Zen Buddhism

Author(s): Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: William Heinemann LTD

Page 74

THE NATURE OF ZEN BUDDHISM 53 purify another.” It is therefore strange that into such a noble and dynamic faith, with its clear command to control and purify the lower man until the last stain of personal desire and its consequent suffering is purged away, there should have crept, as late as the thirteenth century A.D., its very antithesis, the doctrine that effort, however splendid, would never of itself avail, and that faith must supply the deficiency. And the faith was not in the Buddha within, as a guide and teacher, but in Amida, the personified Principle of Buddha-hood who dwelt in a conventional heaven. Only by Tariki, this "other power”, could man be saved, and after a while the middle way of Jodo Buddhism, with a balance of Jiriki, "self-power”, and Tariki, was replaced by the extreme of Shin Buddhism, wherein all morality and the mind's development was declared to be of no importance so long as faith in Amida was held in the mind and repeated constantly. Thereafter Amida's vow, to save mankind, was sufficient means to Enlightenment, and all who believed would find themselves in the Pure Land of his all-Compassionate Mind. The basic doctrine of early Buddhism, whereby a man is the product of his thoughts and acts and sole creator of his destiny, no God nor all the powers of Heaven having the power to stand between all this was ended. He who believed would be saved.
If it is argued that faith and love are stronger than the law of Karma, of action-reaction, then it is no law. I prefer the Christian doctrine, "Love is the fulfilling of the law," and regard it as the finer Buddhism. If it be said, and so it was said to me in Japan, that the original doctrine is too hard for the many, then let the many tread, as in other Buddhist countries, so far as they can up the hillside until