“Know that we are not good persons”: Pure Land Buddhism and the ethics of exile. Melissa Anne-Marie Curley Faculty of Religious Studies McGill University, Montreal June, 2009 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy © Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, 2009 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the notion of the Pure Land (Jōdo 浄土) as an immanent utopia in both classical Buddhist sources and modern Japanese thought. The first half of the dissertation presents the argument that the idea of a Pure Land existing in this world was in wide circulation before the modern period, and that the orthodoxy of a strictly- transcendent Pure Land is a modern invention. The second half of the dissertation explores how modern thinkers respond to this orthodoxy by once again positing an immanent Pure Land. It focuses particularly on how notions introduced by the modern Buddhist thinkers Kiyozawa Manshi and Soga Ryōjin are taken up and interpreted by the Kyoto School philosophers Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Hajime. It concludes that the ethical and political significance of the modern Pure Land lies in its identification of the utopian space of the Pure Land with the space of exile or homelessness. RÉSUMÉ La présente thèse examine la notion de terre pure (Jōdo 浄土) vue en tant qu’utopie dans le bouddhisme classique ainsi que dans la pensée japonaise moderne. La première partie défend la thèse selon laquelle l’idée d’une terre pure existant dans ce monde était commune avant la période moderne, et que la notion selon laquelle seule une terre pure conçue comme étant strictement transcendante est orthodoxe est une invention moderne. La seconde partie de la thèse décrit la façon dont les penseurs modernes répondent à cette nouvelle orthodoxie en avançant de nouveau une terre pure immanente, et se penche en particulier sur la façon dont des notions introduites par les penseurs bouddhistes modernes Kiyozawa Manshi et Soga Ryōjin sont reprises et interprétées par les philosophes de l’école de Kyoto Miki Kiyoshi et Tanabe Hajime. La thèse conclut que l’importance éthique et politique de la terre pure moderne repose sur le fait qu’elle identifie l’espace utopique de la terre pure avec l’espace d’exil ou d’absence de demeure. 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I received generous support in the research and writing of this dissertation from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, in the form of both a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and a McGill Internal SSHRC Grant, from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, and from the Faculty of Religious Studies of McGill University, which provided an unexpected and deeply appreciated Dean’s Fellowship in the final year of my program. In the early stages of my research, I was able to spend a semester at Ōtani University as a fellow. This would have been impossible without the assistance of Yasutomi Shin’ya and Robert F. Rhodes; I am extremely grateful to both of them. I also thank Sasaki Ayako and the staff at Nichibunken for all their help, and Iwamoto Akemi and Mizuno Ayumi for their kindness. Among my many amazing colleagues at McGill, I would like particularly to thank Lara Braitstein, Davesh Soneji, and Katherine K. Young for all their kindness and good advice. My first trip to Japan was taken in the company of the wonderful Cindy Bentley and Jessica Main. I cannot express how lucky I feel to have had the opportunity to argue with them over the years. I am likewise very thankful to have had Rong Dao as the fourth member of our cohort, and am saddened at the prospect of abandoning her and the other members of the CCBTTS, Chris Byrne and Lin Fan. Thanks also to Nishitani-lovers Alnis Dickson, Julian Menezes, and Katherine Narraway; Shahin Parhami and Catherine Lejtenyi, the most glamorous people I know personally; Philippe Turenne for giving me perhaps the most valuable single piece of advice I received during my time as a graduate student (and also for translating my abstract); Varant Original Gu Arslanian; my much- adored Erin Reid; and my role model for humany humanness Meera Kachroo. While at McGill, I twice had the opportunity to teach our upper-level seminar on Pure Land Buddhism. I am deeply grateful to all of the students who studied Pure Land with me for working so hard and for teaching me so much. Along with Erin, Katherine, and Rong Dao then, I thank Ian Bacher, Michael Braff, Christopher Cairns, Dinaz Colabewala, Naomi Collins, Jennifer Elward, Gwen Fisher, Trevor Fraser, Daniel Gelfer, 3 Sasha Iliouchine, Emily Kathan, Conor Lavelle, Evan Montpellier, Jodie Shyptika, Michael Urquhart, Sophia Warshall, Elena Young; Alex Beveridge, Stephanie Butcher, Sylvia Chomko, Diya Chopra, Sean Cronin, Akané D’Orangeville, Melissa da Silva, Conrad Eng, David Ewing, Brad Goldberg, Wesley Hardy-Johnson, Shannon Lawrence, Megan Lee, Ella Marcantonio, Samantha Michael, Anna Michalcevova, Avra Morein, Robert Noble, Nicholas Pang, Lauren Pochereva, Alexandra Prince, Madison Robins, Kelly Schuster, Kate Somerville, Jessica Tatlow, Tara Viglione, Devon Welsh, Davis Wood, and Aleana Young. I am filled with shame (feels like gratitude). In the early months of work on this dissertation, I had the opportunity to present some of my research on Miki as part of the Kyoto School Seminar, hosted at McGill and sponsored by the Numata Foundation. There I received a number of extremely helpful suggestions; I would like especially to thank John Maraldo and David Dilworth for their comments, and Mark Blum for his thoughts on a longer version of my conference paper. In the final months of work on this dissertation, I had the good fortune of participating in a graduate fellows’ workshop hosted by the Religion in the Public Sphere project at the University of Toronto, where I received exceptionally valuable feedback from Ken Kawashima, and was inspired by the insights shared by my fellow fellows, as well as by Ruth Marshall, Juhn Ahn, and Pamela Klassen. Thanks to Professor Klassen and Kendra Hawke for orchestrating this exciting meeting. It seems to me now that every single opportunity I have taken advantage of as I progressed toward the completion of this dissertation has been made possible, in ways big or small, by one person: Victor Hori, who remains the finest thinker and finest teacher I have ever known. I took my first class with Professor Hori when I was twenty years old. That means that he has now spent close to fifteen years making endless efforts on my behalf. The debt I owe to him is incalculable. Finally I thank my mother, Anne Jewell, and my father, Thomas Curley, who have been my staunchest supporters. Without their encouragement, patience, and bottomless love, I would never have started my graduate work and could never have completed it. I thank them with all my heart and promise that in the future I will have a comfortable guest room and a telephone. 4 NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND ROMANIZATION Translations of the Larger and Smaller sūtras are from Luis Gómez, as indicated. Translations of the material from the rest of the Shinshū Seiten are taken from the Ōtani translation series. Translations of Tanabe’s Zangedō toshite tetsugaku are from Takeuchi Yoshinori’s Philosophy as Metanoetics. Where an available and felicitous translation of other materials exists, I have tried to use it. Translations of Kiyozawa and Miki are for the most part my own. My translation of Miki Kiyoshi’s essay on Shinran in particular benefited tremendously from the input of Victor Sōgen Hori, and Iwamoto Akemi; whatever errors or infelicities remains are entirely my fault. Romanization has not been provided for Japanese phrases more than four characters long, except in the case of proper nouns, and in those instances where the expression is referred to more than once in the text. Romanization follows the revised Hepburn system, with the syllabic n (ん) always written as n, even before labial consonants (so nenbutsu rather than nembutsu). When quoting from authors using the traditional Hepburn system, I have taken the liberty of changing the romanization to revised Hepburn, except where such a change would make it difficult to locate the reference, as when the word in question appears in the title. Similarly, diacritical marks have been inserted even where they did not appear in the text being quoted, with the exception of those words that have entered the common English lexicon. Any errors on this score are again my responsibility. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER ONE: THE LAND IN PURE LAND ......................................................................... 25 The Polemics of Transcendence.................................................................................... 25 Spatial Imagination in the Pure Land Sūtras: The Pure Land as Heterotopia.............. 33 Social Imagination in the Pure Land Sūtras: The Pure Land as Counter-Order .......... 41 The Extremes of the Contemplation Sūtra .................................................................... 46 Spatial Imagination in Chinese Pure Land Thought: The Pure Land as Reward Land 54 Social Imagination in Chinese Pure Land Thought: The Pure Land as Heterochrony 58 Locating the Pure Land in Heian Japan ........................................................................ 63 Local Pure Lands and the Manipulation of History ...................................................... 73 CHAPTER TWO: IMAGINARY