new evolutionism was greeted with ridicule as well as rapture, but within a relatively short space of time, opposition to the new model was limited to a fringe, with the majority being more afraid of ridicule from the new evolutionist establishment.

This becomes perhaps less mysterious as we realize that the twin ideologies of “progress” and scientism (a term I use to designate “the scientific world-view” as opposed to science itself) had been growing as the working models for much of the thought and culture of Western “intellectual” circles since at least the late seventeeth century.

So we might say that the successors to the traditional model had been steadily growing in cultural strength and were only awaiting the narrative, the mythos, the “creation story” that would validate and consolidate them in the cultural sphere

In the story of evolution they found this.


The two successors to the traditional model

1. The “Scientific World-Outlook”

I said above that I use the term “scientism” to distinguish “the scientific world-outlook” from science itself.

Science is a means of inquiry whose strengths derive to a large extent from its self-imposed limitations.

These limitations are that science, being based on the empirical method, restricts itself to things that are quantifiable and measurable. Of things that are non-quantifiable and not measurable, it has and can have, by its own definition, nothing to say.

This allows science to create models of reality that are extremely useful for practical application and freed from the need to concern themselves with areas of human perception and reality that are irrelevant to its method.

Clearly these areas outside the domain of science do not cease to exist. It is possible to claim that they can be reduced to epiphenomena of models created by the scientific method, but equally clearly such claims are tendentious and “ideological”. Such claims are certainly made by scientists of the highest order.

But they are not speaking as scientists.

They are speaking as human individuals with their own ideological needs. Equally, other eminent scientists take a completely different view, one closer to the traditional standpoint. Science itself does not and cannot weigh in on either side.

Stephen Hawking declared that heaven is a “fairy tale” and that there is no life after death. Stephen Hawking was the most eminent scientist of our age, but when he made statements like that he was not speaking as the most eminent scientist of our age. He was speaking as an individual who feels the need to hold certain beliefs that by their very nature are unproven and unprovable by science.

The “scientific world-view” is not science but it is very much akin to a religion.

In the modern West, probably the majority of people would say that they accept the scientific world-view, but this is really only because of the suggestive power of its high status in contemporary culture. In practice, unless they are hard-line “true believers” like Stephen Hawking, the scientific world-view is what they hold when they are thinking in “science” terms. When they are thinking in other terms, they hold other ideas, like most humans.

2. “Spiritual evolutionism”

In a certain sense, the second of the two successors to the traditional Western model seems diametrically opposed to the first. The true “scientific world-outlook” denies meaning and purpose to the manifest universe and was able to do this to a large extent because the theory of evolution allows an explanation of the diverse forms of living nature that is based on “accidental change” over large periods of time. In other words, it allows the denial of Form or Essence in nature.

The creed of the rigorous “scientific world-outlook” was summed up by Nietzsche not long after its consolidation:

The total nature of the world is… to all eternity chaos, not in the sense that necessity is lacking, but in that order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other human aesthetic notions we may have are lacking.

On the other hand, the creed of “spiritual evolutionism” sees in the concept of evolution purpose and progress. The notion of continual and inevitable progress in human society was extremely strong long before Darwin’s work but was picked up enthusiastically by progressists who felt enabled to believe that progress was built into the very nature of biological life.

Beginning with pseudo-esotericists like Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, this was elevated to what is sometimes termed the “spiritual” plane, although it is more accurately described as merely psychic.

This has grown into a major (although somewhat unstructured) belief system in the West and in other parts of the world. Adherents readily describe people whom they believe to be of a high spiritual quality as “more evolved” than others. The end point of “spiritual evolution” appears to be something very vaguely akin to the Realization of the Platonist, the Saint, or the advanced practitioner of Vedanta or Buddhism.

But the relationship is very vague and lacking in definition. Such people often like to describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”.

However, since religion and spirituality are fundamentally the same thing, it would be better to describe these attitudes as “psychic but not spiritual”*.

While these two successors to the Western traditional model may seem diametrically opposed, they are also closely linked in that both focus on the flux of matter – the samsara as it is called in the Dharmic traditions – rather than on what the West has always regarded as the fixed and absolute Forms that transcend the flux and yet give it everything it has of form and meaning.

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*By “psychic” here I mean the middle realm of dreams and nightmares between the Spiritual domain of Absolute Reality and the domain of “brute matter” (the world of the “scientific world outlook”) devoid of all meaning and purpose.

The psychic domain is in a sense “superior” to the purely material. On the other hand it has more potential for evil and negative activity (springing from the self-interest that is in every soul). In this regard the world of simple matter can be seen to have a certain “innocence” in contrast to the psychic realm.

In Buddhist terms this negative potential of the psychic domain is described in terms of the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance – in other words desire for some things, aversion to other things and the ignorance that leaves us unable to see through these psychic snares and illusions to true Spiritual Reality. In Christianity this is expressed as original sin.

These two tendencies that have replaced the traditional Western world-outlook – “the scientific world view” and “spiritual evolutionism” – may be regarded in a certain sense as opposites, since one postulates a world in which meaning and purpose are mere human aesthetic illusions and the other posits a world driven by the underlying purpose and meaning of “spiritual” (i.e psychic) “evolution”.

However, while superficially they may be opposed, they are both based exclusively in the world of the samsara – the ultimately meaningless flux of being – that was opened to the West as a valid and acceptable model of Reality by the loss of its true Spiritual underpinnings.

This explosive change was largely driven in the first place by the suggestive force of “evolutionism”, which de-coupled living beings from Spiritual Form.

Go to Part Two ▶