Pure Land, Real World

Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination

Melissa Anne-Marie Curley
Series: Pure Land Buddhist Studies
Copyright Date: 2017
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvvmxmx
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    Pure Land, Real World
    Book Description:

    For close to a thousand years Amida's Pure Land, a paradise of perfect ease and equality, was the most powerful image of shared happiness circulating in the Japanese imagination. In the late nineteenth century, some Buddhist thinkers sought to reinterpret the Pure Land in ways that would allow it speak to modern Japan. Their efforts succeeded in ways they could not have predicted. During the war years, economist Kawakami Hajime, philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, and historian Ienaga Saburō-left-leaning thinkers with no special training in doctrinal studies and no strong connection to any Buddhist institution-seized upon modernized images of Shinran in exile and a transcendent Western Paradise to resist the demands of a state that was bearing down on its citizens with increasing force. Pure Land, Real World treats the religious thought of these three major figures in English for the first time.

    Kawakami turned to religion after being imprisoned for his involvement with the Japanese Communist Party, borrowing the Shinshū image of the two truths to assert that Buddhist law and Marxist social science should reinforce each other, like the two wings of a bird. Miki, a member of the Kyoto School who went from prison to the crown prince's think tank and back again, identified Shinran's religion as belonging to the proletariat: For him, following Shinran and working toward building a buddha land on earth were akin to realizing social revolution. And Ienaga's understanding of the Pure Land-as the crystallization of a logic of negation that undermined every real power structure-fueled his battle against the state censorship system, just as he believed it had enabled Shinran to confront the world's suffering head on.

    Such readings of the Pure Land tradition are idiosyncratic-perhaps even heretical-but they hum with the same vibrancy that characterized medieval Pure Land belief. Innovative and refreshingly accessible, Pure Land, Real World shows that the Pure Land tradition informed twentieth-century Japanese thought in profound and surprising ways and suggests that it might do the same for twenty-first-century thinkers. The critical power of Pure Land utopianism has yet to be exhausted.

    eISBN: 978-0-8248-5778-3
    Subjects: Religion, Philosophy

Table of Contents

  1. Front Matter
    (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    (pp. v-vi)
  3. Series Editor’s Preface
    (pp. vii-viii)
  4. Acknowledgments
    (pp. ix-x)
  5. Abbreviations
    (pp. xi-xii)
  6. Introduction
    (pp. 1-16)

    For a thousand years, Japa nese Buddhists cultivated vivid images of uto pia in the form of the Western Paradise. In defiance of common sense, they insisted on the existence of a world unlike our own— a place of perfect ease and unrestricted access to liberation. The Pure Land constructed by Amida Buddha, Buddha of Limitless Light and Limitless Life, was the most power ful picture of shared happiness in the premodern Japa nese imaginary. To imagine this utopia was also to make an assertion: things could be dif fer ent; things could be better.

    Over the course of the...

  7. Chapter One The Land in Pure Land
    (pp. 17-46)

    It is a truism that Japa nese Pure Land Buddhists have traditionally imagined the Western Paradise as a transcendent pocket universe, located at the far edge of the universe, which we will reach only after death. Thus it seems that the Shinshū traditionalist has no alternative but to despise this world and long for the Pure Land, patiently waiting for salvation and cultivating an attitude of otherworldliness that the modern mind cannot tolerate.

    The position of this book is that this truism is not in fact true. When we look at premodern sources, we find that it is not at...

  8. Chapter Two The Modern Tradition
    (pp. 47-85)

    James Dobbins uses the term “Shin Buddhist modernism” to describe a “new articulation of Shinran’s thought” that followed “ the advent of sci entific consciousness” and the crisis of Meiji-period attacks on Buddhism (haibutsu kishaku ”廃仏毀釈)) (2004, 108). Without neglecting its revisionist tendencies (120), Dobbins deems Shin modernism a “ momentous and heroic achievement attained through the creative efforts of countless Buddhists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (108). Dobbins identifies the Otani-ha reformer Kiyozawa Manshi (1863–1903) as the nearest thing Shin modernism has to a founder, praising Kiyozawa as “a nonconformist visionary who inspired a generation of Buddhist...

  9. Chapter Three Special Marxist, Special Buddhist: Kawakami Hajime
    (pp. 86-120)

    In January 1946, the members of Kyoto University’s Department of Economics gathered for the funeral of Kawakami Hajime, a former member of the department and Japan’s most famous Marxist economist. In the course of events, conversation apparently turned to the topic of the department’s cooperation with the imperial state during the war. This conversation triggered days of self-interrogation, culminating with a meeting at which all of the department’s se nior professors submitted their resignation letters. The remaining ju nior faculty “had to rebuild the department from scratch” (Yagi 2004, 19).

    There is something poetic about this turn of events. On...

  10. Chapter Four Pure Land for the People: Miki Kiyoshi
    (pp. 121-159)

    In 1932, Miki Kiyoshi was identified by his friend Tosaka Jun (1900–1945) as the emerging leader of the generation of young Japa nese phi los o phers working under the banner of “Nishida philosophy.” By the summer of 1945, Miki’s mentor Nishida Kitarō(1870–1945) was dead, and both Tosaka and Miki were in jail. Tosaka died in Nagano Prison on August 9, 1945, six days before the Japa nese surrender to the Allies brought an end to the Asia-Pacific War. Miki died in Toyotama Prison on September 26, 1945, six weeks into the Allied Occupation.

    Miki’s relationships with Nishida...

  11. Chapter Five Man without a Hometown: Ienaga Saburō
    (pp. 160-189)

    Ienaga Saburō was born in Nagoya in 1913. When he was still an infant, his family moved to Kyushu and then onward to Osaka. By his own account, however, he came from nowhere: “In ‘who’s who’ dictionaries, he always leaves the space for ‘birthplace’ blank because ‘ birthplace’ is usu ally identified with ‘Hometown’ [furusato]” (Huntsberry 1976, 244). The furusato invokes a farming village, with a plot of land that will one day be passed down from parent to child but “I have no experience of life in a farming village,” Ienaga writes, “and my father was a businessman who...

  12. Epilogue: “Let Us Read Shinran, Young People!”
    (pp. 190-198)

    Before the modern period, when it was easy to imagine the distant Western Paradise as enfolded within this world and the future encounter with Amida as piercing the pres ent moment, the utopian order of the Pure Land licensed many dif fer ent kinds of re sis tance to the regimes of the real world: Hōnen’s blithe disregard of codes of purity and pollution, Shinran’s refusal to live as either a monk or a layman, Rennyo’s assertion of Honganji as a domain governed by its own laws, the effervescence of dancing nenbutsu, the outright rebellion of the ikkō ikki.

    During...

  13. Notes
    (pp. 199-210)
  14. Works Cited
    (pp. 211-232)
  15. Index
    (pp. 233-242)
  16. Back Matter
    (pp. 243-244)