Even Good People Go to the Pure Land

QUESTION: There is a quote often attributed to shinran that says something like "Even the good person attains birth in the Pure Land, how much more so the evil person"....i'm finding this statement difficult to understand, perhaps you could offer an explanation

DHARMAVIDYA: Thank you. This quotation comes from Tannisho which is a work compiled by Shinran's disciple Yuien after the master's death. The first half consists entirely of quotations from Shinran and this is one of them. It brings out Shinran's distinctive take on what Buddhism, especially Pureland Buddhism, is all about. Essentially there are two possible approaches to Buddhism. One approach is to become a Buddha oneself by one's own effort by achieving moral perfection, medative stability and limitless wisdom. That approach is called the Path for Sages. The other approach is to rely upon the Buddha's grace. In this second approach one is transformed naturally by allowing the Buddha to enter one's life. This is a path of faith and ecstatic response to the Tathagatha's transcendent presence. This latter is called Pureland. It is the bhaktiyoga of Buddhism where the Path of Sages is the karmayoga. Teachers like Honen and Shinran observed that although the Sages Path was the official form of Buddhism in their day, the so called sages did not exemplify the standards established in the sutras. In fact, nobody exemplifies them. Some people are better than others, but nobody actually matches the level of perfection supposedly required. They concluded that we must now be in mappo, the Dharma-ending age, when nobody has the capacity to follow the Sage Path completely any more. So Pureland rests on the principle that there are two approaches to Buddhism in principle, but only one works in practice. The one that works is the Pureland Path and that is what Shinran taught.

Now the Pureland path is specifically the method for bonbu, i.e. ordinary people who do not have super-human capacities for moral perfection, meditative stability, or limitless wisdom. We bonbu cannot get to nirvana by effort and self-refinement, only by relying upon the fact that Buddha - especially Amida Buddha - accepts us as we are (rather than as we would be if we perfected ourselves). Entering the Pure Land is, therefore, for bonbu, not for the virtuous. But since Amida's compassion is without limit, one must say that even virtuous people are also allowed. Hence, even the virtuous enter the Pureland, how much more so sinners.

What this means is that Pureland or Amidism is religion for ordinary people - for Mr and Mrs Everybody. In Pureland we make the simple basic religious distinction between the sacred and the mundane. The mundane is ourselves and our world. The sacred is Amida and the Pure Land. Our religious practice then consists of the feelings we have when we contemplate this configuration and we express these feelings by calling the Buddha's name, usually in the form "Namo Amida Bu." This call is called the nembutsu. It may express longing, joy, despair, gratitude, awe, request, hope, excitement, calm - the whole range of religious sentiment. It gathers into one phrase the whole expression of our reflection upon our own short-coming in relation to the sacred realm that we contemplate and call upon. It is only meaningful, however, in relation to a sincere and deep realisation that we are bonbu and the sacred realm is not.

This makes Pureland, in one sense, the most simple, basic form of religion there is - simple enough for bonbu like us. However, there is also a subtlety in it, since Shinran is aware that the person who strives toward self-perfection is also the person who does not really have faith in anything other than themselves and such a person actually has much more difficulty entering into the grace that religion offers. Such a person is really trying to stay in control of their own fate and has not got the basic willingness to trust that religion is all about. So this more subtle sense is a second dimension of meaning in what Shinran is saying. An everyday illustration of this spiritual problem is found in the fact that we can commonly observe that people who are ethically strict are often, by the same token, intolerant, whereas there are plenty of examples of people who are self-indulgent who are equally happy to indulge others and so are more tolerant and easier to live with even though they perhaps keep their precepts less strictly. Virtue does not always make for heaven, either for oneself or others.

Amidism is, therefore, that most basic form of religion in which unholy beings such as we contemplate holy things; and do so in such a way that feelings arise in us - feelings that then reshape our life, death, sense of our place in the universe, and so on. It is about naturalness and fellow-feeling rather than perfectionism. Shinran had this special talent for one-liners that bring this situation home to us with immediacy.