The evolutionist explosion that rocked the West had relatively little impact on the Dharmic world.

The Vedic portion had long been used to the idea of the world – from a star to a sparrow – “unfolding” from the One, the Center of Being.
It had also been long established that the One and all the components of Being – including the Atma, or soul of sentient beings – are non-dual and ultimately the distinction between them is illusory.

On the Buddhist side the idea of the Samsara as the beginningless and endless process of being is part of the very foundation of the teaching of Shaka-sama (Shakyamuni, the this-world historical Buddha).

Also non-dualism is clearly established in the Mahayana. The distinctions between Shunya (void) and the Samsara are illusory.

In terms of Japanese history an interesting coincidence occurred. At approximately the same time that the Evolutionist revolution was sweeping the West, the early Meiji Era was unfolding in Japan.

In those early days there was a relatively brief anti-Buddhist movement in government and other intellectual circles. The slogan “Out of Asia. Expel the foreigner” was designed to signify both cutting ties with Asia and ending the foreign domination that began with Admiral Perry’s black ships.

Japan was to be a “civilized modern country” on a par with the colonizing West and superior to the surrounding Asian cultures.

In line with this, an embrace of Shinto (impeccably Japanese with strong Imperial connections) and a rejection of Buddhism (a “foreign death cult”) was promoted in government and other influential circles.

Buddhism could not compete with Shinto in terms of “Japaneseness”, but it could take on the religions of the West in terms of representing itself as a “rational system” free from theistic “superstitions”.

This “rationalist” representation has had a huge influence in the West and influenced much modernist “Shin Buddhist” thinking, again especially in the West.

In Japan, where these issues did not loom very large outside of certain circles in a certain relatively brief period, the influence was, and is, much more limited, though by no means non-existent.

Consequently, while its influence in Japan remains relatively minor, it has played a huge role in shaping current Western Shin Buddhism in a rationalist/modernist and in some cases New Age-influenced direction.¹

Buddhism is in a strong position to take on the theistic traditions of the West with their strong dogmatic (in the proper theological sense) nature.

This dogmatism prohibits the asking of certain questions and the postulation of various theses such as multiple rebirths, which would negate the strict heaven and hell rhetoric (this word also in its proper sense²) of these traditions.

This has inhibited many deeper interpretations, including those of Origen, a well-established father of the Church. The early Church went through two major “Origenist crises” and those who continued to accept Origen’s work did so on the grounds that he “could not” have meant rebirth in any literal sense.

Recent modern Fundamentalist-leaning Christians see interpretations of Origen’s work that accept rebirth in any meaningful sense as New Age-influenced aberrations.

In truth, the New Age concept of “reincarnation”, rooted in the earlier ideas of H. P. Blavatsky and her circle, and strongly influenced by non-scientific “evolutionism”, has very little in common with the reality of 輪廻 (rin’ne) – ever-recurring rebirth – as taught by the Dharmic traditions and many other cultures from Egypt to Siberia to native North and South American traditions, Africa and the Far East.

The Traditional doctrine is directly comparable to the heaven and hell dogma of the Abrahamic traditions. While there is no way of expressing the inexpressible – that which transcends this world and all its possible rational and verbal theses – the practical upshot as it pertains to salvation is the same.

And salvation is all that matters. The universal Traditions in this final degenerate Age³ are, in origin, entirely concerned with rescuing those who – for the most part – are incapable of rescuing themselves, and for the few who are so capable, providing Paths suitable to these spiritually very difficult times.

The core and starting point of this rescue mission is teaching the fact that we face a stark choice in this life. Its end will lead to one of two things: salvation (or re-uniting with the One in blissful union), or a very long (possibly aeons long) exile in worlds that are mostly painful and horrifying, some bearable to partly pleasant and a few mostly happy.

This is and should be a terrifying prospect. All genuine doctrines of rebirth accept that one may – and will, many times over the course of aeons – be reborn as an animal or an insect or as something far, far worse.

This is an emergency, and one that it is the primary function of the universal Traditions in this Age to address.

The Blavatsky-influenced New Age notion of reincarnation (which now has fairly wide currency in modern culture) is based on a loose, pseudo-scientific reading of “evolution”. This idea is that once one is human, one has “evolved” to a point where one will always be born human – just as lesser life-forms evolved into humans in this world.

This is in stark contrast to all Tradition and has no basis whatever.

The state of non-regression indeed exists but this is only when one has fully and completely entrusted oneself to Amida-sama (or equivalent states in other Traditions). Non-regression is not attainable outside of a saving Tradition. It is certainly not the inevitable product of some imagined “evolution” – a concept that did not exist until relatively recently.

Frithjof Schuon writes of Christianity and Buddhism:

They consider it [the here-below] not in relation to its symbolism, which connects all things essentially, qualitatively or vertically to the divine Prototype, but solely in relation to its character of manifestation, creation, hence of non-divinity, imperfection, corruptibility, suffering and death.⁴

The reason Christianity and Buddhism (in many respects outwardly opposite in approach) both take this stance is that both are universal traditions made available to all people without distinction of ethnicity or culture. These are very practical traditions focused primarily on rescuing humans – especially humans whose cultures have become estranged from Tradition⁵ – from their deadly peril. For this reason they are more focused on the rhetoric of this peril than the less pressing Truths that more established Traditions have leisure to pursue.

The heaven-and-hell rhetoric also exists in Buddhism since there are hells and a heaven in the six courses. On a deeper level, from the Jodo Shinshu perspective, the true Heaven is the Pure Land and the true Hell is return to the endless and terrifying cycle of rebirth.

Metaphysics – and therefore symbolism – begins to be re-introduced into Buddhism with the Mahayana. This is a natural development since by that stage Buddhism is beginning to mature into a fully-developed Tradition in its own right, with the space to address the universal Truths of metaphysics.

One aspect of this re-establishment of metaphysics – especially important from our point of view – is found in the Sutras describing the Pure Land.

“Pure” is a well-chosen description. The meaning of it is “untainted by any of the elements of this world and therefore shaped by metaphysical Reality”.

Among other things the Pure Land contains many birds and other creatures. These cannot be what birds and animals are in this world – that is, beings trapped in the near-eternal cycle of rebirth. These are the pure Essences or Archetypes reflected on the earthly plane by the equivalent creatures.

With this, Buddhism rejoins the world of Plato⁶ and all the ancient Traditions – including, of course, the wider Dharmic Tradition.

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¹ See “Fundamentalism vs Modernism – Enemies Joined at the Hip”

² See this essay by Ananda Coomaraswamy for the deeper meaning of “rhetoric”.

³ Indian Kali Yuga, European Age of Iron, Christian latter days, Buddhist Dharma-ending age or mappo, Islamic end times, etc.

⁴ Schuon, Treasures of Buddhism, p.96

⁵ We may tend to think of loss of Tradition as a modern phenomenon, but even in what are relatively “ancient” times from our point of view, cultures lost contact with their original Traditions. It was largely for the peoples of such cultures that the universal Traditions came into being.

⁶ Plato’s work consists essentially in re-stating the sanatana dharma – the timeless and universal Tradition – in terms ingestible by the people of the latter phase of the Iron Age. His explications have held good for over two millennia and are still valuable to all who wish to explore the universal Tradition further.

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◀ Return to Part One

Fundamentalism is a phenomenon most commonly associated with Christianity and Islam, although there is at least one Fundamentalist sect associated with Jodo Shinshu.

What is Fundamentalism and why does it exist? First of all Fundamentalism never appears in isolation. It always appears after the appearance within its particular Tradition of another phenomenon called Modernism. This is necessary because Fundamentalism grows out of Modernism and is meaningless without it.

Fundamentalism is essentially a reaction against Modernism. It is sometimes thought of as being Traditional or Orthodox, but in fact it is the very reverse. It is a reaction against Modernism that gives Modernism the advantage that everything is defined in Modernist terms. Fundamentalism does not in essence disagree with Modernism. In fact it does Modernism the favor of accepting all its basic precepts at face value even if it tries to reject them.

So what are the basic precepts of Modernism without which Fundamentalism could not exist?

1. Regarding Religion/Tradition as a purely historical/cultural phenomenon.
   
2. Regarding Religion/Tradition as a purely human invention.
   
3. Regarding the basis of symbolism – on which all Traditions to some degree rest – most notably the Platonic/Theistic Western Traditions – as purely human in origin.
   
4. Having a strong interest in history, because it regards all these things as being purely historical/developmental phenomena, non-different from any other historical/cultural phenomena.
   

In this it is hugely assisted by the Evolutionist revolution of the mid 19th century which led to the triumph of Modernism as the underlying ideology of the West.

Fundamentalism (rightly) frames its argument against Modernism as a defense of religion as something outside of and superior to the historical process.

Fundamentalism is the reaction against Modernism in its Western (here including Islamic) form.

Without Modernism it could not exist.

In this it is put at a vast disadvantage by the near-universal adoption of Modernism as the basic ideology of the West that was sealed by the Evolutionist Revolution of the mid-19th century – a coup d’état that had been several centuries in the making.

So, for example, Modernism tackles the question of the age of the earth and cites scientific evidence that it is far older than Biblical narratives suggest. Naturally this implies an extremely literalistic interpretation of Biblical and other texts.

Fundamentalists fall into the trap of defending this literalism. In fact Fundamentalism and literalism are often taken to be synonymous.

In relation to Jodo Shinshu, Modernists attack literalist interpretations of the Sutras and other texts. In this they are on good ground. Clearly they are not meant to be taken as literal statements of mere material fact.

What Modernists appear to see them as, however, is the symbolic expression of psychological and cultural phenomena – often near-devoid of any content that might realistically be called “Spiritual” or genuinely religious.

It often leads to a kind of Buddhist-tinged “social gospel” and is closely (if ironically) often associated with attempts to disengage Jodo Shinshu from anything that smacks of Christianity (or genuine religion in general) and make it conform to Western concepts of “Buddhism” that are often predicated on the so-called “scientific world-view”.

In this the Modernist position is clearly in error. Amida-sama’s vow is not to improve those rooms within the burning house that haven’t yet caught fire but to rescue beings from the burning house altogether.

That is, to rescue us from the Samsara with its Heavens, its Hells and its endless round of death and rebirth.

This is the summit to which all the Traditional/Religious Paths lead. Our Path does so via the vast mystery of the Fundamental Vow (to rescue us from the burning house) and the Nenbutsu.

I believe that our Path has become even easier than it was in Shinran Shounin’s time – just as it has in the other Traditions. But in any case it leads to the same Summit.

Amida-sama is as old as the Gods of other traditions and – from our point of view – encompasses them all. Amida-sama is not a “historical figure” – if by that we mean some being who existed at a particular time and passed on to another existence – a creature still bound by the Samsara. That is why it is so wrong for both Fundamentalists and Modernists to claim “historicity” for Amida-sama.

Amida-sama is certainly a real Buddha and for that very reason not limited by history or by the lifespan of this particular world-system.

Was the Amida-sama who made the Primal Vow countless kalpas ago a “Buddhist”?

Probably not as we now use the term.

Amida-sama is not contained within religious or other Formulas. Amida-sama is the Absolute. Our task is coming to terms with the vastness and mysterious limitlessness of the Primal Vow as it is contained in the nenbutsu.

We need not worry. All we need to do is trust.

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 ▶