Truth Made Apparent by One's Own Thought.
The Japanese of to-day often speak of these seven religious bodies which we have enumerated and described, as "the old sects," because much of the philosophy, and many of the forms and prayers, are common to all, or, more accurately speaking, are popularly supposed to be; while the priests, being celibates, refrain from saké, flesh and fish, and from all intimate relations with women. Yet, although these sects are considered to be more or less conformable to the canon of the Greater Vehicle, and while the last three certainly introduce many of its characteristic features—one sect teaching that Buddha-hood could be obtained even in the present body of flesh and blood—yet the idea of Paradise had not been exploited or emphasized. This new gospel was to be introduced into Japan by the Jō-dō Shu or Sect of the Pure Land.
Before detailing the features of Jō-dō, we call attention to the fact that in Japan the propagation of the old sects was accompanied by an excessive use of idols, images, pictures, sutras, shastras and all the furniture thought necessary in a Buddhist temple. The course of thought and action in the Orient is in many respects similar to that in the Occident. In western lands, with the ebb and flow of religious sentiment, the iconolater has been followed by the iconoclast, and the overcrowded cathedrals have been purged by the hammer and fire of the Protestant and Puritan. So in Japan we find analogous, though not exactly similar, reactions. The rise and prosperity of the believers in the Zen dogmas, which in their early history used sparingly the eikon, idol and sutra, give some indication of protest against too much use of externals in religion. May we call them the Quakers of Japanese Buddhism? Certainly, theirs was a movement in the direction of simplicity.
The introduction of the Zen, or contemplative sect, did, in a sense, both precede and follow that of Shingon. The word Zen is a shortened form of the term Zenna, which is a transliteration into Chinese of the Sanskrit word Dhyana, or contemplation. It teaches that the truth is not in tradition or in books, but in one's self. Emphasis is laid on introspection rather than on language. "Look carefully within and there you will find the Buddha," is its chief tenet. In the Zen monasteries, the chair of contemplation is, or ought to be, always in use.
The Zen Shu movement may be said to have arisen out of a reaction against the multiplication of idols. It indicated a return to simpler forms of worship and conduct. Let us inquire how this was.
It may be said that Buddhism, especially Northern Buddhism, is a vast, complicated system. It has a literature and a sacred canon which one can think of only in connection with long trains of camels to carry, or freight trains to transport, or ships a good deal bigger than the Mayflower to import. Its multitudinous rules and systems of discipline appall the spirit and weary the flesh even to enumerate them; so that, from one point of view, the making of new sects is a necessity. These are labor-saving inventions. They are attempts to reduce the great bulk of scriptures to manageable proportions. They seek to find, as it were, the mother-liquor of the great ocean, so as to express the truth in a crystal. Hence the endeavors to simplify, to condense; here, by a selection of sutras, rather than the whole collection; there, by emphasis on a single feature and a determination to put the whole thing in a form which can be grasped, either by the elect few or by the people at large.
The Zen sect did this in a more rational way than that set forth as orthodox by later priestcraft, which taught that to the believer who simply turned round the revolving library containing the canon, the merit of having read it all would be imputed. The rin-zō[24] found near the large temples,—the cunning invention of a Chinese priest in the sixth century,—soon became popular in Japan. The great wooden book-case turning on a pivot contains 6,771 volumes, that being the number of canonical volumes enumerated in China and Japan.
The Zen sect teaches that, besides all the doctrines of the Greater and the Lesser Vehicles, whether hidden or apparent, there is one distinct line of transmission of a secret doctrine which is not subject to any utterance at all. According to their tenet of contemplation, one is to see directly the key to the thought of Buddha by his own thought, thus freeing himself from the multitude of different doctrines—the number of which is said to be eighty-four thousand. In fact, Zen Shu or "Dhyana sect" teaches the short method of making truth apparent by one's own thought, apart from the writings.
The story of the transmission of the true Zen doctrine is this:
"When the blessed Shaka was at the assembly on Vulture's Peak, there came the heavenly king, who offered the Buddha a golden-colored flower and asked him to preach the law. The Blessed One simply took the flower and held it in his hand, but said no word. No one in the whole assembly could tell what he meant. The venerable Mahahasyapa alone smiled. Than the Blessed One said to him, 'I have the wonderful thought of Nirvana, the eye of the Right Law, which I shall now give to you.'[25] Thus was ushered in the doctrine of thought transmitted by thought."
After twenty-eight patriarchs had taught the doctrine of contemplation, the last came into China in A.D. 520, and tried to teach the Emperor the secret key of Buddha's thought. This missionary Bodhidharma was the third son of a king of the Kashis, in Southern India, and the historic original of the tobacconist's shop-sign in Japan, who is known as Daruma. The imperial Chinaman was not yet able to understand the secret key of Buddha's thought. So the Hindu missionary went to the monastery on Mount Su, where in meditation, he sat down cross-legged with his face to a wall, for nine years, by which time, says the legend, his legs had rotted off and he looked like a snow-image. During that period, people did not know him, and called him simply the Wall-gazing Brahmana. Afterward he had a number of disciples, but they had different views that are called the transmissions of the skin, flesh, or bone of the teacher. Only one of them got the whole body of his teachings. Two great sects were formed: the Northern, which was undivided, and the Southern, which branched off into five houses and seven schools. The Northern Sect was introduced into Japan by a Chinese priest in 729 A.D., while the Southern was not brought over until the twelfth century. In both it is taught that perfect tranquillity of body and mind is essential to salvation. The doctrine is the most sublime one, of thought transmitted by thought being entirely independent of any letters or words. Another name for them is, "The Sect whose Mind Assimilates with Buddha," direct from whom it claims to have received its articles of faith.
Too often this idea of Buddhaship, consisting of absolute freedom from matter and thought, means practically mind-murder, and the emptiness of idle reverie.
Contrasting modern reality with their ancient ideal, it must be confessed that in practice there is not a little letter worship and a good deal of pedantry; for, in all the teachings of abstract principles by the different sects, there are endless puns or plays upon words in the renderings of Chinese characters. This arises from that antithesis of extreme poverty in sounds with amazing luxuriance in written expression, which characterizes both the Chinese and Japanese languages.
In the temples we find that the later deities introduced into the Buddhist pantheon are here also welcome, and that the triads or groups of three precious ones, the "Buddhist trinity," so-called,[26] are surrounded by gods of Chinese or Japanese origin. The Zen sect, according to its professions and early history, ought to be indifferent to worldly honors and emoluments, and indeed many of its devotees are. Its history, however, shows how poorly mortals live up to their principles and practise what they preach. Furthermore, these professors of peace and of the joys of the inner life in the Sō-tō or sub-sect have made the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth years of Meiji, or A.D. 1893 and 1894, famous and themselves infamous by their long-continued and scandalous intestine quarrels. Of the three sub-sects, those called Rin-zai and Sō-tō, take their names from Chinese monks of the ninth century; while the third, O-baku, founded in Japan in the seventeenth century, is one of the latest importations of Chinese Buddhistic thought in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Japanese authors usually classify the first six denominations at which we have glanced, some of which are phases of thought rather than organizations, as "the ancient sects." Ten-dai and Shin-gon are "the medieval sects." The remaining four, of which we shall now treat, and which are more particularly Japanese in spirit and development, are "the modern sects."
[THE BUDDHISM OF THE JAPANESE]
"A drop of spray cast by the infinite
I hung an instant there, and threw my ray
To make the rainbow. A microcosm I
Reflecting all. Then back I fell again,
And though I perished not, I was no more."—
The Pantheist's Epitaph.
"Buddhism is essentially a religion of compromise."
"Where Christianity has One Lord, Buddhism has a dozen."
"I think I may safely challenge the Buddhist priesthood to give a plain historical account of the Life of Amida, Kwannon, Dainichi, or any other Mahāyāna Buddha, without being in serious danger of forfeiting my stakes."
"Christianity openly puts this Absolute Unconditioned Essence in the forefront of its teaching. In Buddhism this absolute existence is only put forward, when the logic of circumstances compels its teachers to have recourse to it."—A. Lloyd, in The Higher Buddhism in the Light of the Nicene creed.
"Now these six characters, 'Na-mu-A-mi-da-Butsu,' Zend-ō has explained as follows: 'Namn' means [our] following His behest—and also [His] uttering the Prayer and bestowing [merit] upon us. 'Amida Butsu' is the practice of this, consequently by this means a certainty of salvation is attained."
"By reason of the conferring on us sentient creators of this great goodness and great merit through the utterance of the Prayer, and the bestowal [by Amida] the evil Karma and [effect of the] passions accumulated through the long Kalpas, since when there was no beginning, are in a moment annihilated, and in consequence, those passions and evil Karma of ours all disappearing, we live already in the condition of the steadfast, who do not return [to revolve in the cycle of Birth and Death]."—Rennyō of the Shin sect, 1473.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."—John.
"The Father of lights, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."—James.