Zen Buddhism

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

Page 76

THE
BUDDHISM 55 himself has written of the inner truth of Tariki Buddhism, and is in fact a professor of the Otani College of the Higashi Hongwanji Temple in Kyoto. And it was the Prince Abbot of the twin monastery of the Nishi Hongwanji in Kyoto who presided, as I have related elsewhere, at the conference at which I debated this point with his pundits. In the end he announced, "Mr. Humphreys is right. Tariki and Jiriki alike are means." And that, as I said in my book, ended the discussion.
Tariki and Jiriki, then, are both means to an end, another of the opposites which only exist as such on the plane of discrimination. But as Zen is itself above such a plane it must exist in both "means" equally, though its principal vehicle, Zen Buddhism, is unquestionably of the Jiriki School. It is in the degradation of a spiritual truth that evil lies, in teaching the people that morality and character-building are of no importance. A balance must be obtained, and in practice I found that it was so in all but the lowest rank of the Pure Land followers. Thus "Self-hood is revealed in otherness and otherness in selfhood, which means a complete interpenetration of subject and object, Amida and his devotees. And we can see that Buddhism is after all one, and remains so in spite of apparent diversity."
NATURE
OF ZEN
جود
THE ARHAT AND THE BODHISATTVA IDEAL
The ideal of the Thera Vâda was and is the Arhat, he who by his own efforts attains Enlightenment. But as the Mahayana developed, this limited ideal was held to be
1 Via Tokyo (Hutchinson), p. 74.
2 The Eastern Buddhist, Vol. IV, Pt. 2, p. 32 (of reprint).