The Wife adheres to a New Year’s Day rule: Don’t do anything on New Year’s Day that you don’t want to end up doing all year long.1 She cleans and straightens the house over the days leading to New Year’s Eve in order to enjoy her relaxed holiday. Having been married 34 years, I’ve adopted her rule – do only things you want to do all year long on New Year’s Day – but without all the preparatory inconvenience.
So today, Jan. 1, 2024, I’ve strictly limited television viewing. I’ve ignored the leaves littering the bottom of the pool in the backyard. And I’ve spent the majority of the day in my recliner reading.
I picked up Richard J. Smith’s “The I Ching: A Biography,” which I had been reading the day before. This is one of the “Lives of Great Books” series which “recount the complex and fascinating histories of important religious texts from around the world.” I’ve previously read “The Lotus Sutra: A Biography” and “The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography,” both by Donald S. Lopez Jr.
However, in keeping with my “only do things you want to do all year long,” I put The I Ching biography down and picked up “The Vision of Buddhism” by Roger J. Corless. This was an introductory Buddhism text recommended by Jan Nattier in her book “Once Upon A Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline.” (More about that book tomorrow and subsequent days.)
I was attracted to this book by Corless’ effort to reject the Western tendency to teach Buddhism as a linear historical tale.
History is an academic discipline that has developed in the western hemisphere. The western hemisphere has been strongly influenced by the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and their conception of time as something created by God in and through which God manifests himself. On this view, time is meaningful. It has a beginning and an end, and the end is a goal, so that there is development, a progressive achievement of the goal. It makes sense to ask “What is the meaning of life?” A Christian hymn says “God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year.” As soon as we substitute the word Buddha for God in this sentence, however, there is a problem.
History as a secular discipline has many of the features of the Abrahamic tradition’s view of time. God has been gradually eased out, and the notion of goal or purpose has become suspect, but the assumption that time is meaningful and that development is real does not seem to have been given up by even the most radical critics of the philosophy of history.
Buddhism, on the other hand, sees things as changing over time, but it does not see things as becoming more meaningful as they change. Change, for Buddhism, is a primary characteristic of cyclic existence (samsara), and history is just a lot of change. All that we can say about history, Buddhistically, is that as time goes on we get more of it.
I greatly enjoyed his summary of the basic story of the Buddha’s life, which uses the Tibetan story of the “Twelve Acts of the Buddha”:
- Waiting in the Tushita Heaven
- Growing in the womb of Mayadevi
- Birth as a human for the last time.
- Attainment of intellectual and physical skills
- Marriage and the enjoyment of sensuality
- Renunciation of the worldly life
- The practice of extreme self-denial
- The march to the center
- Overcoming Mara
- Attaining enlightenment
- Teaching
- Final Nirvana
His summary of the teaching of emptiness – or as he explains it, “transparency” – was very useful and I was looking forward to seeing how his college textbook published in 1989 would proceed. At that moment, however, I needed to run an errand with The Wife. (All year long I’ll do this!)
When I was able to return to my recliner, I picked up “The Vision of Buddhism” but instead of returning to where I had left off I decided to first browse the book index.
As a Nichiren Buddhist I’m always interested in what an introductory college text has to say about the Kamakura period of Japan’s Buddhist development.
Nothing. The word Kamakura does not appear in the index. The entry for “Japan, and Buddhism” points to pages 59-62.
This happens to be the place where Corless has devoted a little more than two full pages to “Nichiren Shoshu (“The Orthodox Nichiren Lineage”). There is no other index entry for Nichiren.
In Corless’ Chapter 2, The Value of Worldly Skills (Act 4 of the Buddha), in the subsection entitled “Social Buddhism,” he writes:
Social Buddhism
There are two forms of Buddhism that, in very different ways, emphasize social action above all else: the Nichiren Shoshu of Japan, and the reform movement of Dr. Ambedkar in India.
NICHIREN SHOSHU
Nichiren Shoshu, “The Orthodox Nichiren Lineage,” is nothing if not clear, organized, and motivated. It claims to have the true Buddhism, proves it by its physical success, and aims at the destruction of all other forms of religion. Its roots are in a medium length Mahayana Sutra, Saddharmapundarika Sutra or Sutra on the True Dharma which is like a White Lotus, called the Lotus Sutra for short. This text presents Shakyamuni in his gigantic-sized, Sambhogakaya form preaching the Mahayana doctrines that had been withheld from the Hinayana. It may have been written about the beginning of the Christian era. Partly perhaps because it was chosen by the Chinese monk Chih-i (531-597 C.E.) as the perfect expression of Mahayana, it has become one of the most popular texts of Far Eastern Buddhism. It was studied by Nichiren (1222-1282 C.E.), a Japanese Tendai monk practising on Mount Hiei. He seems to have decided that the scholastic exegesis of the Lotus Sutra had become over-subtle, and that its main points had been missed. The Sutra was not concerned, he felt, with voluminous doctrinal formulae, but with the victory of the oppressed under the leadership of the Bodhisattva Vishishtacharitra (“He of Superlative Action”; known as Jogyo Bosatsu in Japan), who is mentioned in chapter 15 of the Lotus Sutra as the leader of a vast army of Bodhisattvas who emerge from below the earth to worship the Buddha. Coming out of the earth signified, for Nichiren, the release of the lowly from injustice, and he identified Vishishtacharitra with himself. Later followers came to regard Nichiren as the pre-eternal Buddha, superior to all other Buddhas. Only by cleaving to the supreme doctrine of the Lotus Sutra could anyone be free, either relatively (i.e., within samsara) or absolutely (i.e., by leaving samsara). He expressed his contempt for competing forms of Buddhism in four staccato phrases:
- “Nembutsu muken”: Those who recite the Buddha’s Name in the hope of paradise will be reborn in hell.
- “Zen temma”: The practitioners of Zen are deluding demons.
- “Shingon bokoku”: The Tantric Buddhists, who say they are protecting the country, are traitors.
- “Ritsu kokuzoku”: The Buddhists who punctiliously observe the monastic regulations are rebels.
The government attempted to execute Nichiren as a troublemaker, but he was saved by a miracle, and exiled to the island of Sado between 1271 and 1274. He founded two temples before he died, and began the Hokke Shu, “Lotus Lineage” which emphasized the great merit of reciting the mantra NAM’MYOHO-REN-GE-KYO, “Hail to the Lotus Sutra.” Since the Lotus Sutra says that reciting a single phrase from it earns as much merit as reciting all of it, and since, according to classical Chinese thought, the essence of a book is encapsulated in its name or title, those who recite NAM’MYO-HO-REN-GE-KYO will find that they get all that they need.
After Nichiren’s death, the lineage did not have a large following until Toda Josei (1900-1958 C.E.) became president of the Soka Gakkai, “Value-Creation Society,” in 1951. Soka Gakkai is a lay organization that grew out of the educational theories of Makiguchi Tsunesaburo (1871-1944) who, in his four-volume work Soka Kyoikugaku Taikei, “A System of Value-Creation Education,” written between 1930 and 1934, offered the unexceptionable idea that education should increase the student’s sense of values. Toda befriended Makiguchi, both joined the Nichiren Shoshu (an outgrowth of the Hokke Shu), and, after Makiguchi’s death, Toda whipped up what had been a study circle into a tightly run missionary society. He vowed to obtain the conversion of seven hundred and fifty thousand families before his death, and far exceeded his goal.
Today, Soka Gakkai is a potent force in Japanese society, able to stage breathtakingly unified mass meetings and, through the Komeito, “Clean Government Party,” it is powerfully influential in the Diet (the Japanese parliament). Its militancy alarms non-members, who may argue that it is not really Buddhism. Soka Gakkai claims, for instance, that Japan lost the Second World War because the Four Divine Kings deserted Japan when the Lotus Sutra was neglected. Soka Gakkai also has a world mission, with an American headquarters near Los Angeles and branches throughout the United States. Members of Soka Gakkai in America, where it is called Nichiren Shoshu of America (N.S.A.), attribute such varied practical benefits as release from drug addiction, a happy sex life, improved sports performance, good business deals, and successful hitch-hiking to the persistent recitation of the mantra NAM’MYO-HO-REN-GE-KYO. Unlike most Buddhists, they make great efforts to gain converts, and may claim that other Buddhists are not “real” Buddhists. And, whereas Nichiren himself originally claimed the Lotus Sutra as the salvation of Japan, American devotees patriotically use it to pay homage to the Stars and Stripes, sometimes with fife-and-drum bands.
After reading this I was exhausted and took a nap. I set my watch’s timer for 30 minutes and closed my eyes.
Napping I don’t mind doing for the rest of the year. Reading Corless’ book, not so much. When I got up from my nap I went to my office to write this. Writing is something I want to do all year. Explaining how many ways Corless gets Nichiren Buddhism wrong, I can do without.
I’ll go do gonyo now while my wife proof-reads this. After I do my 32 Days of the Lotus Sutra post I’ll consider my wife’s suggestions and post this. Tomorrow I plan to pick up Jan Nattier’s “A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to The Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparip̣rcchā)
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- The Wife’s objection: I feel this is misleading. The rule is – What you do on NYD will dominate or be a major focus for the coming year. Therefore you want to do pleasurable and rewarding things. return
In 2003, Jacqueline I. Stone, at the time a professor of Japanese Religions in the Religion Department of Princeton University, wrote a paper entitled, “By Imperial Edict and Shogunal Decree: Politics and the Issue of the Ordination Platform in Modern Lay Buddhism.” 