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Finger, Text, and Moon: Dennis Hirota and Iwasaki Tsuneo

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Finger, Text, and Moon: Dennis Hirota and Iwasaki Tsuneo Open Theology 2018; 4: 342–354 Phenomenology of Religious Experience II: Perspectives in Theology Gordon Bermant* Finger, Text, and Moon: Dennis Hirota and Iwasaki Tsuneo https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2018-0026 Received June 13, 2018; accepted August 1, 2018 Abstract: Dennis Hirota is a modern master of Shin Buddhism who for several decades has explicated the role of natural language in fostering Buddhist awakening. At the core of his oeuvre is the claim that Shin Buddhism’s founder, Shinran Shonin (1173-1263), accepted the earlier Mahayana teaching of non- dual awareness as a necessary condition for awakening. Shinran’s unique contribution was to insist that ordinary persons were, as a matter of historical circumstance, incapable of the disciplines required to arrive at non-dual awareness. It was just this circumstance that the historical Buddha foresaw when he taught the Larger Pure Land Sutra, in which the mind of the Buddha Amida, perfect wisdom and compassion, became available to ordinary people who call his Name in joyful sincerity. This is a difficult teaching of “non-practice” that embraces many subtleties. As a heuristic to ease the way into Shinran as Hirota presents him, this paper introduces a painting by the modern Japanese scientist and artist, Iwasaki Tsuneo. This is not a “Shin painting,” but certainly a “Mahayana painting” that connects the aspiration of an ordinary person to ultimate truth through the text of the Heart Sutra, arguably the quintessential Buddhist teaching of non-dual awareness. Keywords: Hirota, Iwasaki, Shin Buddhism, nembutsu, shinjin, hermeneutics, Self-power, Other-power, Mahayana, non-dual awareness 1 Prelude Hanging on a wall in my home is a print of a calligraphic painting by the Japanese scientist and artist Iwasaki Tsuneo (1917-2002). It is a skinny print, over three feet tall and just seven inches wide (see Figure 1). Close to the bottom a man stands in a small boat, his arm stretched straight up, his hand pointing with a single finger. Close to the top rests the moon, partially dusted by cloud. In a single line straight between the man’s finger and the moon are the Chinese characters of the Heart Sutra, exquisitely drawn and precisely placed.1 I often pause to gaze at this print as I pass by it. I find it to be soaked in reference and emotional sense; it invites interrogation. What more is there to say about the finger, the text, and the moon?2 1 The text comprises 275 kanji, including the sutra’s title. According to one authority, the shortest known length of the sutra is 268 kanji. Yifa, Prajnaparamita, 2. 2 Arai, Seeing the Wisdom. Professor Paula Arai of Louisiana State University is the leading scholar on the religious artistry of Iwasaki. She notes that Iwasaki titled this painting Moonbeam (personal communication, May 29, 2018). There appears to be a long history of using the Heart Sutra’s characters in depictions of objects. For example, Yifa, Prajnaparamita, 8, report that the characters were inscribed in the shape of a pagoda on a 9th century scroll discovered in the Moago caves of Dunhuang, China, in 1900. *Corresponding author: Gordon Bermant, University of Pennsylvania, United States of America; E-mail:[email protected] Open Access. © 2018 Gordon Bermant, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. Finger, Text, and Moon: Dennis Hirota and Iwasaki Tsuneo 343 Figure 1. Moonbeam, by Iwasaki Tsueno (courtesy of Professor Paula Arai) 344 G. Bermant To begin more or less at the beginning, there is the instruction that Śākyamuni Buddha gave to his cousin and attendant Ānanda in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra: The Buddha said to Ānanda, “You and others like you still listen to the Dharma with conditioned minds, and therefore you fail to understand its real nature. Consider this example: suppose someone is pointing to the moon to show it to another person. That other person, guided by the pointing finger, should now look at the moon. But if he looks instead at the finger, taking it to be the moon, not only does he fail to see the moon, but he is mistaken, too, about the finger. He has confused the finger, with which someone is pointing to the moon, with the moon, which is being pointed to.3 The Buddha’s message to Ānanda is clear: don’t confuse the guidance with the truth to which the guidance points. They are related to each other in an important way, but they are not the same thing. Returning to Iwasaki’s painting, what are we to make of what he did by placing text of the Heart Sutra between finger and moon? This question unpacks into three other questions, and it is these questions that will organize the exposition that follows. – What is “the text itself?” – What is the religious significance of the text? – What principles should guide the acceptance of the text? I am particularly grateful for the work of Iwasaki because it provided me a moment of clarity about an essential feature of an important corpus of scholarship by a modern master of Shin Buddhism, Dennis Hirota.4 Hirota has devoted his career to studying the role of language in the process of religious awakening within the Jodo Shinshu (Shin Buddhist) tradition, as spoken and written by the founder, Shinran Shonin (1173-1263). Hirota’s attention to questions of religious language in Shin Buddhism, as translator, commentator, and Buddhist teacher, extend back more than thirty-five years5, with a steady focus on both the illuminations and obscurities of religious communication. By concentrating on Hirota, I continue my expression of appreciation for modern Shin masters and hope that readers unfamiliar with their work will be encouraged to learn more about it.6 2 What is “the text itself?” Our concern here is with Hirota’s interpretation of Shinran’s texts and oral record. It will become clear that the distinction between Shinran’s extensive written corpus and his oral teaching, as transcribed by a faithful follower, is an important dimension of Hirota’s Shin Buddhist hermeneutics. One of the difficulties of comprehending Shinran’s own religious awakening, at least when his texts are translated into English, is the lack of a single word or brief phrase that sufficiently transmits the significance of shinjin, which in Japanese comprises two polysemous kanji characters.7 In an early publication, Hirota and Yoshifumi Ueda expressed the problem as follows: The word shinjin...is a basic, widely used Buddhist term and has often been translated “faith.” For Shinran, however, the term signifies the central religious awakening or experience in the Pure Land path, and his entire teaching revolves around the clarification of its nature and significance. In order to alert the reader to the uniqueness of Shinran’s use of this term and its importance in his thought, we have generally used the transliteration “shinjin,” though at times we also translate it “entrusting.”8 3 Śūraṅgama Sūtra, 54. The metaphor of finger pointing to the moon is also recognized in the Upanishads, and became a book title by a modern exponent of that tradition. Osho, Finger Pointing. 4 Professor Emeritus, Ryukoku University, Kyoto. I cannot claim to have read everything Hirota has written on this topic, for I have been surprised more than once to find a reference by him to an earlier article or chapter of his that I had not yet uncovered. 5 For example, Hirota, Tannishō. 6 Bermant, Seeing What Is There; Already but Not Yet; Subjectivity in Shin Buddhism. 7 See http://www.romajidesu.com/kanji/信 and http://www.romajidesu.com/dictionary/meaning-of-Shinjin.html 8 Ueda & Hirota, Shinran, 146. Finger, Text, and Moon: Dennis Hirota and Iwasaki Tsuneo 345 Among his accomplishments, Hirota served as Head Translator of the Collected Works of Shinran, published in two volumes in 1997.9 Volume I contains Shinran’s written works (658 pages) and brief but significant contemporaneous documents including the Tannishō, a famous account of Shinran’s oral teaching published after his death (40 pages). Volume II contains introductions, glossaries, and reading aides for Volume I prepared by Hirota and his colleagues. These materials are substantive and detailed, including a glossary of Shin Buddhist terms. The glossary offers a brief but pithy essay defining shinjin. We find in this essay the major topics that Hirota has addressed repeatedly in the decades since Collected Works of Shinran was published. Excerpts from the essay version are a good introduction to our theme. [Shinjin is] one’s entrusting to Amida’s Primal Vow, which is at the same time the negation of calculative thinking, brought about by Amida’s working…[It] literally means man’s “true, real, and sincere heart and mind” (makoto no kokoro) which is given by Amida. This heart-mind has basically two aspects: a non-dichotomous identity wherein the heart and mind of Amida and the heart and mind of the practicer are one, and a dichotomous relationship wherein the two are mutually exclusive and in dynamic interaction…. [Shinjin] is a oneness of that which is true and real with its exact opposite….In religious terms, the oneness of shinjin expresses the working of great compassion (Buddha’s wisdom) taking persons of evil (foolish beings possessed of blind passions) into itself, never to abandon them…. Shinran’s teaching, then, is not one of salvation through “faith,” for shinjin is not a means to salvation but salvation itself.10 Shinjin, then, is a transformative awareness of the wisdom and compassion of the world, and a movement to embody and express them.
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