Tag Archives: Shinran

Faith and contemplation

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We still seek wholeness. It is intrinsic to human identity that, however much we have achieved, we are never satisfied. We hunger and thirst for what lies beyond our grasp and even beyond the horizon of our desire. Religion and spirituality, which are less easy to divorce than we thought – are the elements of culture that deal with this desire beyond desire. Where are they taking us? Where do we have to redefine the old terms by which we try to understand ourselves in this longing for wholeness? …

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, pp.3,9

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

There’s a kind of hunger that draws one in, further and further. It’s not that present practice is wrong, or inadequate; but that there’s always more, literally infinitely more, and the heart cannot rest – it has to go on, further in and further up. This is, to put it in rather technical words, part of the phenomenology of contemplation – first person experience, in everyday words.

One of the great pitfalls of the spiritual life is to refuse to see, or understand, what is given to us in first person experience, because it does not fit what we have been taught, or have come to believe. Perhaps this is why contemplatives and the contemplative way seem so often deeply threatening to both religious authorities and secular presumptions, and why they so often provoke resistance and even oppression. (One has only to read the biography of St John of the Cross, of Gutoku Shinran, or even of Eihei Dōgen, to see what I mean.)

Faith, in one sense at least, is just this “unreserved opening of the mind” to contemplative experience, and the acceptance of its implications for one’s life, however difficult or unlikely they may seem.

The Sufi scholar Oludamini Ogunnaike, speaking in an interview:

There’s a famous Ḥadīth that says, “God is beautiful and that he loves beauty.” Here beauty is not just a distraction or temptation, but instead a reflection of the Divine, it is the Divine.

But this can mess you up.

The analogy that one of my teachers uses is birds flying into windows. The world is like that, a fun house of mirrors. You see the beautiful face of the Divine reflected everywhere, but if you just run toward it at full tilt, you’re going to keep smacking into it. You’re not going to get to kiss your beloved. So you have to learn to navigate the world of reflections of Divine Beauty. The sweetness we taste in sugar is a reflection or manifestation of Divine Sweetness, but if we just eat sugar all day, we’re going to get very sick. So it’s a process of recognizing and understanding the manifestations of the Real in every phenomenon and treating each with the proper adab or courtesy it demands. You can see God in a crouching tiger, but it’s still usually good adab or manners to give it a wide berth.

Contemplation seems to require patience, and stillness. I know from my own past life the danger of running to kiss reflections! But still the hunger, and the excitement, call us on. To sit still, in silence, in faith, when the tides of yearning are at flood, is perhaps the hardest and most necessary thing we shall have to do.

All by itself

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The way gives them life; Virtue rears them; Things give them shape; Circumstances bring them to maturity. Therefore the myriad creatures all revere the way and honour virtue. Yet the way is revered and virtue honoured not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (51)

This passage, among others, has given rise to the Taoist concept of ziran, “just-so-ness” (Suzuki). The way goes on; to be truly human is to walk in the way, to “accord with the Tao”: “Therefore there is such a thing as aligning one’s actions with the Tao. If you accord with the Tao you become one with it.” (Tao Te Ching tr. Muller).

It is so simple, but how can it be done? Like Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teaching on choiceless awareness, it can be frustrating to read words like this, with little or no indication of a practice. (There isn’t one in either Krishnamurti or in the Tao Te Ching.) I have often written of shikantaza, the Sōtō Zen practice of “just sitting”, in its simplicity and quiet; but I have also found myself drawing parallels with the Eastern Orthodox practice of hesychasm, and with the Pure Land practice of the Nembutsu. Both of these can of course be seen as a variety of prayer, and many of their practitioners would argue strongly that this is so. But the repetition of a short phrase, either the Jesus Prayer or the Nembutsu, has a quality of practice that is not quite expressed either by the word “prayer” or the word “mantra”, as I understand it.

Let me try and explain. The Nembutsu in particular, often transliterated “Namo Amida Bu”, is usually translated, “I take refuge in Amitābha Buddha”. Amitābha is a compound of the Sanskrit words amita (“without bound, infinite”) and ābhā (“light, splendour”). The recitation of the Nembutsu is seen, in Jōdo Shinshū, as the practitioner’s response to tariki (“other power”) – the power of Amitābha, sometimes expressed as simply “the way things are”. The practitioner does not cause anything by their practice, nor do they plead for anything to be done for them: they merely acknowledge its having been done. They “accord with the way”. As Shinran, the founder of Jōdo Shinshū, wrote:

For myself, I do not have even a single disciple. For if I brought people to say the nembutsu through my own efforts, then they might be my disciples. But it is indeed preposterous to call persons “my disciples” when they say the nembutsu having received the working of Amida.

The beauty, it seems to me, of practices such as hesychasm and Nembutsu is their extreme simplicity, coupled with their explicit renunciation of any sense that it is the practitioner’s hard work that is at stake in the process of awakening.

(It’s important, too, to recognise that, despite all our acceptance of the way, of “other power”, this is not a way of passivity – an accusation often levelled at Christian Quietists from the C12 Beguines right through to William Pollard and Francis Frith among C19 Quakers! To walk in the way may at times be active indeed; the point being to walk in accordance with the way, not to cease walking altogether!)

It seems to me that any practice, like its practitioner, needs simply to disappear in contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. Enter a practice of total simplicity and poverty of intent, such as either the shikantaza, “just sitting”, or the Nembutsu – the total “hands-off” (shinjin) entrusting of oneself to the way.