The Ojoyoshu: Essentials of Birth in the Pure Land

This is my last post on the subject of mortality, but I wanted to close with a look at a famous Japanese Buddhist text, the Ōjōyōshū (往生要集), or “Essentials of Birth in the Pure Land”. The text was written before 986 by a monk of the Tendai sect named Genshin (源信).

Tendai Buddhism descended from the Chinese Tien-Tai (天台) school, which founded its teachings on the Lotus Sutra, and became effectively the “state” Buddhism for a time. But Japanese Tendai took a different turn from the start. Saicho, the founder of Tendai Buddhism, continued to base his teachings on the Lotus Sutra, but added a lot of esoteric practices and teachings, both from China and what his disciples learned from Kūkai, contemporary and founder of Shingon Buddhism.

However, Saicho’s disciples and their disciples really began to shift the focus to Pure Land teachings (with the Lotus Sutra still as the foundation). If you look at Tendai Buddhism today, disciples will have morning rituals devoted to the Lotus Sutra, but in evening, they have rituals devoted to Pure Land practices. Tendai Buddhism is a huge, complex sect, so I don’t want to oversimplify things here, but history shows that later disciples of Tendai introduced Pure Land teachings more and more during Tendai prominent days in the 8th through 12th centuries.

So, it’s no surprise that a Tendai monk in the 10th century like Genshin would take such a deep interest in Pure Land doctrine, and write the Ōjōyōshū. The Ōjōyōshū reads in many ways like Dante’s Inferno, where Genshin depicts various kinds of Buddhist hell realms, where various types of cruel and selfish actions are punished.

In keeping with Buddhist theology, the hell realms are not permanent states of rebirth, but one can stay there for a very, very long time before being reborn again:

• The Hell of Retribution and Justice, where one dwells for 12,500,000 years for destroying life or eating meat. People here are pummeled by demons into mincemeat.
• The Hell of the Black Rope, where murderers and thieves are flogged with whips of fire and cut with burning axes.
• The Hell of Unlimited Suffering, where the worst of the worst go. Devadatta, who tried to kill the Buddha a number of times, and split the early monastic community, is said to dwell here. The Lotus Sutra makes clear though that one day he too will be a Buddha though.

Like Dante’s Inferno though, the “hell” sections only comprise one part. Genshin talks about the Pure Land of Amida Buddha at great length, and teaches techniques for visualizing and meditating on the Pure Land in order to attain rebirth there. This was centuries before the later Japanese Pure Land Buddhist movement arose under another Tendai monk, Honen, who coincidentally was deeply influenced by the Ōjōyōshū. He strongly encouraged anyone who read the texts to make an effort to be reborn in Amida Buddha’s Pure Land, saying it was for people of all types.

When I visited Japan in 2007, I was treated by a surprise when I visited (again) the Shinto shrine of Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gū in Kamakura, they had a rare exhibit of Buddhist art from temples in the area for a real limited time. I saw amazing, life-like statues of Jizō Bodhisattva with his staff looking kindly down upon me. I saw life-like statues of Amida Buddha flanked by his two Bodhisattva attendants, Kannon and Seishi, and I saw a few pieces of artwork devoted to the Ōjōyōshū. In medieval times, it was very popular to make artwork, like what is shown here, to depict the levels of Buddhist hell, and the Pure Land, so it was really a special chance to see this artwork upfront.

Although, like Inferno, this no longer has the same cultural relevance in the 21st century West that it once did in medieval Buddhist Japan, I think it’s good to take time and appreciate how people approached matters of death and the afterlife then. It’s too easy to just dismiss these things as superstition, but at the same time, it’s foolish to assume these are literal either. No one really knows what death is like until they’ve undergone it, so we don’t know what happens to those who passed away before us.

So, we should take Genshin’s words with some reverence, after all he was trying to teach us something important that holds true even now. The imagery is very different, but the message is the same: time is short, and we create the worlds we dwell in with our thoughts, actions and words. If we choose to live a life of hatred, deceit, lust and so on, its results will come to fruition in time, and we will suffer ruin. If we choose the holy path instead, though difficult at times, we are sure to see its results in time as well.

Namuamidabu