PURE LAND, REAL WORLD: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination | By Melissa Anne-Marie Curley | Pacific Affairs

PURE LAND, REAL WORLD: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination | By Melissa Anne-Marie Curley | Pacific Affairs



BOOK REVIEWS, NORTHEAST ASIA


VOLUME 92 – NO. 1




PURE LAND, REAL WORLD: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination | By Melissa Anne-Marie Curley


Pure Land Buddhist Studies. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. xi, 241 pp. US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5775-2.

With her analysis of the role of Pure Land thought in the work of three prominent twentieth-century Japanese leftists, Melissa Anne-Marie Curley provides us with a rich, insightful, and provocative book detailing the ongoing salience of Buddhist ideas for Japanese intellectuals. First and foremost the book is an examination of how Kawakami Hajime, Miki Kiyoshi, and Ienaga Saburō tapped the rich tradition of Pure Land thought, particularly Shinran and Jōdo Shinshū’s version of it, in formulating their alternative visions for Japanese society that could escape the grip of the state during the dark valley and post-war years of the twentieth century. At the same time, Curley manages to accomplish much more. Her introductory chapters are an insightful overview of Shin Buddhist history that interprets the tradition as a reservoir of utopian vision: “things could be different, things could be better” (2).

One of Curley’s key arguments is that the understanding of the Pure Land as a transcendent heaven off in the distant West is a distinctively modern one. In her deft, cogent survey of key figures in Jōdo Shin history, Curley shows that the understanding of the relationship between our Sahā world and the Pure Land was far more complex for many pre-modern Shin practitioners from Shinran to Rennyo. Incorporating ideas from a range of modern theorists, including Gayatri Spivak and Theodor Adorno, Curley argues that for Hōnen, Shinran, and Rennyo, the Pure Land was not exclusively transcendent or solely immanent. Instead, pre-modern Shin luminaries understood that “within this world, there come to be multiple sites in which Amida’s Western Paradise is established, sometimes entirely and sometimes partially, sometimes permanently and sometimes contingently” (18). In this way, borrowing from Spivak’s reading of Hinduism, Curley sees the pre-modern Shin understanding of the nature of our world as one that “at any moment might be cathected by the transcendent divine” (18). The Pure Land, for pre-modern Buddhists, was an alternative space isomorphic and intertwined with the profane world, one that provided a refuge from suffering. It is only with the intellectual rupture that occurred at the start of the modern era in Japan, which Curley pinpoints at the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868, that Shin thinkers and others see the Pure Land as exclusively transcendent and apart from this world. As Buddhism becomes a matter of belief rather than practice, the “religious” becomes a private, internal concern about an “absolutely transcendent” realm apart from this world (49). In this survey of Shin doctrinal thought, Curley provides a series of evocative readings of such important figures as Rennyo, Kakunyo, and Kiyozawa Manshi, Soga Ryōjin, and Kaneko Daiei, in each case providing novel insights into their interpretations of Shin practice.

Following Karatani Kōjin and Isomae Jun’ichi, Curley views the start of the Meiji era as the point of rupture between pre-modern and modern Japanese thought. With the end of Tokugawa rule and the rise of the imperial nation-state, according to Curley the Japanese discovered “interiority” and the “buffered self” through which the individual disengages completely from the world in inner isolation. Curley consequently rereads Rennyo’s command to “affix the Buddhist law to your foreheads (hitai) and maintain the Buddhist law deep within (naishin)” (39), interpreting the operative terms hitai and naishin to refer to the interior and exterior of the Honganji community. Although such scholars as Kuroda Toshio have interpreted this as an indication that Rennyo considered religion to be an inner concern, Curley dismisses this analysis as an anachronistically modern understanding of pre-modern Shin spirituality. Rennyo’s language in the letters cited by Curley and some others, in which he refers to believing deeply in the Buddhist law internally (41) or in the letter, Shukke hosshin (Letter I–2), in which he distinguishes between outward appearance and deep realization of entrusting heart do seem to indicate the sort of interiority that supposedly did not come into existence until the Meiji era. Rather than finding ways to read Rennyo in conformity with Karatani and Isomae, perhaps we should see this as evidence that these theorists are mistaken about the lack of interiority in pre-Meiji Japanese religiosity?

Against the backdrop of the modern understanding of the religious as private and belief-centred, Kawakami, Miki, and Ienaga, like many of the Kyoto School philosophers, were free to draw upon Pure Land Buddhism as a font of ideas for alternate visions to the totalitarian state. As twentieth-century Shin practitioners came to view the Pure Land as absolutely transcendent, Kawakami, Miki, and Ienaga, while interpreting the Pure Land tradition through a Marxist lens, found within the tradition variously a means to preserve their self-autonomy in an internal Pure Land outside the grasp of a coercive state (Kawakami), the inspiration for the construction of an utopian, organic community of equality and comradeship (Miki), or as a model of complete world-negation that sustains criticism of the state and hope for the future (Ienaga). Curley, examining these figures in three separate chapters, demonstrates that far from being irrelevant to twentieth-century Japanese intellectual history, Buddhism, particularly the Jōdo Shin tradition, served as a rich source of utopian and critical ideas even for secular intellectuals in twentieth-century Japan.

Curley has done a superb job placing Kawakami, Miki, and Ienaga within the broad sweep of the Jōdo Shin tradition. She manages to write in several registers at once, adroitly integrating what at times is an insightful survey history, a critical intellectual analysis of three important twentieth-century Marxists, and a constructive philosophical contribution to Jōdo Shin thought. In the third vein, Curley calls upon us to think through Jōdo Shin ideas and practices in order to create a world envisioned from “the periphery.” Such a world, Curley writes optimistically, can become one of “perfect solidarity” that ameliorates the ills of the increasingly atomized, disconnected social existence of the twenty-first century. Curley’s ability to integrate these three dimensions make this book essential reading for scholars of Japanese Buddhism, intellectual historians of Japan, students of post-modern criticism, and practitioners alike.

Richard Jaffe

Duke University, Durham, USA

Last Revised: May 31, 2019