The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [37]
Here, too, lies the basis of the Buddhism of faith, of the Sukhavati or Pure Land school, in which it is held that all efforts to become a Buddha are merely the false pride of the ego. All that is necessary is to repeat the formula namo-amitabhaya (literally, “the Name of Amitabha” or “Hail, Amitabha”) in the faith that this alone is sufficient to bring about one’s rebirth in the Pure Land over which Amitabha presides. In this Pure Land all the obstacles which stand in the way of becoming a Buddha in this world are removed, so that rebirth in the Pure Land is virtually equivalent to becoming a Buddha. The repetition of the Name is held to be effective because, in ages past, Amitabha vowed that he would not enter into supreme Buddhahood unless rebirth in the Pure Land were assured for all beings who invoked his name. Because he subsequently entered the state of Buddhahood, the vow is effectively fulfilled.
Even Nagarjuna was in sympathy with this doctrine, for it is obviously a popular and more graphic way of saying that since one’s own true nature is already the Buddha nature, one does not have to do anything to make it so. On the contrary, to seek to become Buddha is to deny that one is already Buddha–and this is the sole basis upon which Buddhahood can be realized! In short, to become a Buddha it is only necessary to have the faith that one is a Buddha already. Shinran, the great Japanese exponent of the Pure Land, went even so far as to say that it was only necessary to repeat the Name, for he saw that the attempt to make an act of faith was too artificial, and led one to doubt one’s own faith.
Pure Land Buddhism is clearly an outgrowth of the Bodhisattva doctrine that the proper work of the liberated man is the liberation of all other beings by upaya or “skillful means.” By prajna or intuitive wisdom he sees into the nature of reality, and this in turn awakens karuna or compassion for all who are still in the bonds of ignorance. At its deepest level karuna means something rather more than compassion for the ignorance of others. For we saw that the Bodhisattva’s return into the world of samsara was based on the principle that samsara is in fact nirvana, and that “the void is precisely form.” If prajna is to see that “form is void,” karuna is to see that “the void is form.” It is therefore an “affirmation” of the everyday world in its natural “suchness,” and this is one of the features of the Mahayana most strongly emphasized in Zen. Indeed, it makes nonsense of the idea that Buddhism is always a philosophy of world-denial, in which the uniqueness of forms has no importance. It was because of karuna that Mahayana Buddhism became the principal inspiration of Chinese art in the Sung and Yüan dynasties, an art which stressed natural forms rather than religious symbols. For by karuna it is seen that the dissolution of forms into the void is in no way different from the particular characteristics of the forms themselves. The life of things is only conventionally separable from their death; in reality the dying is the living.
The perception that each single form, just as it is, is the void and that, further, the uniqueness of each form arises from the fact that it exists in relation to every other form is the basis of the Dharmadhatu (“Dharma realm”) doctrine of the enormous Avatamsaka Sutra. This voluminous work is