River of Fire River of Water Read online

  To

  my father

  who taught me to see

  what eyes cannot see

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The idea for this little book came from Trace Murphy, editor at Doubleday, who felt a strong need for the aspect of compassion in Buddhism to be more widely introduced to the general public. He thus invited me to write on Pure Land Buddhism for the interested reader who has had some acquaintance with the other better-known forms of Buddhism, such as Zen, Tibetan, and Vipassana. In order to meet his request I have kept the tone nonacademic and incorporated personal anecdotes, stories, and poetry from various sources. I wish to thank Trace for the opportunity to undertake this project, which is a new venture for me, but I am delighted to share with the reader my understanding of compassion-in-action, the singular characteristic permeating the great Buddhist tradition.

  It is impossible to mention all the people, both known and unknown, who have contributed to the making of this book, but I wish to thank three parties that gave me encouragement throughout the process. They include the members of the Shin Buddhist Sangha of Northampton, who read several versions of River of Fire, River of Water; my friends and colleagues across the country—Alfred Bloom, Ruth Tabrah, Kenneth Tanaka, Alexander Eliot, Dennis Hudson, Abram Yoshida, Ty-Ranne Grimstad, my little bodhisattva Shaypa; and my wife and partner Alice, who is also my best critic, for her perceptive reading and insightful suggestions. To them all, I give infinite thanks.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Prologue

  1. The Historical Legacy

  2. The Color Gold

  3. The Spirit of the Valley

  4. Home Composting

  5. Primal Vow

  6. Nembutsu: The Name-That-Calls

  7. Other Power

  8. Self-Power

  9. The Quest

  10. Unhindered Light

  11. Faith as True Entrusting

  12. Awakening

  13. Transformation

  14. Two Kinds of Compassion

  15. Conspiracy of Good

  16. Attainment Without a Teacher

  17. Humility

  18. Arrogance

  19. True Disciple of Buddha

  20. Myokonin

  21. Lotus Blooms in Fire

  22. Ocean of the Primal Vow

  23. One Bright Pearl

  24. The Cry of Cicadas

  25. As Is: Sono-Mama 121

  26. Duality

  27. Nonduality

  28. Interdependence

  29. Self as Dynamic Flow

  30. All Is a Circle

  31. Know Thyself

  32. Hell Is My Only Home

  33. The World of Dew

  34. Unrepeatable Life

  35. My Grandmother

  36. The Pure Land

  37. When a Person Dies

  38. House or Home

  39. True and Real Life

  40. Buddha-Nature

  41. Mother Teresa and Hitler

  42. The Single Thread

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Glossary of Key Terms

  PREFACE

  Whether teaching Asian religions at Smith College or appearing at international conferences on religious studies, Professor Unno always strives to inculcate deep hearing and soul-tact. Self-contained, self-effacing, and dryly humorous, he turns the ongoing “dialogue” between Eastern and Western cultures into friendly, fruitful conversation.

  While D. T. Suzuki was the first to open American minds to Zen Buddhism, now with this book Unno brilliantly introduces a different, far more popular Buddhist faith; namely, the ancient Pure Land tradition as developed by Honen and Shinran in thirteenth-century Japan. This dynamic and important religion is something that few Westerners ever heard of—until now.

  The genius of Honen and Shinran, Unno tells us, was that they “discovered the way to bring Buddhist truth alive in the midst of the householder’s life. . . . In the words of Shinran,

  All people—men, women high or low station—

  In saying the Name of Amida are not restricted

  To walking, standing, sitting, or reclining,

  Nor to time, place, or conditions.”

  What else distinguishes this popular faith from elitist Zen? Unno responds with a wonderfully concise quote from Honen: “In the Path of Sages one perfects wisdom and achieves enlightenment; in the Path of Pure Land one returns to the foolish self to be saved by Amida.”

  But return “to the foolish self” is no easy matter. On that path, too, struggle and suffering ensue. “Alienation,” the modern bugaboo, is nothing new. Witness Homer’s Achilles, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Kafka’s relatively blameless “K.” The protagonist in Dante’s Divine Comedy may have hoped to go straight up, but found he had to go down first. And so it is with all of us.

  Unno states the case bluntly: “The question becomes deeply personal and existential. Who am I? Where did my life come from? Where is it going? What is the purpose of my life? How do I cope with death and dying? In trying to fathom the answers we struggle to contend with oneself, with one’s own darkness, with one’s self-delusions.”

  Yet there is no preaching here. Instead, Unno gives us poignant stories, occasionally hilarious personal anecdotes, and plain but lovely translations from appropriate texts. Consider for example Basho’s justly famous haiku:

  Such stillness—

  The cry of the cicadas

  Sinks into the rocks.

  This poem, Unno says, “points to a happening taking place at the deepest level of life, unifying the cry, the rocks, the poet, and the universe into a singular experience.” Taking his courage in his hands and with Basho’s inspiration full upon him, Unno thereupon appends a profoundly insightful haiku of his own:

  Such sorrow—

  The cry of true compassion

  Sinks into my hard ego.

  One is forcibly reminded of these lines from Euripides’ Helen in J. T. Sheppard’s translation:

  I had washed my robes of red

  And on fresh green rushes spread

  In the meadows by the cool

  Darkly gleaming waterpool

  For the golden sun to dry,

  When I heard a voice, a cry;

  such a cry as ill would suit

  the happy music of my lute:

  And I wondered what might be

  the cause of that strange minstrelsy,

  so sad, and yet so wondrous clear.

  Some Bible verses return as well:

  A voice said “Cry!”

  and I said, “What shall I cry?”

  “All flesh is grass”?

  Surely the People is grass.

  Rudolph Steiner’s lecture On Evil (given in Berlin during the dark winter of the First World War) argued that “The root of all evil in human nature is what we call egoism. Every kind of human imperfection, of evil from insignificant shortcomings to the worst crimes, can be traced to this single trait.” And yet, Steiner went on to assert, an alert sense of self is required for spiritual development: “When we enter the spiritual world, even if it is through the portal of death, we must live with the strength which we have developed in our inner being. But we cannot acquire this strength there; it must have been gained by living an altruistic life in the physical world.”

  We are indeed as blades of grass or flowers in the meadow. To unfold, refine, rejoice, and fulfill one’s personal self in this unrepeatable life seems a natural enough ideal. But human egoism remains a wellspring of evil! That’s the terrible paradox, the living contradiction, which confronts each one of us from day to day. It makes the world go around, one might say, and th
ere’s nothing we can do to make the paradox go away. Yet religion, contemplation, art, and poetry, all four can help illuminate the further horizon of reality. As Shinran exults:

  When the many rivers of evil passion enter

  Into the ocean of the Great Compassionate Vow

  Of Unhindered Light, illuminating the ten quarters,

  They become one in taste with the water of wisdom.

  Yes, East and West do meet. They always have. For we are all one people, an ignorant and self-destructive lot—yet simultaneously blessed to be alive.

  The heavens declare the glory of God

  And the firmament showeth his handiwork

  Day unto day utttereth speech

  And night unto night showeth knowledge.

  It’s not so much to say that Unno bares the heart of Shin Buddhism. Like Quaker Christianity, for instance, his religion is not intellectual but contemplative, not hierarchical but egalitarian. His exposition of his faith remains intellectual by necessity, yet poetic as well. Indeed it runs bubbly-clear, like a trout stream; the trout being his own humble heart. Hence for this reader at least, Unno’s book goes well beyond its stated aim. It has improved my understanding of my own faith—and even of myself.

  ALEXANDER ELIOT

  VENICE, 1997

  PROLOGUE

  There are eighty-four thousand paths to liberation and freedom from self-delusion, according to Buddhism. This wealth of possibilities may seem to make liberation more than accessible, but they are not spelled out in some enlightenment mail-order catalog. Which path a person takes is often not a matter of choice but decided by the accidents of birth, circumstance, encounters, and quirks of fate. Yet there are defining moments for each of us that can change the entire course of life. Such a moment for me was the shocking suicide of my best friend. I was twenty-four at that time.

  I had been in Japan for two years, following my graduation from the University of California at Berkeley in 1951. My ambition was to become a Buddhist scholar. Through the intermediary of D. T. Suzuki, whom I had met during my senior year in San Francisco, I enrolled in the Tokyo University graduate school as a special student before matriculating in the regular program in Buddhist Studies.

  Living in Japan, which at that time was still suffering the devastation of World War II, I came to have mixed feelings about my new home. Having grown up in a Japanese-American family, I could easily identify with its rich cultural past but not with its contemporary history and its people. It was difficult to fully comprehend the kind of suffering that war had brought to them. And yet, in America, I had never really felt at home either. My family and I had been among one hundred twenty-thousand Americans of Japanese ancestry who had been incarcerated behind barbed-wire fences in “concentration camps,” (so-called by then President Franklin D. Roosevelt) without due process of law. Now in Japan but still lost and confused, a stranger in a strange land, I was searching for some kind of mooring. It was at that point that I was befriended by Teruo, a brilliant, older philosophy student also at Tokyo University.

  I felt a close kinship with him, in part because of our shared interest in discussing issues of a philosophical nature. We compared notes on Japanese and American cultures, gossiped about professors we knew and about courses we took, exchanged notes on impetuous liaisons with the opposite sex, and shared our dreams and hopes for the future. But a dark, persistent cloud hovered over the bright promise of Teruo’s future: his frail health, due to tuberculosis in his youth. Effective medical treatment was lacking at that time, and his body had been ravaged by the effects of the disease. He was frequently exhausted and in great pain. He became increasingly frustrated that he could not sustain the vigorous demands of a highly competitive academic life. One day of hard studying needed to be compensated by two full days of quiet rest.

  When we experience pain and suffering, it is only natural to ask “Why?” Such was probably the case when Teruo one day asked me, “What is karma in Buddhism?” It was on the eve of his graduation from the university, and we were sitting having a beer in a German-speaking bar in Tokyo’s Ginza district. I failed to appreciate the deep feeling that motivated his question, and I glibly quoted some abstract theories that I had just read in a Buddhist text and abruptly changed subjects. As we left the bar to go home, Teruo said that he had tickets for a dance the next evening. We said good night, and I promised him that I would drop by his home the following afternoon. We could go to the social together.

  The following day, as promised, I went to his home shortly after the noon hour. When I knocked on the door, Teruo’s mother came to the door with a worried look on her face. In an anxious whisper, she said, “Teruo didn’t come home last night!” Knowing that he could have stayed out all night drinking (as he sometimes did) I calmly assured her, “I’m sure that he’ll be home soon. I’ll come back again later.”

  Late that afternoon I went to a noodle shop. The evening edition of the newspaper had just arrived, and as I picked up the paper, I read the headline with horror—”College Student Commits Suicide.” I instantly knew that it was Teruo. He had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, swallowing them with soft drinks, in the compounds of a Zen monastery south of Tokyo. Did he decide to take his life because of his failing health, the anxiety of academic competition, or some unknown existential crisis?

  I rushed back to his home, hoping somehow to comfort his mother, who had also just heard the tragic news of her son. Devastated, she had lost her only son upon whom she had showered love and affection, and she just wailed in grief and mourning. This went on and on. Though I searched desperately for words to express my sympathy and for words that might comfort her, none came forth.

  That evening, I stayed up all night going over the tragic happening again and again. Three questions loomed large in my mind. First, I wondered if Teruo was now happy—was he now at peace? I thought about this for a long time, but instead of an answer coming to me there was only silence. Secondly, I wondered what I could say to Teruo’s mother. What is the one word of compassion that I could offer her for her painful loss? I wasn’t looking for hackneyed phrases of condolence but truly uplifting words. But again, I didn’t know—there was only a void. And thirdly, I kept thinking of Teruo’s question to me—what is karma, really? As I thought deeply about it, I realized that such an objective question, having little to do with my own existence, would invite only empty, abstract answers, answers of the sort I had given Teruo on the previous night. For a truly meaningful answer, the question of karma had to become more concrete: Who am I? What am I? Where did my life come from and where was it going? There was only a blank.

  I thus found myself at an absolute impasse. I could not change the past. I could not go forward. I could not stay still and find peace in the present. Somehow I would have to find my way out of this predicament, but I felt truly lost. Yet, as all these questions and frustrations were circulating in my mind, I remembered the Pure Land parable of the two rivers and white path. Attributed to Shan-tao, the Pure Land master of seventh-century China, it captures the existential predicament in which one is made to awaken the aspiration for enlightenment (bodhicitta). My painful struggle became slowly illuminated by this ancient parable.

  In the parable, a traveler is journeying through an unknown and dangerous wilderness. Soon he is pursued by bandits and wild beasts, and he races to get away from them. Running westward, he eventually comes to a river divided into two, separated by a narrow white path. The white path is only a few inches wide and runs from the near shore to the far shore. On one side of the path the river is filled with leaping flames that reach twenty feet into the air; on the other, the deep river has a powerful current that overflows with dangerous waves. Even though the white path is the only possibility of escape across the perilous river, it is not an alternative because of lapping fire and waves. Filled with fear, the traveler cannot go forward, cannot go back, and cannot stand still. In the words of Shan-tao, he faces “three kinds of imminent death.”
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  Courtesy of the Kawasaki City Art Museum

  Just at that time, the desperate traveler hears a calming voice right behind him on the eastern shore, urging him to go forward on the white path: “Go forth without fear; no danger exists. But if you remain, you will surely die!” Just then, he hears a beckoning call from the far shore: “Come just as you are with singleness of heart. Do not fear the flames and waves; I shall protect you!” Shan-tao tells us that the river of fire connotes anger; the river of water, greed. The two joined together make an odd picture, but they illustrate how the overflowing abundance of greed and anger can fill our lives. In our greed we want to make life move according to our desires. When we do not get our way, our passions are stifled and anger erupts.

  The eastern shore, the side where the traveler encountered his dilemma, is the world of delusion—samsara. The western shore is the Other Shore of enlightenment—nirvana. While this side is the defiled land, the far side is known as the Pure Land. Connecting the two is a narrow, white path. The tenuousness of the path shows the weakness of human aspiration to break through self-delusion into liberation and freedom.

  The pursuing bandits represent enticing teachings that abound in our world, all promising immediate material benefits and psychological relief. They may provide temporary answers but no true liberation. The wild beasts manifest instinctual passions that keep us bound to this shore of delusion. Both pull us away from moving forward on the path. The voice of encouragement from the eastern shore is that of the historical Buddha, the teachings of Sakyamuni; the beckoning call from the western shore comes from the Buddha of Immeasurable Light and Immeasurable Life, Amida. As one heeds the urging of Sakyamuni, the aspiration to move forward becomes pure and powerful. And as one embodies the call of Amida, it becomes single-minded and unshakable. This aspiration for supreme enlightenment is none other than the white path, now expanded and made safe, now an open passage through the flames of anger and waves of greed.