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Open Theology 2018; 4: 342–354
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
1The 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.
2Arai, 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:gbermant@psych.upenn.edu
Phenomenology of Religious Experience II: Perspectives in Theology
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 Śūragama 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. 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 years, 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.
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. 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.”
3Śūragama 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.
4Professor 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.
5For example, Hirota, Tannishō.
6Bermant, Seeing What Is There; Already but Not Yet; Subjectivity in Shin Buddhism.
7See http://www.romajidesu.com/kanji/信 and http://www.romajidesu.com/dictionary/meaning-of-Shinjin.html
8Ueda & 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. 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.¹
Shinjin, then, is a transformative awareness of the wisdom and compassion of the world, and a
movement to embody and express them. This awareness, the “self,” never forgets the reality of its
karmic nature as a foolish being (“evil person”). Shinjin is a dynamic process that softens the hard
edges of “personality” over time, but it cannot eliminate the negative consequences of its nature as
an embodied, causal agent in the world. To the extent that simply being alive establishes a zero-sum
game with other beings and objects in the world, to that extent one lives at the expense of others and
the inanimate environment.
Over the decades of his scholarly career, Hirota has returned repeatedly to the explication of
shinjin’s dynamic nature from various vantage points. “The text itself” that Hirota explicates is very
large, (approximately 700 pages in English translation), of which more than ninety percent is Shinran’s
written work. But the remaining pages contain an enormously influential account of conversations
between Shinran and a faithful follower, Yuien (or Yuien-bo), which Yuien published after Shinran’s
death. Yuien was concerned that some of Shinran’s followers were expressing heresies, so his “lament
over divergences,” Tannishō, was an effort to correct these errors by quoting and expanding on his own
conversations with the late Master.
The impact of Tannishō on Shin Buddhist understanding has been profound,¹¹ and there are
numerous English translations and commentaries. Naturally, one would like to have confidence in
the authenticity of transmission across the seven centuries’ worth of complex linguistic and cultural
boundaries that separate Shinran from us today. The usual assumption would be that text from the
master’s own hand would have greater authority than text from the hand of a reporter “on the scene,”
unless something contextual at the time and place of the teaching enriched it in an important way. We
shall see in subsequent sections that, in Hirota’s judgment, there was something special about the
occasion of Shinran’s oral teaching that authenticated and enhanced its religious significance for us
today.
This is an important topic in any effort to understand the phenomenology of religious experience.
It inevitably moves one beyond “the text itself” to contextual messages that moderate our responses to
the text that is presented as the source of guidance, inspiration, and transformation. At the least, one
would like to be sure about key features of the reported narrative.
9Hirota et al, Collected Works of Shinran,
10Hirota et al, Collected Works II, 206-207.
11“Tannishō is indisputably one of the great religious classics of Japan. Among the many Buddhist works this country has
produced, there is none as well-known and widely read.” Hirota, Tannishō, 15.
346 G. Bermant
What follows below is a small example of the difficulty of becoming settled about the nature of
“the text itself.” It concerns Yuien’s Preface to the Tannishō. Hirota provides several versions of it.
One is from page 21 of Hirota’s Tannishō. It is copied in plain type in the paragraph below. A second
translation is from Collected Works of Shinran.¹² Almost all the changes from the earlier to the later
version are shown between angle brackets in bold type.
As I compare, within my foolish thoughts, the time when Shinran was alive with the present, I cannot help but
lament the departures from the true shinjin taught directly by the late master <that he conveyed by speaking to us
directly>, and I fear that those who seek the path hereafter will fall into doubts and confusion concerning it <and I
fear that there are doubts and confusion in the way followers receive and transmit the teaching>. How is ent-
rance into the great way <into the single gate> of easy practice possible except through reliance <unless we happily
come to rely> on a true teacher whom karmic bonds fortunately bring a person to encounter <whom conditions
bring us to encounter>? Let there be not the slightest distortion of the fundamental significance of Other Power <of
the teaching of Other Power> with words of an understanding based on one’s own views.
Here, then, I set down in small part words of the late master <the words spoken by the late Shinran Shonin> that
still speak deeply to me <that remain deep in my mind>, solely out of the desire to disperse the doubts of practicers
with whom I share the same aspiration <solely to disperse the doubts of fellow practicers.>
Are these changes important for understanding Hirota (as translator), on Yuien (as compiler), on
Shinran (as master), while moving from classical Japanese to modern English? I am unsure, but I think
they may be. To my eye and ear, the later translation is more direct and lively than the earlier one. And
the impact of “directness” is certainly important, as we will see in a subsequent section, because of
Hirota’s claim about a special contextual feature of Shinran in conversation.
Finally, Hirota also provided a third translation of Yuien’s Preface, of a different sort. In the Primer,
Hirota includes a section that presents the entire text a second time, with Japanese characters and
transliteration on left hand pages, and literal translations into English on the facing pages. The final
section of the Yuien’s Preface, beginning “Here then”, appears in the literal translation as follows:
I record a little of the import of what the late Master Shinran said that abides in the depth of my ears. [This] is solely
for the sake of dispersing the doubt of practicers of the same mind [as mine].¹³
Here the major shift is, of course, to “the import” of Shinran’s words from “the words themselves.” Does this
matter? It depends in part on the religious status of Shinran’s words as authoritative and hence not easily
paraphrased for their import.
As Hirota emphasized, this is the more general problem with moving shinjin into English. A distinction
between Shinran’s words and their import for Yuien may be noteworthy. Without belaboring the point, I will
quote here from another translation, this by the Japanese scholar Bando Shojun assisted by the Australian
Harold Stewart. They render the sentence as follows:
Therefore, I have recorded here the gist of what the late Shinran Shonin told me, while it still reverberates in my
ears.¹
The gist, of course, is not the words themselves.
The example of Yuien’s preface may be a minor one, even inconsequential, except that interpretations
of Tannishō have already been so consequential in the history of Shin Buddhism. Perhaps the prudent
conclusion is that, in this case, “the text itself” eludes us.
12Hirota et al, Collected Works, 661.
13Hirota, Tannisho, 51.
14Bando et al, Tannishō, 3.
Finger, Text, and Moon: Dennis Hirota and Iwasaki Tsuneo 347
3 “The text itself” of the Heart Sutra in Iwasaki’s painting, and
ongoing controversy
A picture is worth a thousand words
…photographs have nothing to do with words.¹
If a picture is worth a thousand words, does a painting of words increase their value? If photographs have
nothing to do with words, does a photograph of Iwasaki’s painting, or a print of it in a series of prints,
have anything to do with the meanings of the 275 kanji? As we will see, the relationships among speaking,
hearing, reading, and accepting are at the core of Shin Buddhist awakening in Hirota’s account, and a
necessary condition of that awakening is a deep appreciation (a “pre-awakening,” perhaps?), of a Mahayana
truth in the Heart Sutra’s message.
Iwasaki honored and celebrated the Heart Sutra in many different paintings that incorporated the
sutra’s kanji into numerous structural forms, from the cosmos to the stem of a plant as well as the connector
of characters between pointing finger and the moon. For him, the text seemed to instantiate the world.
Why this sutra in particular? There is wide agreement of scholars that it presents “the heart” (Hridaya in
Sanskrit) of Mahayana Buddhism in an especially elegant way. For example, the translator and commentator
Red Pine opens his detailed analysis of the sutra as if he also was gazing at Iwasaki’s painting:
The Heart Sutra is Buddhism in a nutshell. It covers more of the Buddha’s teachings in a shorter span than any other
teaching, and it does so without being superficial or commonplace…I would describe it as a work of art as much as religion.
And it is perhaps one more proof, if any were needed, that distinguishing between these two callings is both artificial and
unfortunate.¹
In the next section the sutra’s content is described in religious terms, in the effort to connect its teaching
with Hirota’s account of Shin Buddhist awakening. This is both interesting and important because Shin
Buddhism, as it has been developed in the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA) for more than a century,
has not included the Heart Sutra among its canonical scriptural sources¹. Nor did Shinran refer to the
sutra in his major scholarly and doctrinal work, Kyōgōhinshō¹. Nevertheless, as will become clear in the
next section, there are numerous pointers in Shinran’s texts to the Mahayana truth that the Heart Sutra
announces and that Iwasaki celebrates in his calligraphic paintings.
Iwasaki’s paintings were based on a deep connection to the semantics of the sutra’s Chinese characters
and the phonics of their Japanese pronunciations. Many translators and expositors of the sutra, have rendered
the characters into English text (or most of them—we return to what remains in original language in the next
section). Translations into English from Sanskrit or Chinese have been published for more than 150 years. ¹
After dozens of translations and commentaries over more than a century, one might think that a
consensus form of the sutra in English had been obtained. But disagreements among experts continue.
In 2014, the revered Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh published a new translation.² In a
letter to his followers he gives a detailed account of the need for the translation. Speaking of himself in the
third person, he begins very clearly: “Thay needs to make this new translation of the Heart Sutra because
the patriarch who originally compiled the Heart Sutra was not sufficiently skilled enough with his use of
language. This has resulted in much misunderstanding for almost 2,000 years.”²¹
15Alhadeff, “Moving Targets,” 26.
16Red Pine, Heart Sutra, 5.
17The Heart Sutra does not appear in the 1994 BCA service book nor in the much newer service book published by the [BCA]
Orange County Buddhist Church in 2013. It did appear in the service book of the Ekoji Buddhist Temple, Springfield, Virginia,
and was regularly chanted there between 1981-2002, during the tenure of the temple’s founding minister, Kenryu T. Tsuji. It is
no longer chanted there.
18Hirota et al., Collected Works I, 3-292.
19Beale, The Paramita-Hridaya Sutra.
20Thich Nhat Hanh, New Heart Sutra Translation.
21Ibid.
348 G. Bermant
We will return below to this new translation. It is enough for now to conclude that “the text itself” of
the Heart Sutra, being something more than marks on paper, remains elusive. Surely when Iwasaki painted
his many calligraphs of the sutra with exquisite care and devotion, he had something more in mind than
making ink marks on paper. It was from the entirety of the text in artistic context, informed by the heart and
mind of the painter, that the truth in it emerged.
That is the religious significance of the text. It is to that, in Hirota’s appreciation of Shinran’s corpus
and Iwasaki’s evocation of the Heart Sutra, that we turn now.
4 Hirota on Shinran: the religious significance of the Name and
the Vow
As a high-water mark of Pure Land Buddhism in Japan, Shinran’s exposition of “True Pure Land” relied on
earlier Mahayana teaching with emphases to which Shinran returned repeatedly²². It is worth remembering
that Shinran began as a temple monk in the Tendai tradition, living on Mount Hiei outside of Kyoto for
twenty years, beginning at age nine. During that time, he absorbed many Tendai doctrines and practices,
which included veneration of Amida Buddha.
After two decades on the mountain, he became restless and dissatisfied with his situation, so he
descended to the city and, during an extended solo retreat, experienced a transformation. He then joined
the followers of an older monk, Hōnen, who had preceded him down the mountain some years earlier.
Shinran became totally devoted to Hōnen and claimed repeatedly over his life that his own ministry was a
continuation of Honen’s.²³
At the center of Hōnen’s and Shinran’s Pure Land teaching is the nembutsu (also nenbutsu), a term with
several subtly distinct meanings. The meanings all surround the name Amida Buddha and announcing
of the name as Namu Amida Buddha (also Namu Amida Butsu). “It might be said that ‘Amida Buddha’ is
a name, but Namu-Amida-Butsu is the Name.”² “Namu” (also Namo) means that the speaker is taking
refuge, and taking refuge in “the Buddha” is among the oldest of all Buddhist practices—but the referent
has undergone a change. The Buddha of the nembutsu is Amida. But traditional understanding is that the
life, transformation, and saving power of Amida was revealed in a sutra spoken by the historical Buddha
Śākyamuni in the so-called Larger Pure Land Sutra. Today, we appreciate that this sutra is part of the early
Mahayana tradition, perhaps composed in the Gandhāra region in the first century CE.²
The importance of nembutsu for Shinran’s soteriology cannot be overstated. And there is an intimate
connection between nembtsu and shinjin. In one of his many letters to his followers Shinran wrote:
although the one moment of shinjin and the one moment of nembutsu are two, there is no nembutsu separate from shinjin,
nor is the one moment of shinjin separate from the one moment of nembutsu.²
Here again is the concept of dual aspects of a single reality; we saw it earlier in Hirota’s essay on shinjin (text
at n.10 above). Shinran carries this even further: he teaches that the nembutsu is in fact the voice of Amida
expressing universal wisdom, compassion, and salvation.
The influence of Shinran’s close connection to Hōnen included a commitment to bring religious
comfort to people on the bottom rungs of Japanese society, which necessarily influenced the language and
style of his teaching. Mark Blum has summarized the transformation of emphasis in Japanese Pure Land
Buddhism:
22Ueda & Hirota, Shinran, 139. “[Shinran] brought about a basic change in the Pure Land path by rooting it in fundamental
Mahāyāna thinking concerning the complex relationship this world and the world of enlightenment.”
23For a brief account of Shinran’s life, see Ueda & Hirota, Shinran, Chapter One. For a novel based on his life, see Tabrah, The
Monk Who Dared.
24Hirota et al., Collected Works II, 195.
25Inagaki, The Three Pure Land Sutras, 55; Buswell & Lopez, Princeton Dictionary, 683.
26Hirota et al., Collected Works I, 538.
Finger, Text, and Moon: Dennis Hirota and Iwasaki Tsuneo 349
Pure Land Buddhist thought presents a reversal…wherein Buddhism is considered from the ground of the unenlightened
person…[E]ach individual must attain a realization of the fundamental truth that he/she is so steeped in karmic limitations
that attaining complete enlightenment “on one’s own” is an existential impossibility. …. Everyone is an “ordinary person”
(bonbu)…The Pure Land discourse is thus marked by a distinct movement away from the metaphysical to the existential.²
Hirota’s reading of Shinran and his context has led him to the following principles of Shinran’s Pure Land
soteriology:
– Linguistic communication is an inevitable, necessary aspect of religious learning, hence of religious
teaching.
– Yet, almost all language and communications are distorted by the greed, anger, and ignorance that
infect human lives.²
– As language, only the nembutsu is true and real.
– Nembutsu crosses from the formlessness of absolute reality to the form of this world as the voice of
Amida: wisdom and compassion.
– Bringing Nembutsu into the world of samsara is the fulfillment of Amida’s Primal Vow.²
– Awakening to Amida’s “embrace” coexists in tension with a new sensitivity to one’s living as an afflicted
human being.³
– The key to opening the door of awakening is the decentering or weakening of the subject-object
dichotomy.³¹
Hirota locates Shinran’s insights as distillations of Mahayana fundamentals into Pure Land terms,
interpreted in keeping with Shinran’s disappointments with the prevailing orthodoxies and sectarian
monkish elitism. Awakening is available to all who speak the Name and hear the call.³²
27Blum, Origins, 6.
28Shinran expressed negative views about human nature, particularly his own. Hirota helps us to place these expressions in
a larger Buddhist context. Traditional Buddhism identifies intellectual and emotional grasping, thirsting, lusting, attaching,
etc. as the causes of existential suffering, but it also teaches that through sincere practice (the eightfold path, for example),
these afflictions can be greatly reduced or even eliminated by the time of death. In medieval Japan, however, the concept of
“the age of degenerate dharma” (mappō) taught that the historical Buddha’s message had faded too far into the past to be
understood, thus placing enlightenment beyond human accomplishment. Based on his acceptance of the Pure Land sutras,
his interpretations of certain commentaries, and his personal religious experience, Shinran taught that Amida’s Vow to save all
beings via nembutsu had in fact been fulfilled, erasing the debilities of history, so that awakening to reality in the present life
was available to all. (Discussion of post-mortem circumstances are beyond the scope of this article).
29The Larger Pure Land Sutra, spoken by Śākyamuni to a very large group gathered to hear it, relates the story of Dharmakara
Bodhisattva, who spent billions of years learning the truths expressed by all the Buddhas of the universe. He subsequently
made forty-eight vows listing what he must do before accepting ultimate enlightenment for himself. Shin Buddhists especially
venerate the eighteenth vow, known as hongan, or Primal Vow. A well-known English translation is this: “If, when I attain
Buddhahood, sentient beings in the lands of the ten directions who sincerely and joyfully entrust themselves to me, desire to be
born in my land, and call my Name even ten times, should not be born there, may I not attain perfect Enlightenment.” (Inagaki
243). There is an “exclusion clause” following the quoted text, which made the vow inapplicable to certain sinners. Shinran,
following other sutras and commentators, denied the efficacy of the exclusion, so that the hongan is taken to be universal.
30Hirota, Asura’s Harp, 100.: “The new paradigm is characterized precisely by the decentering of the self as subject-agent that
discerns and relates itself to elements of the Buddhist path (Amida, Name, Pure Land) as objects. In place of the autonomous
subject, there emerges a dual presence: the self as false, samsaric existence, and the Vow or Name as that which is true and
real…Self and Vow, inseparable and in polar opposition, emerge together in this way at the very point that a divide between
them forms.”
31Hirota, Asura’s Harp, 99-100: “Authentic engagement [with Shinran’s Pure Land path] is not simply an intellectual grasp or
affective embracing of the verbal teaching, but involves a fundamental shift in awareness…This awareness is not attainment
of nondiscriminative wisdom in which the subject-object dichotomy that characterizes delusional thought and perception has
been eradicated; nevertheless, a transformative paradigm of apprehension of self, world, and reality emerges in which the
subject-object dichotomy has lost its domination.”
32Kenryu Tsuji composed these lines: “When I call Amida’s name, it’s Amida calling me. His voice and my voice are one. I
gassho to Amida.” Bermant, Already but Not Yet, 243.
350 G. Bermant
5 The religious context of Iwasaki’s painting
How does the incorporation of the Heart Sutra into Iwasaki’s painting support the sutra’s meaning, if at
all, and how does it contribute to the religious significance of the painting? Iwasaki’s case is a special one,
because his art was initially private, an act of devotion accomplished without professional or commercial
intent.³³ That he chose the characters of the Heart Sutra was not surprising, however, because of the sutra’s
popularity in Japan.³
But Iwasaki’s Moonbeam testifies to the artist’s personal appreciation of what is true and real beyond
verbal expression, symbolized by the moon, and his own limitations as a human being reaching the end of
his life. The text of the sutra, which is in large part a series of negations of the permanence of the existential
categories taught by the Abhidharma³, softens the boundaries between self and world and encourages
aspiration for connection to what is beyond categories. One can think of the sutra as a ladder erected from
below or dropped down from above. Or both. Top down or bottom up: Perhaps that is a distinction that
makes no difference.
6 Bringing Iwasaki and Hirota into congruence
It is at this point that contemplating Hirota and Iwasaki together can deepen appreciation of them both. For
Iwasaki, the Heart Sutra is the ladder (erected up) or lifeline (dropped down) connecting his self-awareness
as an old man gripped by karmic vicissitudes to the felt sense of “getting past” such burdens, as joyfully
expressed in the sutra’s closing mantra: “Gate gate paragate parasamgate. Bodhi svaha! ³ The mantra
emerges sincerely from Iwasaki’s painstaking devotion.
The religious meaning of the sutra, its force or power, is thus contextualized by the circumstances of its
production and producer. Contextually, the painting of the sutra’s text connecting the pointing finger and
the luminous moon is both a scene on paper and a perfected expression of an artist’s life.
Contemplating the importance of such context clarifies the intent and significance of Hirota’s emphasis
on Shinran’s oral teaching in Tannishō, discussed in the next, final section.
Hirota’s account of Shin awakening specifies a state of mind for the initial experience of shinjin. This
is a decentering of self in consciousness, equivalently expressed as a weakening of distinction between self
and other, or self and objects more generally—it is a move toward oneness. In the Mahayana background to
Jodo Shinshu, this might be expressed as sunyata. But Shin teaches that ordinary people, which includes
just about everybody, are existentially incapable of reaching an awareness of such emptiness “under their
own steam,” so to speak. The ordinary religious seeker needs help. Exactly such help is in fact available
to everyone, configured as Amida, the Buddha of limitless light and life, wisdom and compassion. Amida
calls those who listen through nembutsu, which is not different from the sincere and joyous recitation of the
Name by the earnest practicer. Continued practice with nembutsu deepens the awareness and gratitude of
the practicer without destroying the practicer’s continued awareness and activity as the self-ascribed evil
person, the foolish person of blind passions. ³
33Arai, Seeing the Wisdom of Compassion.
34Nattier, The Heart Sutra, 153: The sutra “is surely one of the best loved Buddhist scriptures in all of East Asia…. And the
tenacity of [its] mass appeal is attested by the fact that in contemporary Japan the Heart Sutra has been printed on more teacups,
hand towels, and neckties than has any other Buddhist scripture.” Perhaps the end of the road of a religious text’s popularity
is kitsch; other examples are the fate of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer in the U.S., and Bhagavad Gita excerpts used as
checkout-counter giveaways in India. The skill, devotion and intention evident in Iwasaki’s painting protect the work from this
reputational fate.
35Thich Nhat Hanh wished to clarify the nature of these negations in his 2014 translation of the Heart Sutra. It may be, as
he feared, that misunderstanding the lines about emptiness and form predispose readers to a nihilistic, hence incorrect,
interpretation.
36The Sanskrit mantra is most often left untranslated, but there is ample commentary about its translation and significance.
Red Pine, Heart Sutra, 156-160.
37Maida, Evil Person.
Finger, Text, and Moon: Dennis Hirota and Iwasaki Tsuneo 351
7 Conclusion: Seeking religious validation in the being of the
speaker
How does one learn to listen, and finally to hear the call? Religious seekers seek teachers. The problem is
not merely to find a teacher, because in today’s religious environment there is competition among teachers,
as writers, speakers, and media personalities, vying for the attention and support of earnest seekers. How
is one to choose among the possibilities?
There is no short answer to this question, and this is not the place to attempt a complete one. There is
an important aspect of the answer, however, that is grounded in the preceding discussion.
If one accepts the possibility of shinjin as an authentic religious experience that is open to deepening
with continued practice, then it is reasonable to ask the following question: Are the religious expressions of
a person of shinjin, an awakened person, credible for that reason alone? In other words, to what extent are
the “texts” of an awakened person, whether written or spoken, validated by the special state of the person’s
being?
The classical texts provided some guidance on this question by framing hermeneutical principles.
These are called the Four Reliances, and are the subject of traditional and modern commentaries.³ Among
modern scholars, Robert Thurman posed the background question almost forty years ago::“What need do
the Buddhists have of a hermeneutical system?”³
Thurman listed the Four Reliances as follows: Rely on the teaching, not the teacher’s authority; rely
on the meaning, not the letter; rely on the definitive meaning, not the interpretable meaning; rely on (non-
conceptual) wisdom, not on (dualistic) cognition.
Thurman’s use of “authority” in the first Reliance lessens the tension between it and the fourth
Reliance. Other commentaries have spoken of the “personality” of the teacher, which is to be subordinated
to the “teaching itself.” On this interpretation, if one is unable to find benefit through reading and therefore
turns to listening, then, naturally and inevitably, the characteristics of the speaker will loom as a salient
dimension of the context of the practicer’s listening. The listener faces a direct conflict between the
admonitions of the first and fourth Reliances.
The listener will want to find clues in the demeanor of the speaker of the non-conceptual wisdom
out of which Mahayana religious truth emerges. It is exactly here, with the reference to non-duality, that
Hirota’s frequent references by to decentering the self and weakening the subject-object dichotomy find
their Mahayana philosophical underpinning.
The movement forward from initial realization to deepening awareness is also clarified. In traditions
other than Jodo Shinshu, “conceptual, analytic wisdom” must be accompanied by a specially advanced
state of mind if awakening is to be realized:
[conceptual, analytic wisdom] will not produce the experiential transformation called enlightenment…unless it is com-
bined with a systematically cultivated one-pointedness of mind…The Buddhist hermeneutical tradition is a tradition of rea-
lization, devoid of any intellect/intuition dichotomy. Authority here gives way to intellect, yet never lets intellect rest, as it
were, but pushes beyond it toward a culminating non-dual experience.¹ (Emphasis added.)
Shinran differs from the Mahayana background in two important ways. He identifies conceptual analysis
as hakarai, a self-powered calculating mind that becomes a dead-end toward awakening.² Nor will the
ordinary person, regardless of devotion and sincerity, be able to cultivate one-pointedness of mind through
38See for example Lopez, Buddhist Hermeneutics 3, 7.
39Thurman, Buddhist Hermeneutics, 22.
40Ibid., 23.
41Ibid., 35.
42“In Shinran’s more common usage, as a synonym for self-power, [hakarai] refers to all acts of intellect and will aimed at
attaining liberation. Specifically, it is the Shin practicer’s efforts to make himself worthy of Amida’s compassion in his own
eyes and his clinging to his judgments and designs, predicated on his own goodness, for attaining religious awakening.” Hirota
etal., Collected Works II, 174.
352 G. Bermant
meditative practices to arrive at a state of mind of ultimate reality. The Shin practicer becomes stuck in the
pursuit of these pathways. The practicer escapes the trap of self-power by relaxing into another “reliance,”
which is not hermeneutical but existential: reliance on the Name and the Vow. The practicer accepts the
non-dual mind of Amida, which includes a compassionate acceptance of self as bombu the foolish one.
“Non-working” characterizes this acceptance, but nothing is harder than such non-working. Shinran
put it this way:
It is the consummate teaching among consummate teachings,
The sudden teaching among sudden teachings.
It is hard to encounter the true essence of the Pure Land way, hard to realize shinjin.
This is the most difficult of difficulties; nothing surpasses it.³
Here as throughout Buddhist history and practice, the critical importance of a teacher cannot be exaggerated.
The best Mahayana teacher is the one who speaks from a position of non-dual awareness.
How does bombu recognize this person? There are examples in the Pure Land tradition, but they are
formidable. First is the case of Dharmakara, whose teacher, the Buddha Lokesvararaja, sent him on a
religious pilgrimage lasting five billion years. Upon his return, his forty-eight Vows established the Pure
Land and our assured places in it. (Fortunately, that trip did not need to be taken again.) But we know this
only because Śākyamuni told us so in the Larger Sutra. It is most important that the opening segment of
the sutra, includes an extraordinary compliment paid to Śākyamuni by his cousin and attendant Ānanda,
which includes the following praise:
Today, the World-Honoured One dwells in the rare and wondrous Dharma; today, the World-Hero dwells in the Buddha’s
abode…today, the World-Valiant One dwells in the supreme Bodhi. For what reason does his countenance look so majestic
and brilliant?
Amusingly, the Buddha checks to see if Ānanda had been put up to his speech by some deva or another.
Assured by Ānanda that his compliments are sincere, the Buddha accepts them and elaborates on the scope
of his powers and wisdom, concluding with these words:
The reason for [my attributes]is that [my] meditation and wisdom are perfect and boundless and that [I have] attained
unrestricted power over all dharmas. Ānanda, listen carefully. I shall now expound the Dharma.
The Buddha was speaking from a special state of mind with special understanding. Ānanda saw the
embodied radiance, then heard the wisdom of the teaching as the Larger Pure Land Sutra.
We arrive third and finally at Hirota’s characterization of Shinran, particularly Shinran’s oral teaching
as written by Yuien in Tannishō. Hirota finds numerous instances of Shinran upsetting the framework of
questions put to him by practicers who had walked for many miles to meet with him in Kyoto. Shinran’s
refusal to respond in the terms put to him signifies to Hirota that Shinran was responding from the
perspective in which the self as agent has surrendered to the fulfilled promise that made irrelevant the
distinctions that continued to confuse his visitors. Hirota says this:
In these passages, a fundamental rift runs between the question and the mind-set from which it arises, on the one hand,
and Shinran’s response, on the other. In other words, Shinran’s reply is not an attempt to lead the listener discursively into
the realm of shinjin, but rather an expression that manifests the difference between our ordinary thinking and the thinking
43Hirota et al., Collected Works I, 629. In this verse, he is citing the seventh-century Chinese Pure Land Master Shan-tao
(Shandao; Zendo in Japanese).
44Inagaki Three Pure Land Sutras, 234.
45Ibid., 235. In the text, the Buddha refers to himself in the third-person, as Tathagata.
46Several authors have emphasized the importance of this preliminary portion of the Larger Sutra, including for example
Roger Corless, who noted that Shinran himself had “authenticated” the Larger Sutra for just this reason. Corless, Shinran’s
Proofs of True Buddhism, 275.
Finger, Text, and Moon: Dennis Hirota and Iwasaki Tsuneo 353
that occurs as and through shinjin. Thus, the response begins with a presentation of an utterly transformed vision of the
issue raised and then proceeds to disclose the stance from which this perspective flows.
This section began with the question whether the religious expressions of a person of shinjin, an awakened
person, are credible for that reason alone. I believe a good provisional answer is that a practicer who works
to keep the Four Reliances in mind until fatigue intervenes will find that the wisdom of the teacher is
assessed in a dynamic relationship with the practicer’s sense of the text. Confidence in the speaker can
enlarge acceptance of text that might otherwise be rejected, but at a certain point, the practicer falls back
onto solo reflection away from the teacher’s presence and influence. Shinran recognized this when he said
of his own teaching,
Such, in essence, is the shinjin of the foolish person that I am. Beyond this, whether you entrust yourself, taking up the
nembutsu, or whether you abandon it, is your own, individual decision.
I suppose that all regular readers of Tannishō find certain passages especially demanding, worthy of
repeated visits. I will conclude with a choice of my own, number eight:
For the practicer who says it, the nembutsu is not a practice, it is not a good deed. It is said not to be a practice because
it is not said out one’s own efforts and designs. It is not a good deed because it is not brought about by one’s efforts and
designs. Since it is totally Other Power and free of self-power, for the person who says it, nembutsu is “not-practice,” it is
“not-good.”
Thus were his words.
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