[machine translation from the German original]
Shinran in an intercultural context
in: Hōrin. Vergleichende Studien zur japanischen Kultur 1, 1994, pp. 26-40
Gerhard Schepers
Religious traditions have been subject to the most diverse cultural influences in the course of their history. This is all the more true when they have spread over wide areas and encompass different cultural spheres. In modern industrial societies, however, even smaller religious groups today are placed in an intercultural context, since growing mobility and global communication systems hardly allow for the confinement to individual, self-contained cultural areas. The Jōdo-Shinshū (the True School of the Pure Land or Shin Buddhism), which goes back to Shinran, must also be seen in such a larger context. Whether it can be counted as one of the great religions remains to be seen, but what is certain is that it is currently found in numerous countries around the world and can therefore certainly be called a world religion in this sense. Even in Japan, the country of origin of Shin Buddhism, a confrontation with the most diverse cultural influences flooding the country cannot be avoided if Shin Buddhism is to be a living religion for people today.
In view of the present situation, then, it is becoming increasingly important to see Shinran's thought and religious experience in an intercultural context, with the problem of translation into other languages and into other cultural contexts being particularly important. However, it should also not be overlooked that Shinran himself has been in an intercultural context from the beginning and can only be understood from within it, if we think of the elements of Indian and Chinese culture in Buddhism, alongside the various aspects of Japanese culture of his time. It is on these two points, the intercultural context at the time of Shinran on the one hand, and that in the present situation of Shin Buddhism on the other, that the emphasis of the following remarks will lie. In doing so, I would like to address some fundamental problems, above all by means of concrete examples.
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1. Shinran in the intercultural context of his time
The extra-Japanese tradition to which Shinran refers is already visible in his name. He adopted it, after several others, from the time of his exile (1207) and thus probably marks the beginning of his decisively new faith experience. "Shin" is the second syllable of "Seshin" (or also "Tenjin"), the Japanese name for the Indian Vasubandhu (4th/5th century), and "ran" the second syllable of "Donran", Japanese for the Chinese Tan Luan (476-542), of which the latter in particular is important for the development of Shinran's thought. The diversity of cultural traditions that characterises Buddhism as a whole is also evident in the seven "patriarchs" of the Shinshū tradition, two of whom are Indian, three Chinese and two Japanese, including the two just mentioned.
In addition, for Shinran there is what one would call in the Christian context the "ecumenical" character of the Tendai tradition, in which other Mahāyāna teachings, from Tantrism to Zen, play an important role alongside the central Lotus-Sūtra. Shinran was thus able to encounter the most diverse dimensions of religious experience within the Buddhist tradition during his two decades on the Hiei-zan. This is similarly true of the other founders of the great new schools of the Kamakura period, who all spent some time on the Hiei-zan and received their, in most cases fundamental, religious training there. Tendai Buddhism thus proved to be a fertile breeding ground for all those traditions that shape Buddhism in Japan today.
On the other hand, these school founders all left the Hiei-zan, creating a distance from it that may have been above all a distance from the culture of the court aristocracy in Kyōto. Dōgen stayed on the Hiei-zan for only two years, Nichiren for about ten, Shinran for twenty, Hōnen (with interruptions) and Eisai for about thirty years. This roughly corresponds to their distance from the court culture. Hōnen and Eisai maintained their connections to the court aristocracy, Eisai also to the new rulers in Kamakura. For the other three, however, their experiences away from the culture of the imperial city became crucially important. Nichiren's background as the son of a fisherman from Chiba means that he comes from a completely different cultural milieu right from the start. Dōgen retreats completely to the Eihei-ji in Echizen (today Fukui). He also keeps his distance from the military rulers in Kamakura, although they, too, set themselves apart from the culture in Kyōto and a similar spirit would later lead to a close connection between Zen and Bushidō.
Shinran's origins are entirely in the culture of the imperial city
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Kyōto. Although various details of his family background are disputed, his noble origin may be considered certain. From the age of eight, he devoted himself entirely to Buddhist studies and practices on the Hiei-zan, and even after he left in 1201 at the age of 28, he remained as Hōnen's disciple in the realm of Buddhist lifestyles of the upper class of the time. No doubt, therefore, his exile to Echigo (now Niigata) represented a culture shock the likes of which it is difficult to imagine greater. He lost all his privileges as a Buddhist monk as well as practically all contact with the culture of the capital and now had to earn a living for himself and his family under the most difficult conditions. This was probably the first time he experienced how hard, often inhumane and desperate, life was for most ordinary people at that time. It was not by mere coincidence that many of them were called hinin (non-humans, subhumans).
The fact that even in this situation, in which many would have despaired, he was able to live from the strength of faith and trust in Amida, since it was precisely the deepened experience of human inadequacy that led to deepened certainty of faith, this experience was probably the decisive event of his life. Traditionally, in Shin Buddhism, leaving the Hiei-zan and turning to Hōnen is seen as the turning point in Shinran's life. However, I agree with some others that the decisive turning point, which led to a sometimes radical reformulation of the Buddhist tradition, took place in Echigo.1 One indication of this is the fact that Shinran did not return to Kyōto even after his exile was lifted (1211), but began a missionary activity of about 20 years, mainly among the rural population in Hitachi, today's Ibaraki, in order to let as many people as possible share in his new faith experience. Hōnen, on the other hand, did not need to move far from Kyōto because of his connections to the court aristocracy and soon returned there.
It seems to me that Shinran's breadth of experience in
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various religious and cultural spheres, combined with his basic religious experience that relativized all these experiences, made it possible for him to detach himself from given traditions and ideas to an astonishing degree. In this way, he was able to deepen his own religious knowledge towards that which alone seemed essential to him, but at the same time also towards a general basic human experience beyond cultural differences. This is probably the reason for the often noticed, sometimes quite astonishing parallels to Luther or to the Christian tradition, as represented above all by Luther. They had already been noticed by the first Christian missionaries. It is not possible here to address the various interesting questions that arise from an intercultural perspective in this context. However, I would like to at least try to show the importance of the intercultural context for understanding Shinran's thinking by means of a concrete example.
Among the most important and frequently discussed terms in Shinran's thought is "jinen". Shinran explains his understanding of this word in a very well-known short text, often referred to as Jinen-hōni-shō, which is considered by many to be the culmination of Shinran's old-age wisdom. Since the word jinen-hōni occurs only here in Shinran's writings, much has been secreted into the text, so that Satō Masahide speaks critically of the "myth of jinen-hōni"?2 Satō, on whose research I will mainly rely in the following, has corrected many of the previous interpretations through precise philological considerations, thus allowing us to see how Shinran combines various religious and cultural traditions in this text out of the superiority of his faith standpoint in order to express some of his deepest insights. I can only briefly touch on the most important points here.
The text has survived in three places, which indicates its importance. It is most frequently quoted after the Mattōshō, a collection of Shinran's letters, where, however, the first four sentences are missing, which are important for the overall interpretation. The probably original
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version that I quote below is the so-called Kenchi kikigaki. In it, Shinran's disciple Kenchi apparently wrote down words of his teacher that he must have heard directly from him in 1258. It is an explanation of a short text, otherwise unknown, which Shinran uses to reflect on his own experience of faith. It is only in this context that the word hōni enters Shinran's vocabulary at all, as it was associated with jinen in the original text. Shinran only touches on it briefly and largely equates it with jinen.
Now first the text in English translation, which I prefer here, as a German one would still require various additional explanations3
As for the character gyaku, we call gyaku what is obtained in the state of cause. As for the character toku, we call toku what is obtained in the state of effect. As for the character myō, we call a name in the state of cause myō. As for the character gō, we call a name in the state of effect gō.
As for jinen, ji means ,of (by) itself' (onozukara); it is a word which means ,to be caused to be(come) so' (,to be caused to come about' [shikarashimun, without any contrivance (intention, calculation, effort [hakarai]) of the devotee. Nen is a word which means ,to be caused to be(come) so', because it is due not to the contrivance of the devotee but to the Vow of the Tathāgata. As for hōni, we call the working (being caused to be[come] so) hōni because it is the Vow of the Tathāgata. hōni means ,to be caused to be(come) so' due to this Vow, without the least contrivance of the devotee, by virtue of this Dharma (hō). In all, there is nothing that man can do an his part. Therefore, we should know that in the Other Power non-meaning (gi-naki) is meaning.
jinen is a word which from the first means ,to be caused to be(come) so'. Mida (= Amida) Buddha's Vow has from the first nothing to do with the contrivance of the devotee and was made with the intention of welcoming (to the Pure Land) those who trust in the Namo Amida. Therefore, when the devotee considers neither what is good nor what is bad this is called jinen. So I have heard. His Vow is meant to make us attain supreme Buddhahood. A supreme Buddha has no form. Since he is without form we speak of jinen. When one indicates that there is form, one does not call it supreme
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Nirwana. In order to let it be known what this formlessness is like he is called Mida Buddha. This is what I have learned. Mida Buddha is there to let us know what jinen is like. After one has understood this one need not always be concerned with this jinen. If one is always concerned with jinen the ,non-meaning is meaning' after all again assumes a meaning. This is the incomprehensible wisdom of the Buddha.4
The explanation of the first word combination, gyakutoku-myōgō, is not easy to understand. The only important thing is that myōgō means 'the holy name', the Namo Amida Butsu, and that it describes a combination of cause and effect: Amida is cause as Hōzō Bosatsu and effect as Amida Buddha.
The second and third sections no longer refer to Amida, but to the believers and their birth in the Pure Land, which is brought about by Amida's vow. The term used to describe this process is the central term of the text, namely jinen. Its meaning requires a little more explanation.
The word "jinen", or as it is read today, "shizen", has been used since the Meiji period to translate the European term "nature". However, it originally had a completely different meaning, and even in modern usage it cannot be used, like "nature", to designate specific individual phenomena or a particular character (as in the expressions "his nature", "of a stormy nature"). The basic meaning, which is still decisive today, is found in the adjectival and especially in the adverbial use of the word (jinen ni and shizen ni respectively). The German "natürlich" [naturally] often comes very close to this usage, which is why one could also translate jinen as "naturalness" if one wants to render it with a noun.5
The original meaning of jinen can be seen from the meaning of the two Chinese characters that make up the word: ji means "by itself", "spontaneously", nen (in addition to "burn") means "to be like this". Until the Meiji period, jinen was used almost exclusively adjectivally or adverbially, in the sense of "onozukara" ("of itself"). In the Buddhist context from which it originated, the word almost always denotes a general phenomenon, a certain quality of the real. It then has, according to
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the two Chinese characters, mostly the meaning "spontaneous", "of itself", "existing out of itself", or it denotes the very essence of things as they are, the "Thus-ness" (also in the sense of tathatā, Japanese shinnyo). According to our text, the power of Amida that leads to birth in the Pure Land works in the human being jinen ni (in the sense of onozukara), by itself, completely "naturally" in this sense, without any effort or calculation (hakarai). In this sense, jinen was also used in non-Buddhist languages at the time of Shinran. Shinran, however, gives the word a special meaning within his thought by referring it exclusively to the work of Amida, through which the believer is led into the Pure Land and thus to enlightenment without any action on his part.
On the other hand, the connection with the pre-Japanese Buddhist tradition becomes particularly clear in the last section, where jinen is understood above all as Thus-ness, as ultimate reality, as shinnyo, which for Shinran is, apparently, essentially identical with the Pure Land, Nirvana and Buddha-being. With the term jinen, which even in common usage usually does not designate concrete individual phenomena as such and thus can point beyond them, Shinran creates a bridge between everyday experience and the absolute. Jinen is the ultimate reality as Thus-ness and as a power effective from itself, which can be experienced at the same time in trusting faith as a power effective in the human being.6 By emphasising the absoluteness of Nirvana or Buddha-being, Shinran underlines the connection to the original Buddhist tradition. At the same time, however, he does justice to the concern of Amida Buddhism to create a mediation between the ultimate reality of the Buddha and that of the human being. He succeeds in this by using the term jinen, which reflects the everyday experiences of his contemporaries, but which he deepens out of the Buddhist tradition and his own religious experience and can thus use to describe the Absolute.
What remains problematic here is how to express these connections in German in a reasonably appropriate way. The word "natural" and even more so its nominal form evoke associations with "nature" that are in no way present in Japanese. "Spontaneity" in German is associated with action, not with happening as jinen does. "Automatically" refers more or less to mechanical processes, so it is also
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not suitable for describing jinen. These are just some of the linguistic problems that arise here. Perhaps one should not stick too closely to the original text and use a term from German mysticism such as "Gelassenheit". In its multi-layered meaning, this could express the interconnectedness of Amida's work, the detachment of the human being from ego-attachment and an attitude that stands in contrast to everything that is impatiently calculated (hakarai). However, the aspect of Thus-ness, the ultimate reality, would have to be connected with it.
In any case, it seems to me that the concept of jinen is a good example of how Shinran combines religious experiences from different cultural spheres and deepens them in such a way that he is able to express in them a basic religious experience that is also likely to be valid in a worldwide intercultural context. It was probably not least these universal and transcultural elements in Shinran's thinking that made it so attractive to many intellectuals in modern Japan when it came to dealing with problems of modernisation and internationalisation. One could mention here such diverse thinkers as Kiyozawa Manshi, Miki Kiyoshi, Hattori Shisō and lenaga Saburō. This brings me to the second part of my presentation.
3. Shinran in today's intercultural context
With the opening of Japan since the Meiji period, a new, difficult period began for Buddhism. The situation was particularly aggravated by the anti-Buddhist attitude of the Meiji state, which meant the loss of all previous privileges and often outright persecution of Buddhists. Alongside restorative tendencies, this led to attempts to reconsider Buddhist identity and to various reform efforts. Buddhist studies were intensified; special efforts were made to study the pre-Japanese tradition and the origins in India as well as the relationship to Japanese culture.
On the other hand, the great confrontation with Western thought now began, fluctuating between acceptance and rejection. Probably not coincidentally, two of the best-known examples of this confrontation come from Shin Buddhism. The first is the Shinshū priest and philosopher Inoue Enryō (1858-1919), who tried to defend Buddhism against Christianity and modern Western thought in his numerous writings. The other example is Kiyozawa Manshi (1863-1903), the most important reformer of the Higashi Hongan-ji. He draws upon
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Western thought, especially Epictet's stoicism, but also on Hegel, on the one hand, and on the other hand, on Shinran's thought, especially the Tannishō. Katō Chiken emphasises that Kiyozawa shows the Japanese a way to modernise and internationalise religion.7 Kiyozawa's understanding of Shinran and his reformist aspirations are still alive in Shin Buddhism today, especially through the writings and work of his disciples, such as Soga Ryōjin (1875-1970) and Kaneko Daiei (1881-1976). He had a particular impact on Japanese intellectuals at the beginning of the century, and this was the beginning of a widespread new interest in Shinran. With the overwhelming success of the reading drama "The Priest and His Disciples" (Shukke to sono deshi, 1917) by Kurata Hyakuzō, a veritable Shinran boom then even began.
A similar situation arose with the crisis after the end of the Second World War, when people in Japan were once again very intensively exposed to Western culture and Western ideas, and the criticism of traditional Japanese society and its values made the ideas of Marxism attractive to many Japanese intellectuals. It is now astonishing that in this context special attention was paid to a medieval Buddhist thinker, namely Shinran. He was virtually "rediscovered" by intellectuals such as Miki Kiyoshi and Hattori Shisō.
This led to a renewed engagement with Shinran's thought, initially focusing on the social revolutionary and political critical elements that Hattori saw in Shinran.8 Further discussion then corrected some of the initial one-sidedness and placed Shinran's critical, even partly revolutionary thinking in the context of his fundamental religious experience. In any case, this discussion of Shinran showed his relevance for modern Japan. This can also be seen in the very large number of publications on Shinran and Shin Buddhism. Both also attract relatively great interest in Japanese daily newspapers, especially when it comes to questions of criticism and reform as well as social and political problems.9
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Shinran's thinking, however, must currently be seen in a much larger framework, as stated at the beginning. With the spread of Shin Buddhism and the worldwide interest in it, it now stands in a global intercultural context. This raises a number of problems which I would now like to address.
First of all, there is the problem of translation, which has already been mentioned several times. In the English-speaking world, Christian terminology was initially used to make Shin Buddhist thought comprehensible. Today, however, it is recognised that this can lead to numerous misunderstandings.10 This also applies to the German-speaking world, which is still very dependent on English translations and interpretations. What the transfer into another cultural context means for the term jinen, for example, was explained above. Similarly problematic is the translation of other central terms of Shinran, which correspond to the Christian terms faith, sin, salvation.
However, one should also see the positive possibilities that lie in an expansion of the intercultural context. The history of the great religions offers numerous examples of this. Often only in relativisation by other cultural contexts can a religious tradition recognise its essence, the universal truth that lies within it, can it deepen its religious experience towards a universal human experience of faith, at least as long as and insofar as it is living faith.
For Shin Buddhism, there is also the fact that by its very nature it is designed for dialogue with all people and cultures. Amida's vow contains the condition that all people attain enlightenment. In other words, this means that either everyone will become Buddha or no one will, a great thought that should oblige every Shin Buddhist (and not only the latter) to work for the religious salvation of all people everywhere in the world, i.e. to seek dialogue with people of all cultures and religious traditions.
In such an intercultural and interreligious dialogue, one must not overlook the extent to which one's own cultural horizon of experience often obscures one's view of phenomena in other cultural contexts or distorts these phenomena, usually without one being aware of it. It is difficult to detach oneself from one's own categories, ways of thinking
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and value concepts if one does not first become aware of them. They are too much taken for granted within one's own cultural and linguistic environment.
For many years now, so-called Buddhist-Christian "dialogues" have been taking place. However, if one looks more closely at what happens there, one is sometimes more inclined to speak of Buddhist-Christian "monologues", in which each side remains trapped in its own categories without the participants being aware of this. Better than much talking, therefore, are often attempts at joint action, such as meditation or social activities.
But as difficult as intellectual encounters are in the intercultural field, they are necessary and are likely to become increasingly important in the future. I would therefore like to conclude by addressing one main reason for many misunderstandings and misinterpretations in the intercultural context, namely the numerous stereotypes and prejudices that are often based on collective dreams and fears. This becomes particularly clear in the example of exoticism, which was especially effective in Europe from the late nineteenth century until the first decades of this century. Even today, it still often determines the image of foreign cultures, especially the idea of Far Eastern religions, and obscures the view of their reality.
4. Intercultural context and exotic stereotypes
Hermann Pollig describes the basic situation of modern man, out of which exoticism can arise, as follows:
The current, unstoppable mechanisation and rationalisation of life, which is perceived as a threat, the strict logic of the natural sciences, the progressive opacity of multi-layered fields of relationships virtually evoke compensations of the psyche. The powerlessness of individuals, their disenchantment with the state and the social system encourage scepticism and a turning away from reality. The perceived crisis of meaning leads to an escape into the irrationality of an imaginary counter-world of paradisiacal and obsessional daydreams. Fleeing into exoticism is one of the ways to achieve psychological balance in the search for harmony with existence.11
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This is how counter-designs to one's own culture emerge, paradisiacal worlds in which one seeks liberation from repressed drives and affects, in which one seeks nature and primordial humanity, wholeness and syntheses.
Thus we can state that in the age of scientific technology, the exotic, which represents pre-scientific, even pre-temporal harmony with nature, is presented as the moral model of a highly technical era. Naturalness, spontaneity, happy harmony with oneself and the world are longings that appear to a highly technical society as hidden possibilities of life.12
The counter-worlds that exoticism seeks in distant regions are essentially the same as those that romanticism and nostalgia seek in the past or that utopians seek in a fictitious future. In all these cases, the counter-designs are related to one's own reality and have basically nothing to do with the only imagined foreign one. They can have an important creative function in that they open up new human possibilities through the imagination that are often not accessible or even suppressed in one's own culture. However, problems arise when one transfers what is only imagined to concrete phenomena, to specific countries and cultures, as is often done. Despite a worldwide flood of information, the stereotypes of foreign cultures created in this way are still effective today, which also applies to Japan and Buddhism.
There is also another related phenomenon in Japan. Parallel to the exoticist tendencies in Europe, people there began to deal with questions of their own identity in their confrontation with Western cultures. This discussion reached its final stage with the appearance of numerous publications since the end of the 1960s, most of which are summarised under the term "Nihonjinron". What is astonishing is that a whole series of central ideas of European exoticism appear in these "discourses on the Japanese", even where they obviously do not correspond to Japanese reality. In other words, here Japanese partly determine their own culture and society through ideas that were designed or dreamed up by Europeans as a counter-image to European culture and originally have nothing to do with Japan. Typically, Japan and "the West" are thus described in pairs of opposites.
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Among them are pairs like: individualism or groupthink, masculine or feminine, father-religion or mother-religion, intolerant or tolerant, materialistic or spiritual, rational or emotional, hostility to nature or closeness to nature (naturalness), whereby the second element is supposed to apply to Japan.
It seems that European longings and Japanese interests confirm each other here and reinforce each other in such a way that a critical reference back to the actual circumstances becomes difficult. This explains some extreme tendencies and positions in the "Nihonjinron" and the uncritical way in which they are often adopted outside Japan. Basically, exoticism and "Nihonjinron" have the same root, insofar as they are expressions of desires, longings and fears, escapes from a reality often experienced as negative or problematic into a merely imagined, dreamed world. According to Peter Nosco, one can detect such a tendency in Japan as early as the Kokugaku of the eighteenth century.13
So what does this mean with regard to Shinran and Shin Buddhism? Fortunately, there are relatively few misunderstandings of the Jōdo-Shinshū influenced by exoticist ideas. This may be due to the fact that Shinran's thought seems to be very similar to Christian or Western thought in many respects and thus can hardly be presented as a counter-project to the latter.
A typical example of an interpretation of jinen determined by modern stereotypes is offered by Undō Gidō, who claims that the "basic attitude of man to go on living as he is" (jinen) is "characteristic of the Eastern view of nature".14 This has nothing to do with Shinran's concept of jinen, which, as we have seen, does not contain the meaning "nature" at all. What is clear, however, is the reference to an "eastern" concept of nature influenced by exoticist ideas as a counter-image to the "western" view of nature. It is not surprising that such ideas are then taken up in the West. Alfred Bloom, for example, seriously speaks of jinen as an "identification of believer and nature",15 which is in keeping with the exotic longing for unity with nature.
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but is the exact opposite of what Shinran means by jinen.
But such examples are hardly to be found in connection with Shinran's thinking today. Rather, the exotic longings are directed towards Zen Buddhism, which is thus more popular in the West than Shin Buddhism. However, this sometimes leads to Shin Buddhists, especially in America, wanting to interpret Shinran's thinking more from Zen. In this way, there is a certain danger of exotic ideas over-shaping Shin Buddhism. Both tendencies are probably mainly due to Suzuki Daisetsu, who is responsible for many of the stereotypical ideas of Japanese Buddhism influenced by exoticism.
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1 See for example Alfred Bloom 1968, The Life of Shinran Shonin. The Journey to Selfacceptance. Numen, 15th ed., p. 17; KATO Chiken 1987, Shinran to Ruta. Shinkō no shūkyōgakuteki kōsatsu, Tōkyō: Waseda Daigaku Shuppanbu, p. 96; TAKAHATAKE Takamichi 1987, Young Man Shinran. A Reappraisal of Shinran's Life, Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfried Laurier University Press, pp. 90, 95-100; YASUTOMI Shinya 1989, Shinran to kikki-ishiki. "Gutoku Shaku Shinran" no tanjō. Otani Gakuhō, 69th volume, p. 52; also FURUTA Takehiko 1975, Shinran shisō. Sono shiryō hihan, Tōkyō: Fuzanbō, p. 124.
2 SATO Masahide 1983, Shinran ni okeru jinen-hōni. Kōza-Nihon-shisō 1 Shizen, ed. by SAGARA Tôru, BITO Masahide and AKIYAMA Ken, Tōkyō: Tōdai Shuppankai, pp. 143-188, here pp. 165f.
3 For my translation, I have consulted several English translations (none of which, however, I found entirely convincing). A terminology for translating Shinran's concepts is gradually emerging in the English-speaking world, which for the most part still needs to be worked out in the German-speaking world. One difficulty here is probably the much more differentiated terminology used in the philosophical-theological field in German (which, as a German, is perhaps only felt this way because of the greater sensitivity towards one's own language).
4 Teihon Shinran Shōnin zenshū, vol. 3, Kyōto: Hōzōkan 1973, Shokanhen, pp. 54-56.
5 Cf. Volker ZOTZ 1991, Der Buddha im Reinen Land. Shin-Buddhismus in Japan, Munich, p. 137. Zotz rightly attempts various paraphrases of jinen, although the terms used remain problematic in some cases (see below).
6 Cf. UEDA Yoshifumi (ed.) 1978, Letters of Shinran. A Translation of Mattōshō, Kyōto, p. 16.
7 KATO Chiken 1990, Ika ni shite shin o eru ka. Uchimura Kanzō to Kiyozawa Manshi, Kyōto: Hōzōkan, esp. pp. 191-257.
8 HATTORI Shisō 1948, Shinran nōto, Tōkyō; the ed. 1950, Zoku Shinran nōto, Tōkyō.
9 I have dealt with the problems briefly touched on here in detail in my 1993 essay, Shinran's Thought in Present-Day Japan. Humanities, Tōkyō, 25th year, pp. 93-120, which is also to appear in revised form in: The Impact of Traditional Thought on Present-Day Japan, Munich: Iudicium.
10 See for example Ruth TABRAH 1992, Re-Thinking Buddhist English. The Pure Land, New Series, Kyōto, 8th-9th volumes, pp. 11-16.
11 Hermann Pollig 1987, Europäische Phantasien. Exotische Welten: Europäische Phantasien, Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, p. 16.
12 Linus HAUSER 1987, Ideelle Ausbeutung der Exoten oder versöhnender Tanz der Standpunkte. Exotische Welten: Europäische Phantasien, Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, p. 41.
13 Peter Nosco 1990, Remembering Paradise. Nativism and Nostalgia in Eighteenth-Century Japan, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London.
14 UNDO Gidō 1968, "Myōkōnin" no jinen-hōni-teki taido ni tsuite. Musashino Joshi Daigaku Kiyō, Tōkyô, 3rd volume, p. 7f.
15 Alfred Bloom 1965, Shinran's Gospel of Pure Grace, Tucson, p. 44.