Hi everyone,
This is a little detour from my posting concerning my political/social/religious views thinly disguised as a commentary on an obscure religious text from medieval Japan.
I am a little disturbed by all the heated rhetoric (and some of what seem to be outright lies and fear mongering) concerning the health care debates. Maybe I am in need of more info - but I have a few thoughts I'd like to share and then I will post links to articles I think are worth reading. First my thoughts:
1. I am absolutely convinced that if Obama were not president then there would be no debate at all - no health care reform. Just spending on war and only war (probably we'd already be at war with Iran and North Korea by now). The 17% of our population that is uninsured would just be screwed. Mabye if those people would just move to Iraq we would give a %^$& about them. So perhaps President Obama needs to provide a better plan or better presiding over the Congress - but I credit him with at least getting this agenda on the table and pushing for people to do something about this problem that every other civilized free democratic industrial nation has done something about.
2. My wife from Japan and friend from Canada do not have horror stories to tell about their home countries health care and in fact in the latter thinks that it is inexcusable that we do not have a public health care system. There are even aspects of Japanese health care that my wife seems to prefer. I will have to get specifics from her again as this conversation was from a couple of weeks ago and I don't remember the details now.
3. Our country is always eager to go into massive debt in order to fight a war (in someone else's country of course - and esp. if they are Arabs or not-so-caucasion) but horrified at the idea of shelling out even a penny to ensure that our fellow countrymen and women (and children) might have health care. Also, I have read that it is a lie that health care benefits are being extended to illegal immigrants - they are still SOL. Don't worry - all those non-caucasions who speak languages other than English and snuck in here illegally to take our jobs (the jobs the people already here would not take anyway in many cases) will still be able to die in the streets without a penny from any of us - the world isn't totally being tilted on a new axis. I guess the lesson here is that we always have enough money to kill 3rd worlders, but God help you if you aren't in the upper brackets of the US social system because we certainly don't have any money to help anyone but ourselves.
4. It does concern me about overspending and plans that would cause more trouble than they are worth. That is why we need a mature rational national debate. I suppose many people are having that kind of debate. And then other people (mostly white people I think) are indulging in all kinds of side-controversies about whether President Obama is really a US citizen, or whether and how much he hates white people, or whether he is a Muslim in disguise, or else they are showing up at town-hall meetings to scream and rant and in some cases even bringing guns. Now I don't recall any town hall meetings about anything at all during the Bush years. But if there had been - I wonder how far the Anarchists or Black Panthers or other groups would have gotten if they screamed and ranted and brought guns into the area (even in states where that is legal). Mature rational debate yes - thinly veiled racist paranoia - no.
Okay here are the articles I found informative and of interest:
The Case for Postal Style Healthcare
Interesting points in this article - though I will grant that it made me wonder if the stresses of such a system would cause doctors, nurses, orderlies or patients to "go postal" - in a hospital no less.
There are links within that article that are good to look up especially:
The Trouble with Healthcare in Numbers
Now here is another article I found very helpful in setting the record straight:
Myths and Falsehoods about Health Care Reform
One last thing I'd like to point out - Buddhism-as-Buddhism has never instigated a war of conquest.
On the other hand Buddhist monks in China and Japan were instrumental in collecting funds for and directing public service probjects - the building of roads, bridges, and hospitals.
So which policy do you think Buddhists would support - going into debt to invade a country on the pretext that they had weapons they didn't really have?
Or
Trying to push forward some kind of feasible health care plan so that in the supposedly most advanced and wealthiest nation on earth people aren't left without coverage (when every other free democratic industrial nation has found the will and the means to make sure all their citizens are taken care of)?
That's all for now.
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei
The next several chapters of the Rissho Ankoku Ron Commentary at Ryuei.net are all about the history of Pure Land Buddhism up to Honen and the first generation of his disciples. It is crucial to understand this if one wants to understand Rissho Ankoku Ron because Rissho Ankoku Ron's primary critique is aimed at the exclusive Pure Land movement of Honen. For those who want to yawm and skip those sections I would urge you to think again. The history of Pure Land Buddhism in India and East Asia demonstrates some very universal traits of human religiosity - the desire to have a heavenly father who will provide salvation on the cheap (meaning no need for any inner transformation - just a ticket to a heavenly afterlife given in return for some lip service and unthinking allegiance to a simple minded creed) - and the constant attempt to reduce any religious tradition to some antinomian formula (meaning an amoral spiritual teaching preaching self-cultivation is either doomed and/or superfluous so one can act as one pleases and ignore all teachings and methods that would say otherwise). Nichiren Buddhism is not exempt from these traits, and certainly it can be seen in other world religions. So the history of Pure Land Buddhism is really also the history of human religiosity and a universal cautionary tale.
I would also like to note that I have met many sincere practitioners of Pure Land Buddhism among those practicing in Korean or Chinese schools or among the Jodo Shinshu (the followers of Honen's disciple Shinran). I would like to note that Chinese and Korean forms of Pure Land are not the same as Honen's (or Shinran's) exclusive nembutsu - and usually they are allied to the Zen schools in the lineage of Lin-chi (Jap. Rinzai) and buttressed by the teachings of the Flower Garland school and led by monks and nuns who follow the full monastic Vinaya as well as the Mahayana precepts of the Brahma Net Sutra. The followers of Shinran are in some ways even more exclusive than Honen but in other ways Shinran had (or expressed) a much deeper and profounder understanding of human nature in my view. I do not deal with Shinran's teachings in my articles on Rissho Ankoku Ron. Also, any individual practitioner should not be judged by the school they are a part of but should be met with in friendship and sincerity as fellow Buddhists with whom we may or may not agree when it comes to particular points. My essays are not to be construed as encouragement for bad manners or sectarianism.
Anyway, at the end of those chapters summarizing the Pure Land movement of Honen I conclude with the following:
It is not unheard of in the sutras for the Buddha to teach a disciple who cannot remember or practice many teachings to only focus on the most essential point. Usually these stories end with the disciple awakening to the meaning of a single verse or phrase and then by virtue of their enlightenment they come to realize the true meaning of all the teachings and come to embody the virtue of all the practices. One example would be the story of the monk Chudapanthaka who supposedly was too dull-witted to remember even a single verse and in despair was thinking of returning to the home life. The Buddha had compassion for him and taught him to simply sweep out the monastery while saying, “Sweep away the dirt” over and over again. Much to the surprise of the other monks, including his sharper but scornful older brother, Chudapanthaka realized that sweeping the dirt really meant sweeping the mind clean of greed, anger, and ignorance and he thereby became an arhat, liberated from birth and death. He was even able to form thousands of replica bodies to sweep the monastery, thus demonstrating his understanding to the other monks and also expressing the multi-faceted nature of his insight into that one phrase.
Mahayana sutras likewise abound in promises that anyone who upholds even a single verse or phrase will attain inestimable merits. So there are plenty of precedents in both the pre-Mahayana and Mahayana canons for the claim that a single simple practice can lead to enlightenment. Nowhere, however, is the claim made that other practices should then be laid aside or abandoned. Rather, the disciples are being encouraged to receive, remember, and live in accord with as much of the Buddha Dharma as they can, even if it is only a verse or a phrase. The idea is not to neglect everything else. Instead, by upholding a single verse or phrase the disciple would then gain access to the true intent of all the teachings and thereby come to understand and practice them as well. One must, therefore, be careful not to simply scour the sutras for an easy practice that will allow one to bypass everything else. Rather, one should choose the verse or phrase that will in fact provide the key to the rest.
It was Nichiren’s contention that Honen had made two fundamental mistakes. The first was to reduce all of Buddhism to the practice of the nembutsu to the exclusion of all else. This was a mistake because Nichiren believed that the nembutsu did not in fact express the Buddha’s true intent - the attainment of enlightenment in this world. The second mistake, a corollary of the first, was to slander the Lotus Sutra; the one sutra that Nichiren was convinced did in fact reveal the true intent. Honen did this when he advocated laying aside all other sutras, teachings, and practices other than the Pure Land sutras and the practice of nembutsu and insisting that they could no longer help people in the Latter Age of the Dharma. Put simply, in the Senchaku Shu, Honen performed a radical act of reductionism by teaching the exclusive practice of nembutsu and in doing so missed the essential point of Buddha Dharma itself by advocating the neglect of the Lotus Sutra.
The articles on the history of Pure Land are these:
Pure Land Buddhism in India and China
The Life and Teachings of Honen
The Pure Land School after Honen
Rejecting the Gateway of the Holy Path
Casting Aside the Miscellaneous Practices
Closing the Gateway of the Mahayana Sutras
The Band of Robbers in the Parable of the White Path
Lay Aside, Abandon, and Set Aside All but the Nembutsu
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei
I am going to continue posting excerpts from my commentary on Nichiren's Rissho Ankoku Ron (Establishing Righteousness for the Peace of the Nation) because now that I started to do so I want to follow through and finish it. I will try to update this once a week. I'll try to do it on Mondays. We'll see I guess.
For me, Rissho Ankoku Ron is not just some esoteric 13th century Japanese Buddhist document that draws my academic/intellectual curiosity. Frankly I hate being called an academic. I am not. I am an amatuer scholar as I don't deal directly (most of the time) with primary languages and I don't publish my findings in peer reviewed journals, and even though I get deeply into the contexts I do so not out of academic curiosity but because I don't want to be fooled again by relying on other people who twist and obscure the texts and/or teachings for their own benefit or due to their own limited points of view. That is not academic or intellectualism - it is common sense and thinking for myself.
My interest in Rissho Ankoku Ron is more existential than academic. I engaged it a few years ago and wrote my commentary on it because it is on the one hand the most polemical of Nichiren's writings and on the other hand the least edifying or profound. If anything - it speaks to a pre-industrial mythic worldview that most secular irreligious people in the urban 21st century city I live in would find laughable (unless they are fundamentalists of some sort - in which case they would just dismiss Nichiren as a benighted pagan even though their own beliefs are much more primitive and unsophisticated than any medieval Buddhist). My thought was that if I could find anything sensible or helpful in this - his most challenging writing and some say his most important - then I could show that Nichiren is or can still be relevant to us all.
What happened was that I found myself very enriched in following up on Nichiren's sources and all the things he took for granted as a product of his culture. I also found that while I did not always agree with Nichiren or the details of his worldview - for the most part I found myself taking his text as a jumping off point for my own thoughts about how individual people, their societies, their worldviews, and the natural world impact one another for better of for worse. So this commentary is as much an explication of my own thoughts in dialogue with a radical 13th century Japanese monk as it is a way of unravelling an ancient text.
The excerpts I am posting here at fraughtwithperil are just my own thoughts for the most part. I am leaving out all the many pages of explanation of the context and assumptions of Rissho Ankoku Ron. But as I said, I found all that material very enriching in many ways and I hope some of you might look at it as well.
Now here is the next part:
In the Rissho Ankoku Ron, the guest (representing Hojo Tokiyori - the retired regent who was the actual ruler of Japan) is very upset by the host’s (representing Nichiren) accusation that evil monks have misled the rulers of Japan. To say this is to question the judgment of the rulers. So the guest wants to know who exactly he is accusing and on what grounds. Here we have come to the potentially subversive nature of the Rissho Ankoku Ron. Nichiren was very much in the mold of a Biblical Hebrew prophet. He "spoke the truth to power" as some people say today. The Hebrew prophets were not fortunetellers, though unfortunately that is how many people often view them. Primarily the prophets were charged by God to warn the rulers and the people that they were leading their country to ruin by defying God's demands. These demands almost always concerned fidelity to God and to God's call for justice. The prophet’s predictions were actually warnings of what would happen if the nation did not change course, and words of hope if they did repent and reform. Like the prophets, Nichiren came before the rulers of Japan with words of warning and words of hope. Unlike the prophets, Nichiren was not the representative of a deity but of the Buddha Dharma. He came before the rulers and the people with a call to fidelity to the Truth and to a way of life that would restore justice and compassion to his society based upon the teachings of the Lotus Sutra.
Nichiren was a patriot, because he cared deeply about the welfare of the people of Japan. But his patriotism was not the idolatrous nationalism that says, "my country right or wrong." Rather, Nichiren's patriotism was of the sort that caused him to risk his life by telling those in power what he believed they needed to do to align Japan with the Wonderful Dharma so that true peace and prosperity could be restored and maintained. Of course in doing so he had to challenge the status quo of the military government and its patronage of Buddhist movements which Nichiren believed were leading the country away from the true intent of the Buddha's teachings.
It is important to remember that Nichiren was not just persecuted for holding unorthodox religious views. In the first place, Nichiren's views, at the time of the Rissho Ankoku Ron, were not very far off from T’ien-t’ai orthodoxy. Rather, Nichiren's critique was subversive because he questioned the judgment of the ruling Hojo regency that controlled the religious establishment at that time. Military governments like the Kamakuran shogunate do not take well to having their judgment questioned, and Nichiren seems to have realized this would be the reaction to his criticisms, which is why he has the guest respond as he does in this passage.
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei
This article can be found (along with the rest of the Rissho Ankoku Ron Commentary) here:
The Subversive Nature of Nichiren's Prophetic Stance