The Sin of Slandering the Dharma by Jacqueline Stone

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rory
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Re: The Sin of Slandering the Dharma by Jacqueline Stone

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shomon808 wrote:Hi everyone, this is a wonderful discussion which is very stimulating.

Prior to Kamakura Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism was primarily State Buddhism and both Saicho and Kukai appealed to the government and propagated amongst the elite, much as the Catholic Church did to Kings and Queens prior to the Reformation. The Amida line of priests such as Ippen and Honen opened a popular Buddhism where the common person could participate in religion. .
This old trope "Old Kamakura" elites vs "Reformation Buddhism" has pretty much been demolished by research beginning with Jaqueline Stone and many other scholars. It's better to understand that there were no sects per se but locuses of practice: temple complexes and as shown in books about Myoe and Jokei they cared about women and non elites.

gassho
Rory
ps are you Pia, Shomon 808?
Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu
Chih-I:
The Tai-ching states "the women in the realms of Mara, Sakra and Brahma all neither abandoned ( their old) bodies nor received (new) bodies. They all received buddhahood with their current bodies (genshin)" Thus these verses state that the dharma nature is like a great ocean. No right or wrong is preached (within it) Ordinary people and sages are equal, without superiority or inferiority
Paul, Groner "The Lotus Sutra in Japanese Culture"eds. Tanabe p. 58
https://www.tendai-usa.org/
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Queequeg
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Re: The Sin of Slandering the Dharma by Jacqueline Stone

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shomon808 wrote:But, I believe that Honen and his predecessors paved the way for popular Buddhism in the Kamakura period to flourish.
I believe Nichiren would have agreed with this. While on one hand he abhorred the interpretation of Pure Land teachings that all but precluded the possibility of efficacious Buddhist practice in this world, in this life, he remarks somewhere - maybe Rissho Ankoku Ron? that the spread of the Nembutsu prepared the way for the spread of the Daimoku.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
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Queequeg
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Re: The Sin of Slandering the Dharma by Jacqueline Stone

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rory wrote:
This old trope "Old Kamakura" elites vs "Reformation Buddhism" has pretty much been demolished by research beginning with Jaqueline Stone and many other scholars. It's better to understand that there were no sects per se but locuses of practice: temple complexes and as shown in books about Myoe and Jokei they cared about women and non elites.
I think that overstates the case. Give it another 25 years and the hot topics at AAS will be, "Rethinking the rethinking of Kamakura Buddhism".
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
shomon808
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Re: The Sin of Slandering the Dharma by Jacqueline Stone

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not to overgeneralize, but I think prior to Kamakura, Buddhism as religion was something the rulers and the elite used for the benefit of the country and the people were benefited by the peace, prosperity, and stability of the country. For the masses, Kukai's "good works" helped them by the building of dams and reservoirs, etc., but not teaching them religious salvation per se.
But as the time evolves, Nichiren and Shinran actually engaged Buddhism with the people as a religion. Now, a regular samurai or a merchant or a farmer could affect his salvation by chanting himself or herself, with or without a monk, regardless of training in a monastery. Really, a remarkable period in Japanese religious history. As exciting as Meiji Taisho and Showa were with the birth of new religions, it was just the modern extension of empowering the individuals with their own paths to salvation, made fertile by the "freedoms" of modernization.
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rory
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Re: The Sin of Slandering the Dharma by Jacqueline Stone

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Could we have something a little more substantial in this discusssion, like scholarly support? The Lounge is for sitting around the cracker barrel and opining.

Katsuro Hara in 1911 posited the 'Kamakura Reformation' which most are familiar with today and in the 1970's the scholar Toshio Kuroda did ground-breaking work with his theories of kenmon taisei power blocs: nobles, warrior-aristocrats, temple-shrine complexes and made much of exoteric-esoteric system (kenmitsu taisei (Ford, p. 5-6) then after him we have Jaqueline Stone in the 1990's and more, excellent works such as James Ford's Jokei and Buddhist Devotion in Early Medieval Japan Myoe the Dreamkeeper and tons more.

Ford in a review of Honen (as Jokei wrote a famous critique) points out that Honen made 'an absolute and preemptive claim of salvation, unprecedented within Buddhism ....Moreover, once the precedent for such an exclusive claim was introduced, a new paradigm of discourse arose. Thus Shinran and Nichiren follow with their own exclusive claims of salvation." Ford, p. 168

He also quotes Takatoshi Hirokawa out that Honen's '..convictions arrived at through personal religious experience.' p. 167 meaning he used a hermenutical approach of the time kanjin shaku interpreting a scripture via your own experience.

So I would say that Honen was a profoundly radical figure and he had a huge effect on others, which is why Nichiren said as much...

gassho
Rory
ps if you read about Jokei and Myoe you wrotel find out that wrote and prepared and disseminated devotional material. The reason we mostly never hear of them is that Hosso and Kegon are tiny schools whilst the Jodo Shinshu sect and Nichiren Buddhists are the most populous.
Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu
Chih-I:
The Tai-ching states "the women in the realms of Mara, Sakra and Brahma all neither abandoned ( their old) bodies nor received (new) bodies. They all received buddhahood with their current bodies (genshin)" Thus these verses state that the dharma nature is like a great ocean. No right or wrong is preached (within it) Ordinary people and sages are equal, without superiority or inferiority
Paul, Groner "The Lotus Sutra in Japanese Culture"eds. Tanabe p. 58
https://www.tendai-usa.org/
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Queequeg
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Re: The Sin of Slandering the Dharma by Jacqueline Stone

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Scholarly support for what? That some scholar's label Kamakura Buddhism is argued to be problematic by other scholars? In a generation scholars who are running around in diapers now will make their career overturning the scholarship of the previous generation. That's the way it goes.

Labels make it easy to discuss big topics.
"The Buddha draws distinctions..."
Saying they're absolutely true is of course a mistake. Declaring they're "demolished" is not a scholarly statement. Hence my bemused comment about the AAS conference circa 2040.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
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rory
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Re: The Sin of Slandering the Dharma by Jacqueline Stone

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If you don't wish to keep up with ongoing scholarship that is your choice. For others, the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies has an issue on the Lotus Sutra. It's issue 41.1 (2014)
http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/publications/jjrs/
gassho
Rory
Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu
Chih-I:
The Tai-ching states "the women in the realms of Mara, Sakra and Brahma all neither abandoned ( their old) bodies nor received (new) bodies. They all received buddhahood with their current bodies (genshin)" Thus these verses state that the dharma nature is like a great ocean. No right or wrong is preached (within it) Ordinary people and sages are equal, without superiority or inferiority
Paul, Groner "The Lotus Sutra in Japanese Culture"eds. Tanabe p. 58
https://www.tendai-usa.org/
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