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.
CHAPTER IX - THE BUDDHISM OF THE JAPANESE
The Western Paradise.
We cannot take space to show how, or how much, or whether at all, Buddhism was affected by Christianity, though it probably was. Suffice it to say that the Jō-dō Shu, or Sect of the Pure Land, was the first of the many denominations in Buddhism which definitely and clearly set forth that especial peculiarity of Northern Buddhism, the Western Paradise. The school of thought which issued in Jō-dō Shu was founded by the Hindoo, Memio. In A.D. 252 an Indian scholar, learned in the Tripitaka, came to China, and translated one of the great sutras, called Amitayus. This sutra gives a history of Tathagata Amitabha,[1] from the first spiritual impulses which led him to the attainment of Buddha-hood in remote Kalpas down to the present time, when he dwells in the Western World, called the Happy, where he receives all living beings from every direction, helping them to turn away from confusion and to become enlightened.[2] The apocalyptic twentieth chapter of the Hokké Kiō is a glorification of the transcendent power of the Tathagatas, expressed in flamboyant oriental rhetoric.
We have before called attention to the fact that, with the multiplication of sutras or the Sacred Canon and the vast increase of the apparatus of Buddhism as well as of the hardships of brain and body to be undergone in order to be a Buddhist, it was absolutely necessary that some labor-saving system should be devised by which the burden could be borne. Now, as a matter of fact, all sects claim to found their doctrine on Buddha or his work. According to the teaching of certain sects, the means of salvation are to be found in the study of the whole canon, and in the practice of asceticism and meditation. On the contrary, the new lights of Buddhism who came as missionaries into China, protested against this expenditure of so much mental and physical energy. One of the first Chinese propagators of the Jō-dō doctrine declared that it was impossible, owing to the decay of religion in his own age, for anyone to be saved in this way by his own efforts. Hence, instead of the noble eight-fold path of primitive Buddhism, or of the complicated system of the later Buddhistic Phariseeism of India, he substituted for the difficult road to Nirvana, a simple faith in the all-saving power of Amida. In one of the sutras it is taught, that if a man keeps in his memory the name of Amida one day, or seven days, the Buddha together with Buddhas elect, will meet him at the moment of his death, in order to let him be born in the Pure Land, and that this matter has been equally approved by all other Buddhas of ten different directions.
One of the sutras, translated in China during the fifth century, contains the teaching of Buddha, which he delivered to the wife of the King of Magudha, who on account of the wickedness of her son was feeling weary of this world. He showed her how she might be born into the Pure Land. Three paths of good actions were pointed out. Toward the end of the particular sutra which he advised her to read and recite, Buddha says: "Let not one's voice cease, but ten times complete the thought, and repeat the formula, of the adoration of Amida." "This practice," adds the Japanese exegete and historian, "is the most excellent of all."
How well this latter teaching is practised may be demonstrated when one goes into a Buddhist temple of the Jō-dō sect in Japan, and hears the constant refrain,—murmured by the score or more of listeners to the sermon, or swelling like the roar of the ocean's waves, on festival days, when thousands sit on the mats beneath the fretted roof to enjoy the exposition of doctrine—"Namu Amida Butsu"—"Glory to the Eternal Buddha!"[3]
The apostolical succession or transmission through the patriarchs and apostles of India and China, is well known and clearly stated, withal duly accredited and embellished with signs and wonders, in the historical literature of the Jō-dō sect. In Buddhism, as in Christianity, the questions relating to True Churchism, High Churchism, the succession of the apostles, teachers and rulers, and the validity of this or that method of ordination, form a large part of the literature of controversy. Nevertheless, as in the case of many a Christian sect which calls itself the only true church, the date of the organization of Jō-dō was centuries later than that of the Founder and apostles of the original faith. Five hundred years after Zen-dō (A.D. 600-650), the great propagator of the Jō-dō philosophy, Hō-nen, the founder of the Jō-dō sect, was born; and this phase of organized Buddhism, like that of Shin Shu and Nichirer Shu, may be classed under the head of Eastern or Japanese Buddhism.