In the person of
Nembutsu opens up the great path of unobstructed freedom.

"Tannisho, A Shin Buddhist Classic," trans. by Taitetsu
Unno

Shinran,
Barth, and Religion: Engagement with Religious Language as an Issue
of Comparative Theology

by Dennis Hirota

In
a world full of Nazis one can be forgiven for being a Barthian.[1]

--Peter
Berger

In 1974,
with the prominent Buddhist scholar Yoshifumi Ueda as General
Editor, a project to produce an English version of all Shinran’s
doctrinal writings began, eventually resulting in the publication of
The Collected Works of
Shinran.[2] One of the distinctive—and most
controversial—features of this translation is the avoidance of the
words “faith” and “belief” as translations for Shinran’s term shin 信or shinjin 信心. Instead, the
romanization “shinjin” is used. Ueda felt strongly that, although
various arguments could be made against translating shinjin as “faith,”
including its ambiguities as an English word and its long history as
a Christian term, fundamentally what Shinran means by shinjin and what is
ordinarily meant in English by faith are distinct. As stated in a
note published in response to a book review:

It
might be argued, for example, that “faith” expresses certain aspects
of shinjin—such as entrusting or being free of doubt—and that use of
the term would help place Shinran’s teaching in the context of
Buddhist tradition, or more broadly, among the religious traditions
of man. We have felt, however, that using “faith” to translate
shinjin would create a serious obstacle in transmitting the essence
of Shinran’s thought, which is our primary goal. Only rarely will a
misleading translation of a single term make the entire work of a
religious thinker—from its foundations through all its
ramifications—impossible to grasp. But this is the case with
shinjin.[3]

Ueda’s
basic thinking is stated:

The
fundamental difference between shinjin and faith is that while the
concept of faith stands on the duality of God (creator) and man
(created), shinjin is the oneness of Buddha and man, or man’s
becoming a Buddha.

Throughout
the translation project, for more than two decades, the romanization
of “shinjin” was constantly at issue, including after Ueda’s
withdrawal from the project. I continue to believe, however, that
the use of shinjin and the avoidance of the term “faith” was
correct, although I would no longer state the issue as simply as in
the 1981 note quoted above.

In
this article, I will venture some further comparative comments
regarding the Buddhist and Christian traditions. Rather than attempt
to sketch a possible systematization of Buddhist thought or a
persuasive worldview rooted in Buddhist teachings, however, I will
seek here simply to outline aspects of a preliminary issue that I
believe may require attention by Buddhists before directly tackling
other theological problems effectively. This is the question of the
nature of religious texts and teachings themselves. If theology
concerns the self-understanding of the person engaged with the
teachings of a religious tradition, it stands upon assumptions
regarding the nature of the teachings and of engagement with them.

I
will seek to highlight certain of these assumptions as they become
problematic in Buddhist traditions. My particular concerns here
center on the problem of the stances of speaker and listener implied
in Buddhist teachings, and may be illuminated through a comparative
consideration focusing on the thought of the medieval Japanese Pure
Land Buddhist thinker and religious leader Shinran (1173-1263)
together with the Christian theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968).

The
selection of Shinran and Barth in order to propose general comments
about the nature of a Buddhist theology may seem inappropriate. Even
among the various forms of Pure Land Buddhism, Shinran’s Jōdo
Shinshū (Shin Buddhist tradition) represents the furthermost
development of trends towards the thorough rejection of “self-power”
and an emphasis on “shinjin” (authentic entrusting), and Barth is
often portrayed as the exemplar of “neo-orthodox” and exclusivist
attitudes in modern Christian theology, a proponent of a “positivism
of revelation.”

Nevertheless, there are several reasons for
taking up a consideration of these two figures here. To begin, our
basic concern is the elucidation of Buddhist theological thought
through a comparative approach, and the close similarities in basic
concepts and symbols between Protestant Christianity and Shinran’s
Shin Buddhist path have often been noted by both Christian and
Buddhist scholars. Karl Barth himself, surveying the world
religions, noted remarkable correspondences in a number of crucial
concepts between the two traditions, mentioning “grace,” “original
sin, representative satisfaction, justification by faith alone, the
gift of the Holy Ghost” and so on.[4]

More
importantly, the study of Barth has expanded greatly in recent
years, with new evaluations of his thought offered in particular in
studies from “postmodernist” perspectives. I believe that such
studies illuminate areas for possible comparison between Barth and
Shinran, and thereby open up the possibility for exploring
resonances between themes in Shinran and tendencies in contemporary
postmodern thought.

Above
all, however, are the profound similarities in the structures of
thought of Shinran and Barth that point to broad general issues in
the religious engagement with sacred texts. These issues are
sometimes less apparent in other forms of Buddhist tradition, which
place greater emphasis on personal performance of religious
practices in accordance with, and as the concretization of,
religious truth. Nevertheless, the underlying issues involving the
nature of the interpretation of religious teachings remain present,
and they may be said to be most clearly highlighted in the Buddhist
path of Shinran. Comparison with similar concerns in Barth at once
aids in illuminating the theological implications of particular
stances taken by Buddhists and further suggests areas of difference
between Buddhist traditions, including Shin, and Christian
thought.

Karl Barth and Japanese Pure Land Buddhist
Tradition

Barth’s
incisive comparison of Christian and Shin Buddhist thought is well
known and has been taken up for consideration by students of Shin
Buddhist tradition many times. Hence, I will not discuss it here,
except to note the paradoxical character of its overall intent.
Barth is obviously deeply interested to discover in Shin Buddhism
close parallels to Christianity, and speaks of Shin as “the most
adequate and comprehensive and illuminating” nonChristian parallel
to Christianity.[5] At the same time, it may be said that his
interest is fundamentally polemical, for he finds precisely in the
close parallels between Shin Buddhist teachings and Reformed
Christianity justification for dismissing such doctrinal
resemblances as reflecting merely human constructs, as human
“religion” that stands against true faith. The conclusion that Barth
draws from his comparison of Shin Buddhism and Christianity is that,
with regard to truth, finally “only one thing is decisive. That one
thing is the name of Jesus Christ.”

There
are two, paradoxically fused elements in Barth’s attitude toward
Shin Buddhist tradition that will be of interest to us here. One is
his mode of thinking regarding what he terms “religion” as human
construct. It is possible to see in this parallels with strains of
postmodernist thought that insists on recognition of the social and
cultural embeddedness of all the works of human conceptualization.
According to Barth, truth must have its basis not in the human
subjectivity and its machinations but only in the self-revelation of
God.

The
second general theme underlying Barth’s comparison of Christianity
with Shin Buddhism, therefore, is the denial of the truth of all
“religion” as human construct. Truth lies only in the name of Jesus
Christ.

The
paradoxical quality of Barth’s attitude here emerges because the
similarity between Shin and Christian traditions in fact extends
well beyond the particular concepts Barth enumerates, deep into his
very concern to negate all human-generated endeavor to achieve
religious salvation or realization or knowledge of God. It reaches
to a thoroughgoing the perception of human finitude and incapacity
to apprehend truth in terms of evil, a theme that appears not easily
accommodated in current secular thought. Thus, Shinran too, under
the rubric of “self-power,” proposes a complete rejection of all
self-generated endeavor to live and advance “religiously.”

This
extension of resemblance into fundamental modes of thought raises a
significant contemporary issue: Do the similarities between the
thought of Barth and Shinran lead inevitably in Shin Buddhism to the
same predisposition toward religious exclusivism that we see in
Barth? Does it mean that Shin Buddhists and Christians influenced by
the theology of Barth—and Barth appears to be broadly acknowledged
among Protestants and Catholics alike as one of the most important
theologians of the past century—stand in traditions that they
recognize to be so similar in doctrine that they are forced to
reject, totally and in principle, each other’s truth? It seems to me
that the answer is no and that comparison with Barth will aid us in
articulating a position rooted in Shin Buddhist thought that avoids
the apparent logical necessity of religious exclusivism.

In
order to explore such questions concerning the nature of engagement
with religious teachings and texts, I will take up three general
aspects of Barth’s mode of thinking that appear to have close
parallels in Shinran’s thought. The three aspects are:

First,
a dualism between the realm of ordinary human life and the realm of
that which is true and real; this dualism seems to inform Barth’s
religious thought at a fundamental level.

Second,
the requirements of the salvific working that functions to bridge
these two realms.

And
third, the nature of the religious exclusivism that appears to arise
inevitably from the implications of the first two elements of
thought.

I.  Dualism

In the
preface to the Second Edition of his commentary on The Epistle to the Romans,
Barth states in response to critics:

If I
have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard
called the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between time and
eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well
as positive significance: ‘God is in heaven, and thou art on
earth.’ The relation between such a God and such a man, and the
relation between such a man and such a God, is for me the theme of
the Bible and the essence of philosophy.[6]

In
speaking of a “system” that might be seen in his work or of “the
theme of the Bible,” Barth is surely identifying a basic framework
of his religious thought or of the religious question that he
understands to face humankind. Quoting Kierkegaard, Barth speaks of
the recognition of the “infinite qualitative distinction” between
time and eternity and its “negative significance.” From a Shin
perspective, as my epigraph may suggest, both this distinction and
its negative significance—which Barth expresses, “Break off your
dialectic, that it may be indeed dialectic”—appear recognizable and
crucial.

Although
in Barth’s passage above the phrase “infinite qualitative
distinction between time and
eternity” is used, perhaps we may take this broadly to indicate
simultaneously a number of other distinctions or oppositions in his
thought between the works of humankind and the working of God, or
between our ordinary understandings and valuations of ourselves and
our world and that which is true and real, which completely
transcends our language and conceptualization.

Further,
it is not this distinction of realms in itself that is important,
but its negative significance for human beings, which Barth
illuminates in his distinctions between reason and revelation or
between religion and faith. For sinful persons of darkened minds,
however we may endeavor through our designs and judgments to bridge
the qualitative distinction between the sphere of our ordinary lives
and that which is true and real, the task cannot be accomplished. No
form of religious life or effort circumscribed by our ordinary
thoughts and conceptions can be successful.

Thus,
Barth states:

It is
not against faith that we are warned, but against our faith; not against the
place that has become visible where men can stand and live, but
against our taking up a
position there and proceeding to live out our lives there . . . .
The warning is uttered against any position or manner of life or
endeavor that we think to be
satisfactory and justifiable, as though we were able in some
way or other to escape the krisis of
God.[7]

We see,
then, that for Barth, we are admonished against reliance on our own
efforts to make ourselves worthy, and our own judgments, and our own
knowledge of good or conception of religiosity.

Rather,
for Barth, religion and religiosity in this sense are faithlessness
or unbelief (Unglaube). Religion is not merely lack of faith, but
resistance to truth and refusal to abandon merely human attempts to
realize what is true and real.

Barth’s
conception of “religion” appears to correspond closely to Shinran’s
understanding of self-power. Expressing a notion of “doubt” perhaps
not dissimilar to Barth’s “faithlessness,” Shinran quotes the Larger Sutra:

[W]ith
minds full of doubt, [beings] aspire to be born in [the Pure] land
through the practice of various meritorious acts; unable to
realize the Buddha-wisdom, the inconceivable wisdom, the ineffable
wisdom . . . they doubt these wisdoms and do not entrust
themselves. And yet, believing in [the recompense of] evil and
good, they aspire to be born in that land through cultivating the
root of good.[8]

Of
course, for Shinran, the “infinite qualitative distinction” would
lie between the realm of ignorance and the realm of wisdom or
enlightenment, or between unenlightened beings and Buddha. But
whatever the differences that must be drawn between Shinran and
Barth in their specific understandings of the realms infinitely
distinct qualitatively, fundamental similarities in the structures
of their thinking remain striking. This is chiefly because both
thinkers pursued with great thoroughness the “negative significance”
of the dualism of the realm of the human and the realm of what is
true and real.

In other
words, both thinkers assert a total and basic discontinuity between
ordinary human thought and language and that which is true and real.
This means that there is nothing that human beings can accomplish
that can lead to realization of what is true and real.

Shinran
states: “Self-power is the effort to attain birth . . . by
endeavoring to make yourself worthy through mending the confusion in
your acts, words, and thoughts, confident of your own powers and
guided by your own calculation.”[9] That is, for Shinran, self-power includes
all acts undertaken to move oneself toward what is good and true
arising from our ordinary thoughts and feelings, which are distorted
by delusional self-attachment. These words seem quite close to
Barth’s sense of “religion.”

II. Salvific Working

The
second general aspect of Barth’s thinking that seems to converge
with that of Shinran lies in the origin of all power that leads to
salvation or wholeness or attainment of what is true and real. Where
there is strong insistence on discontinuity, salvation is possible
only through the working of that which is true and real. It may be
said that the dualism that Barth delineates in speaking of the
“infinite qualitative distinction” functions to dissolve the
ultimate significance of another complex of dualisms—dualisms of a
“horizontal” dimension, perhaps—that have formed the foundation of
the modernist mindset: subject and object, mind and matter, man and
nature, intellect and world.

For
Barth, salvific working takes the form of revelation in which “the
unknown God dwelling in light unapproachable . . . makes Himself
known.”[10] The primary form of revelation is of course
the incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ. Barth, however, expresses
the underlying mechanism:

He
unveils Himself as the One He is by veiling Himself in a form
which He Himself is not. He uses this form distinct from Himself,
He uses its work and sign, in order to be objective in, with and
under this form, and thererfore to give Himself to us to be known.
Revelation means the giving of signs.[11]

Thus,
revelation also occurs through the Bible and the testimony of the
church. The Gospel as revelation is particularly significant because
it raises the question of the functioning of language and its
capacity to communicate religious truth.

Although
the term revelation is commonly understood to refer to some revealed
content or statement, Barth views revelation or truth as dynamic and
active, occurring as event and as miracle. Here, I would like to
consider two aspects of its functioning, one negative and one
positive, but both shaped by the general structures of Barth’s
thinking briefly sketched above.

Concerning the negative functioning of
revelation, Barth states:

The
Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a
question-mark against all truths. . . . The man who apprehends its
meaning is removed from all strife, because he is engaged in a
strife with the whole, even with existence itself.[12]

Setting
a question-mark against all truths is also expressed as “announcing
the limitation of the known world by another that is unknown” (p.
35). Here we see the relationship between the truths within the
world of our ordinary awareness and the inconceivable truth that
approaches from beyond. In other words, the truth of the Gospel is
not a proposition about the world set on the plane of our other
knowledge.

The
structure of this relationship parallels that set forth in Shinran’s
words in Tannishō:

I know
nothing at all of good or evil. For if I could know thoroughly, as
Amida Tathagata knows, that an act was good, then I would know
good. . . . But with a foolish being full of blind passions, in
this fleeting world—this burning house—all matters without
exception are empty and false, totally without truth and
sincerity. The nembutsu alone is true and real.

In the
same way, revelation in Barth works to show us the limitations of
our own conceptions of our world. Barth states:

When
our limitation is apprehended, and when He is perceived who, in
bounding us, is also the dissolution of our limitation, the most
primitive as well as the most highly developed forms of human
self-consciousness become repeatedly involved in a ‘despairing
humiliation’. . . . We know that God is the Personality which we
are not, and that this lack of Personality is precisely what
dissolves and establishes our personality. The recognition of the
absolute heteronomy under which we stand is itself an autonomous
recognition; and this is precisely that which may be known of
God.[13]

Again,
we see that revelation cannot be proposition set on the plane of our
ordinary knowledge about the world.

Here
we encounter the problem of language, for the words of revelation
must be comprehensible to ignorant beings (“the objectivity of His
works and signs in our creaturely sphere”[14]), but they must function
to disclose that which is beyond conception. This problem was also
faced by Shinran, to an extent perhaps greater than in other
Buddhist paths.

Barth
puts it this way: “God’s true revelation comes from out of itself to
meet what we can say with our human words and makes a selection from
among them to which we have to attach ourselves in
obedience.”[15] Further: “It is disclosed to us that we do
not view and think of God, that we cannot speak of Him; and because
this is disclosed to us, it is brought home to us that this is the
very thing which has to happen no matter what the circumstances,
that we must not fail to do it.”[16] Through the language of revelation, truth
is disclosed to faith (the “obedience” in the quotation above), but
how this should happen is not a matter of human reason or
comprehension, but grace alone. Barth therefore speaks of the
“analogy of faith” (analogia
fidei).

What is
notable here is that, because both Shinran and Barth share similar
modes of thinking regarding the total “qualitative distinction”
between human being and what is true and real, they both face
similar problems in the nexus or bridging of these two realms. From
the stance of ignorant human beings, what is true and real is
thoroughly transcendent; it is beyond all human conception. In other
words, it completely transcends human language, whether the human
problem is post-lapsarian sinfulness or delusional reification and
self-attachment.

Nevertheless,
in order to make its working known to human beings, what is true and
real adapts itself to human thought and linguistic expression.
Shinran states:

Dharma-body as suchness has neither color
nor form; thus, the mind cannot grasp it nor words describe it.
From this oneness was manifested form, called dharma-body as
compassionate means. Taking this form, the Buddha announced the
name Bhiksu Dharmakara and established the Forty-eight great Vows
that surpass conceptual understanding.[17]

III. Religious Exclusivism versus
Dialogical Apprehension

The
requirements of revelation appear to include for Barth what has been
called particularism, along with a use of language that allows for
apprehension without false reference or literalism, that is,
comprehension through an “analogy of faith.”

Working
within his historical context, Barth was concerned to negate all
moves from the realm of general human knowledge and experience to
that which is true and real; hence his rejection of any possibility
of a natural theology or any basis for authentic religion in a
general human experience such as absolute dependence. He asserts
plainly: “We have no organ or capacity for God.”[18] For Barth, God’s self-revelation occurs
through God’s activity focused in the single, particular event of
the incarnate Word. It is here, from Barth’s insistence on the
unidirectionality of salvific power, that the inevitability of his
religious exclusivism appears to arise.

Barth’s
concern, however, is surely not centrally to deny the truth of
nonChristian traditions. Rather, it lies in the illumination of the
nature of Christian revelation and, in particular, of the nature of
its reception, the opposite aspect of the event of revelation.
Setting a question mark involves a searching hermeneutics of
suspicion. I believe a similar tendency toward exclusivism arising
from a similar concern to admonish against all forms of calculative
thinking (hakarai) may be
seen in Shinran. It is for this reason that the force of his
critique of self-power and provisional paths concerns attitudes
within Pure Land practice above all, and to a much lesser degree
locating Pure Land doctrine within the body of Buddhist and
nonBuddhist teachings.

As seen
above, Shinran’s thought and that of Barth share some general
features of a religious paradigm of transformative encounter with
that which is true and real in language. This does not mean,
however, that Shin Buddhists are likewise forced to assume an
attitude of religious exclusivism. In the remaining part of this
paper, I would like to consider one of the reasons for this and
suggest a Shin Buddhist approach to “other religions.”

As we
have seen, both Shinran and Barth may be said to structure their
thought employing two sets of dualities: one operative in the
“horizontal” dimension of our ordinary life, and one characterizing
a “vertical” dimension, in which the horizontal dimension in its
entirety forms one pole and the transcendent or true and real forms
the other. Both thinkers are concerned with dialectical interaction
between these dimensions, that is, with issues of revelation and
hermeneutics. Both articulate critical appraisals of human language
and conceptualization, and of the impulse to “self-power,” while
recognizing the centrality of linguistic “signs” as the vehicle, for
us today, of the manifestation and enactment of the true and real in
the field of human life.

Barth’s
thought has been described as nonfoundational and nonrealist, and in
this way similar to strains of postmodern thought. The same may
perhaps be said of Shinran. Postmodernist thought appears to abandon
and reject any absolutized, objectifying stance for grasping and
judging the world, and to recognize that our knowledge about the
world is always variously contextualized. This acknowledgment of
human finitude and the perspectival nature of understanding finds
resonance in the thought of both Shinran and Barth.

At the
same time, however, in both thinkers a vertical dialectic functions
not only to illuminate the limitation within the plane of our
ordinary life—the finitude and incapacity of human existence—but to
heal it. Thus in Shinran, the existential apprehension of human
finitude arises as realization of evil in a Buddhist sense, and not
simply as a recognition of the historical, social, or cultural
contexts that frame our view of things. Evil in Shinran’s sense is
one’s personal inability to eradicate delusional thought and
perception that give rise to the reification of self and other, the
passions of self-attachment, and the pain, experienced and
inflicted, that characterizes unenlightened existence. In short, it
is the personal incapacity to realize nondiscriminative wisdom or
reality through one’s own fulfillment of religious practices.

For
Barth, as we have seen above, this human situation seems to demand a
particularism that results finally in religious exclusivism.
Revelation is single, for plurality would seem to begin a slide into
the realm of natural theology and human religion.

What
about Shinran? I believe that the basic structure of interaction
between the two dimensions I have spoken of—horizontal and
vertical—differs in the two thinkers, so that Shin Buddhists would
take a different attitude regarding both the concepts of their own
path and other traditions. In Shinran, there are two interrelated
strains of thought relevant to our discussion. First, as with Barth,
there is a tendency toward particularism as a stripping away of
various human props, based on awareness of human limitation. In
Shinran, however, this particularism is expressed in pragmatic
terms, with such traditional Pure Land concepts as the “last age”
(mappō) and the
“practicer of the lowest level.” Not only is this pragmatic
exclusivism nonabsolutist, it is relatively muted in Shinran,
particularly in comparison with the preceding tradition.

The
second strain of thinking is of far greater significance. It turns
on the fundamental mode of Shinran’s religious awareness, in which
duality (samsara and nirvana, ignorance and wisdom, being and
Buddha) is simultaneous with nonduality. Accordingly, the delusional
thinking of ordinary life is pervaded at every point by the wisdom
of realization; our ordinary language is pervaded by the Name of
Buddha. As with Barth, truth is transformative event, but it is none
other than each shift that may occur at any point in our lives when
this nonduality or wisdom—the movement beyond delusional
self-attachment—manifests itself in our existence.

This
means, with regard to the concepts and contexts that frame our
understandings and judgments of the world—including religious
symbols and institutions, both our own and others’—that what is
central is the dialogical apprehension that is itself truth breaking
against, and drawing us beyond, the hardening of our delusional
thought.

[1]
Peter Berger, A Rumor
of Angels (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1970), p. 18.

[2] The Collected Works of
Shinran, Translated, with Introductions, Glossaries, and Reading
Aids, by Dennis Hirota (Head Translator), Hisao Inagaki, Michio
Tokunaga, and Ryushin Uryuzu (Kyoto: Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha,
1997), 2 vols.

[3] From a letter by Prof. Ueda
and myself responding to a book review. See Philosophy East and West 31:
4 (October 1981).

[4] Karl Barth, Church
Dogmatics

[5] Ibid.

[6] Karl Barth, The Epistle to
the Romans  (p.
10)

[7]  (Epistle to the Romans, p.
504)

[8] (“Chapter
on the Transformed Buddha-Bodies and Lands that are Provisional
Means,” 7)

[9]
(CWS
I: 525)

[10]  (Romans, p. 35)

[11]  (Church Dogmatics, II, 1, p.
52)

[12] (Romans, p. 35)

[13] Epistle
to the
Romans, p.
46.

[14] CD
II, 1, p. 51

[15] (Church Dogmatics, II, 1, p.
227)

[16]  (II,
1, p. 212)

[17]  (Notes on ‘Essentials of Faith
Alone,’ CWS I: 461.)

[18]  (Church Dogmatics, I, 1, p.
168)

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