A few things about Amida Shu: Shu is a Japanese word meaning both teaching and school (in the sense of a school of thought). Hence, Zen Buddhism is divided into Sōtō-shū, Rinzai-shū and Ōbaku-shū; and in Japan Pureland Buddhism is divided into Jōdo-shū, Shin-shū and some other smaller groups.
Amida Shu is a Western nembutsu school, and we got the name Amida Shu, when we were visiting Anrakuji temple in Japan; and in discussions with the priest there we noticed that the Japanese were referring to us as Amida-shū. So, we kept it.
The origins of Amida Shu lie in the 1990s. There was a group of us who were interested in Engaged Buddhism. We were quite inspired by the book by Sister Chang Kong called Learning True Love, in which she describes her attempts to put Buddhist principles into practice in Vietnam.
All through my life I’ve been deeply concerned about war and oppression, about how we call kindly action humane, but humans often don’t actually act that way. In the religious inspiration that I’ve had ever since childhood, I always found this mismatch between theory and practice painfully disturbing.
Amida Shu: So, initially we made several attempts to create an Engaged Buddhism Interest Group, but interest was not really enough. For it to be real, we needed action. We took our inspiration ultimately from Amida Buddha, who as Dharmakara bodhisattva made vows to establish a Pure Land in the West. In terms of Chinese Buddhism, “the West” meant India, where Shakyamuni had lived and taught, but we used the slogan to mean the West in the modern sense.
We were interested in applying Buddhist ethics in society. We also recognized that this was a two-way thing, that carrying out compassionate action is also a way of learning for the practitioner. It’s by confronting and getting involved in practical action, that one learns compassion. It’s by striving to understand real social processes that one learns dependent origination, conditioning. It’s all very well talking about unconditional compassion, but the real test is, whether one can have compassion for both the victim and the perpetrators in the world, and also understand what’s going on in a full and deep way.
We saw that there was an unfortunate disjoint between faith and action. There are people who get involved in action who have little faith, and so tend to get burnt out or become bitter; and on the other hand, there are people with faith who retire into personal development practice and sit on their cushions but don’t do much. We wanted to get beyond this disjoint and really allow our faith to be the muscle in our actions, and at the same time to allow the arena of our activity to be the school for our faith. Buddhist training would then have real consequence for body, speech and mind. It would be practical and it would also be spiritual, the two together as a unity.
The Pureland style of Buddhism has the great grace of recognizing the condition of the ordinary person, while still holding onto the inspiration and blessing of the all loving Buddha. It has the two together. One can be secure in one’s faith while still being an imperfect, fallible mortal. This means that you don’t have to get enlightened first before you can be useful. It means that one can make mistakes and learn from them without incurring judgment. It provides a basis for universal compassion because we’re all in the same boat. One can discover that one has a George Floyd and a Donald Trump inside oneself; and a host of other characters as well. This gives one’s faith an earthy flavour. It sweeps away any “Holier-than-thou” tendency. We are all bombu beings crying out for the Pure Land.
Namo Amida Bu
Thank you very much
Dharmavidya
David
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