Zen Buddhism exemplifies practice based in self-power, or jiriki. Pure Land Buddhism exemplifies practice based in other-power, or tariki. These are very different entry gates, but when we examine self-power and other-power more closely, we see that the ultimate goal of practice requires both.
Quicklinks to Article Content:
Pure Land as Other-Power Buddhism
Zen as Self-Power Buddhism
Looking Closer at Self-Power Versus Other-Power
Zen and Other-Power, or Tariki
Pure Land as Other-Power Buddhism
My interest in Buddhism first arose when I was reading a travel guide about India. I was in my mid-twenties, and although I was very fortunate, I was afflicted with a sense of meaninglessness and despair. When I read the guidebook’s brief summary of Buddhism, I was immediately struck by the story of how dissatisfaction arose for the Buddha despite his princely circumstances. Then I was amazed to find out that the foundational premise of the Buddha’s teachings was that life was marked by dukkha, or dissatisfactoriness – and that there was a concrete path of practice you could undertake to relieve it. I immediately looked up “Buddhism” in the phone book.
I didn’t know anything about different kinds of Buddhism, so I ended up at the Sunday services of a Jodo Shinshu, or Pure Land, temple. The people were very kind and made me feel welcome. I was a little surprised to find that the temple looked a lot like a Christian church, with pews, hymnals, and singing. Up front there was an altar with a Buddha on it, but other than that it all felt pretty familiar. After the service, a group of people sat downstairs for coffee and conversation. Several people mentioned their gratitude for Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, which let them cultivate devotion toward Amida Buddha. Doing so, they could be reborn after death in Amida’s “Pure Land,” where conditions are much more conducive to awakening to Buddhahood. They didn’t feel up to the self-discipline required by Zen, which was a path relying on self-power. Instead, they were grateful for the option of relying on other-power.
A mala, or Buddhist prayer beads
The primary practice of Pure Land Buddhists is the reciting of the Nembutsu, or Buddha’s name. Usually while holding a mala, or rosary, they recite, “Namo Amida Butsu” (“I place my faith in Amida Buddha”) over and over, passing a bead through their fingers with each recitation. The recitation is not meant to be merely mechanical, however. It is meant to be done with deep, pure faith and devotion. The website of the Seattle Betsuin Pure Land Temple puts it like this:
[Namo Amida Buddha] is Amida Buddha’s voice calling to us and at the same time is our vocal response to his call. Its meaning is the actualization of our salvation and complete assurance of our Enlightenment. Thus wherever there is “Namo Amida Butsu” there is Amida Buddha and wherever there is Amida Buddha, there is “Namo Amida Butsu.” …When we truly hear the Name, Faith is awakened in our hearts… Faith completes our Oneness with Amida and is the true cause of our Enlightenment.[i]
The practice of chanting Amida’s name has its roots in a set of Sutras that probably arose at the same time as other major Mahayana Buddhist Texts, somewhere around the first century CE, or maybe even earlier.[ii] These are the Sukhavativyuha Sutras, which tell of a bodhisattva called Dharmakara who makes a vow to create a magnificent Buddha Field. He promises that all who are reborn there will never return to the lower realms of existence. A Buddha Field is a little like a heaven realm – it’s beautiful and without suffering – but the point of it is to help beings attain enlightenment and become Buddhas. Dharmakara succeeded, and he now manifests as Amida (or Amitabha) Buddha, presiding over the pure land of Sukhavati. Because of Amitabha Buddha’s “Primal Vow,” it is said that “those who sincerely trust in Amitabha and desire to be reborn in his Pure Land need ‘call on the name’ of Amitabha only 10 times and they will be reborn there.”[iii]
The website of the Pure Land temple I first visited, the Oregon Buddhist Temple, explains:
Attaining the “entrusting heart”—awakening to the compassion of Amida Tathagata (Buddha) through the working of the Primal Vow—we shall walk the path of life reciting Amida’s Name (Nembutsu). At the end of life, we will be re-born in the Pure Land whence we came and attain Buddhahood, returning at once to this delusional world to guide people to awakening.[iv]
Of course, developing a completely “entrusting heart” and chanting “Namo Amida Butsu” with pure devotion is not necessarily an easy thing to do. More on that in a bit.
Zen as Self-Power Buddhism
As soon as I heard the people at the Pure Land temple say that Zen wasn’t for them because it was based on self-power instead of devotion, I made a mental note to go home and look up Zen in the phone book. Within days I had started attending the Soto Zen temple where I would practice for 15 years, ordain as a monastic, and receive permission to teach Zen.
Over my 30 years of practice, I have reveled in self-power. I like nothing better than to be given a difficult task. I roll up my sleeves and dive in, trying to give it my all. From the beginning, I knew I was striving for the big “E” of enlightenment and would be satisfied with nothing less. (I’m not saying I’ve gotten there, but I’ve made enough progress that the whole effort has been more than worth it.) The most powerful moments in my life have been in sesshin, in the midst of sitting for eight hours a day, many days straight.
I have also experienced the limits of self-power. The Dharma resists mastery by willful effort. There are many approaches that work well in almost all other areas of life: Pushing yourself, spending lots of time, dedicating yourself to the hardest practices, being tutored by skillful masters, applying your intelligence. In Zen, these generally produce what seem like meager results compared to your effort. One of my teachers, Kyogen Carlson, said that after a year of strenuous practice at a Zen monastery, where he had thrown himself in completely, he realized he was only in up to his ankles.[v]
Then, suddenly, you’ll make significant progress – an insight, an opening, a letting go, a shift in perspective or behavior. This is almost never because you tried so hard, although your effort lays an important foundation for progress. Instead, the catalyzing moment is often when you give up, hit the wall, taste despair, ask for help, get familiar with your longing, or become vulnerable with a teacher. I remember doing mondo practice, where you present a verse of teaching you resonate with and people question you on it. After the mondos where I thought I had done well, no one else seemed impressed. After the ones where I came up against the edge of what I had experienced for myself, when I thought my responses were honest but inadequate, people would come up and thank me, saying they had been moved. What the heck?
Other aspects of practice, particularly involving Karma Work or Opening the Heart, will seem terribly resistant to your efforts. Even after many years of work, certain habits of body, mind, and heart persist. To keep from giving up or beating myself up, I think of putting these issues on the “back burner” of my spiritual stove. I don’t forget about them and keep them at a low simmer, but I also settle in for a long-term process. Occasionally I am rewarded for this patience when something in my life shifts and I make a little progress on one of my back burner issues. I have rarely been able to shorten the timeline on this process through sheer force of will. Maybe never.
I had been practicing for about six years when I had a very humbling and – at least at first – disturbing realization about my practice. I was preparing for ordination, and was thrilled to be living at Tassajara, a rigorous Zen monastery. I loved Zen and was grateful – and rather proud – that my spiritual path didn’t require me to believe in anything I couldn’t verify for myself. No blind faith in other-power for me!
One day, walking down the monastery path, I realized I was taking the most important aspects of Zen completely on faith. Sure, meditation and mindfulness had been very beneficial to me. Basic Buddhist teachings helped me make sense of my life and relieve some of my suffering. But Emptiness, Buddha-Nature, awakening, all that stuff? In theory I was going to be able to verify these things for myself, but I didn’t know that for sure. I was trusting the teachings, the tradition, and the teachers. This didn’t feel exactly like relying on other-power in the sense that I was hoping something outside myself was going to deliver me without my having to make an effort, but it also didn’t feel like pure self-power. If I was going to awaken, it certainly wasn’t going to be without the support of a lot of other people. I just prayed I hadn’t gotten involved in a cult, and my arrogance about following a perfectly rational self-power path fell away, never to return.
Looking Closer at Self-Power Versus Other-Power
It turns out that the relationship between self-power (jiriki in Japanese) and other-power (tariki) in Buddhism is not as straightforward as it may seem at first. Undoubtedly, a tradition like Jodo Shinshu focuses primarily on other-power while a tradition like Zen requires you to tap into self-power. The value of these alternative approaches can’t be overemphasized, because they provide a way into Dharma practice for different kinds of people. I never would have been able to find my way through Pure Land Buddhism. I’m a skeptical person for whom devotional feelings don’t come easily. And, as I discovered on my first visit to a Pure Land temple, practitioners there probably would not have been able to find their way in Zen.
Despite the apparent segregation of self-power versus other-power between Zen and Pure Land, however, the distinction starts to break down as you look more closely. Zen practitioner and scholar D.T. Sukuzi put it this way:
Shin Buddhism is tariki (Other Power), Zen is jiriki (self-power), or so it is generally assumed, but that is rather a superficial observation. At bottom, when you really get down to it, there is no jiriki and no tariki. Or you might say that both are jiriki and both are tariki. Zen involves religious practice and kōans and so it is regarded as being more jiriki, but in the final analysis, you actually come to transcend the self. In Shinshū you have Amida Buddha, but even in the case of Amida Buddha’s tariki, it is not possible for Amida Buddha to bestow his compassion on someone for whom there is no cause or condition; even in the case of unconditional love and compassion, there has to be a person who becomes aware that they are the object of that unconditional love. In short, whether something is jiriki or tariki is a moot question. [vi]
I knew a Pure Land minister who was very good at explaining the power of Pure Land practice to Zen people. He made it clear that true Pure Land practice was not for the lazy. Sure, anyone can be lazy in practice – you can be lazy in Zen practice too, putting your body in zazen posture like a sack of potatoes, figuring that going through the motions of practice will work some kind of magic on you. (Ironically, it kind of does. But more on that in a bit.)
If you aim to cultivate pure trust for Amida Buddha and aim to say his name with perfect devotion, with nothing else interfering, you will inevitably need to employ some self-power. It may be easy to pray in desperation, begging for a force outside of you to deliver you or fix you, but it is difficult to surrender your self-concern into Amida Buddha’s hands, letting go of your dukkha by entrusting yourself to chanting of “Namo Amida Butsu,” day and night. As Suzuki said, “there has to be a person who becomes aware that they are the object of [Amida Buddha’s] unconditional love.” This takes effort, even if it’s a different kind of effort from self-improvement.
In addition, in every form of Buddhism I know of, people are given great latitude in terms of how much they choose to reify Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and other supernatural figures, forces, or processes. “Reify” means to make something abstract more concrete or real. Some Buddhists believe in literal rebirth and the six realms of existence. Others of us see these as rich mythological metaphors which can teach us even though they aren’t literally true. Some Buddhists believe transcendent or universal Buddhas and bodhisattvas really exist in a kind of alternate dimension, like gods, where we usually can’t see them, but where they can hear our prayers and come to aid us. (Notably, Zen master Dogen believed the bodhisattva Kanzeon saved his ship from a storm.) Others of us are quick to explain to people that when we bow to a Buddha on an altar, that statue is simply a symbol of our deepest aspirations.
It’s interesting that at least one major Pure Land tradition seem to be de-emphasizing reification of the story of deliverance by Amida Buddha after death. On the website of the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA), the American branch of the Japanese Pure Land school, it says:
The Pure Land is a metaphor for the world of truth or enlightenment in Buddhism. The Pure Land is not a physical place, nor is it a realm like heaven. It represents, symbolizes, the world of enlightenment, which is in contrast to the world of ignorance and delusion, or the unenlightened world. The Pure Land also represents the ideal world that we aspire to live in and to also create as a human being.
And in explaining the recitation of “Namu [alt. Namo] Amida Buddha,” it says:
Namu literally means to “bow one’s head,” and comes from the Indian word Namas. What are we bowing to when we say “Namuamidabutsu?” We are bowing to Amida Buddha.
Amida Buddha is not a being, a deity, or a historical person. Amida Buddha is a symbol of the contents of enlightenment, great wisdom and great compassion. We bow our head to the truth of enlightenment, saying “Namuamidabutsu,” and we come to receive that truth of wisdom and compassion into our hearts and minds.
Now, I’m sure there are plenty of Pure Land Buddhists, including at BCA churches, where people fully believe that Amida Buddha awaits them in the Sukhavati, and who devoutly chant his name in hopes that he will hear them and come meet them after death to show them to the Pure Land.
Zen and Other-Power, or Tariki
Clearly there is room for self-power in Pure Land Buddhism. What about other-power in Zen? My Dharma great grandfather Keido Chisan Zenji, taught that self-power and other-power, or devotional practice, were intimately related. Daizui MacPhillamy, one Roshi Kennett’s Dharma heirs, relates this story:
…a number of us Zen students were attracted to this path precisely because it does not have obvious components of worship, belief, devotion or other “unnecessary religious baggage.” Many years ago my own teacher, Rev. Jiyu-Kennett, Roshi, went to study Zen in Japan in a somewhat similar frame of mind. When she mentioned this to her teacher, Rev. Keido Chisan Koho, Zenji, the abbot of the great Soto Zen training monastery of Sojiji, he smiled. The process of Buddhist training, he explained, was like walking through a long tunnel. But unlike a regular tunnel where the goal is to get somewhere else, the important thing about this tunnel is what it does to you while you are walking through it. So it does not really matter which end you go in or which end you come out, what matters is that you walk all the way through and emerge a transformed person.
Then he gave a name to each end of the tunnel. One he called “Zen Buddhism”; the other he called “Shin Buddhism.” Shin, or Pure Land, is the other major form of Buddhism found in Japan, and it may well be the most devotional type of Buddhism around. Shin Buddhists revere the Buddha Amida and worshipfully recite His name many times a day to refocus their devotional attention upon Him. Koho Zenji told my master that it was fine to enter the tunnel through the end called “Zen,” with none of that “religious stuff” anywhere in sight. He just warned her not to be too surprised, however, if she came out the other end a devotional person. And that is what happened to her. [vii]
My teachers, students of Roshi Kennett, took this teaching a little further, saying that if you enter the spiritual tunnel through one end, you have to exit by the other. (Or maybe Kennett Roshi came to this conclusion herself and taught them that). What does this mean to those of us who can’t bring ourselves to reify Buddhas, bodhisattvas, Pure Lands, and all the rest – even if we wanted to?
Fortunately, no reification is required. All we have to do is open ourselves up to the greater mystery of Life and practice. The Dharma is not what we think it is. We are not what we think we are. Practice is not limited to a project of the small self.
In a long essay called “Continuous Practice,” or Gyoji, Zen master Dogen praises the hardcore practice of around thirty Dharma ancestors: Men who sat tirelessly, engaged in ascetic practices, subsisted on acorns, and never laid down to sleep. Surely, these practitioners are the ultimate examples of self-power! Still, in the first part of the essay, Dogen repeatedly suggests that practice is not a self-powered project in the ordinary sense:
On the great road of buddha ancestors there is always unsurpassable practice, continuous and sustained. It forms the circle of the way and is never cut off. Between aspiration, practice, enlightenment, and nirvana, there is not a moment’s gap; continuous practice is the circle of the way. This being so, continuous practice is undivided, not forced by you or others.[viii]
And:
The effect of such sustained practice is sometimes not hidden. Therefore, you aspire to practice. The effect is sometimes not apparent. Therefore, you may not see, hear, or know it. Understand that although it is not revealed, it is not hidden… As it is not divided by what is hidden, apparent, existent, or not existent, you may not notice the causal conditions that led you to be engaged in the practice that actualizes you at this very moment of unknowing.[ix]
If we pay close attention to our own direct experience, we will understand something of what Dogen is talking about. Although we identify strongly with our conscious, verbal sense of self, we begin to recognize that things are moving continuously even as that conscious sense of self appears and disappears, pays attention and then gets distracted, aligns with an aspiration and then goes sour on it. Something actualizes us even at our moments of unknowing. That which brought us to practice, that which inspired our vows, that which inspired the vows of the buddhas and ancestors – that is moving through us. At some point we may realize our True Self is in no way separate from the mountains, rivers, and great earth, or from any Being. What then remains of some kind of self-power encapsulated in our skin bag?
After about 7 or 8 years of Zen practice, I was presenting a verse in mondo. I can’t remember what my verse was or what I had been talking about, but I must have been communicating something of my growing sense of mystery. A friend in the Sangha jumped into the ceremony, saying, “Domyo, here! You’ve always been my poster-child for atheism. It doesn’t sound like you’re an atheist anymore.” I smiled and said, “Hmmm… No, I guess I’m not.” I hadn’t started to believe in a reified deity with a consciousness and agenda similar to my own but just a lot bigger, but I was developing a relationship with what I call the “Ineffable” – something greater we can perceive, at times, but never capture in words.
In Zen we have many devotional practices that we can reify to whatever degree feels appropriate to us. We make offerings at altars, bow, chant the names of our Dharma ancestors, and try to treat each thing, no matter how apparently mundane, with reverence. When doing these things, I like to suspend my judgments about real and unreal – neither reifying nor discounting everything as a metaphor. This helps me align with the Ineffable and open to the great mystery that undeniably exists beyond my limited views of self and everything not-self. Often, the devotional practice will touch or transform me in a way that no other kind of practice does. For example, when I pour a ladle full of sweet tea over a statue of the baby Buddha on Wesak, the festival of the Buddha’s birth, I feel a sense of awe and gratitude that I can’t access by intellectually reflecting on the benefits of Buddhist practice.
It also helps to ask for help. Those of us enamored of self-power generally need to use it until we get to the point where we have reached its limits. More often than not, when we form a vow and practice, we encounter an equal and opposite resistance to that vow. This is only natural – when we try to transcend the self using the self, the self resists this. As long we are trying to attain something for ourselves in a limited sense, transcendence eludes us. Then a prayer of sorts can give us a way through: “May I…” [insert your intention here – sit zazen with alertness, find patience for my child, access loving-kindness for those I do not understand, awaken to true self-nature]. A prayer states our intention while removing our self-centered agenda. It opens us up to receive, allowing continuous practice to move through us.
In the article I quoted earlier by D.T. Suzuki, he shares a poem written by a Pure Land monk named Asahara Saichi:
In Other Power
There is no self-power, no Other Power.
All around is Other Power.
Namu-Amida-butsu, Namu-Amida-butsu. [x]
Let me give a Zen response to this poem:
Suspicious of other-power
I arrived at the top of a hundred-foot pole and must take another step.
May I find the courage
To entrust myself to the buddhas and ancestors
To give myself over completely to the practice
To let myself be caught by the Dharma.
Endnotes
[i] https://seattlebetsuin.org/jodo-shinshu/
[ii] Williams, Paul (2008). Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations 2nd Ed., p. 241. Routledge.
[iii] Ibid
[iv] https://www.oregonbuddhisttemple.com/jodo-shinshu-buddhism
[v] Carlson, Kyogen. You Are Still Here: Zen Teachings of Kyogen Carlson (p. 78). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
[vi] “Anjin, Peaceful Awareness in Zen and Shin” by D. T. Suzuki, in online magazine Buddhism Now. https://buddhismnow.com/2010/07/31/peaceful-awareness/
[vii] MacPhillamy, Daizui. tunnel vision: the surprise of devotion in Zen. In ascent, yoga for an inspired life 1999-2009. https://ascentmagazine.com/articles.aspx%3FarticleID=90&page=read&subpage=past&issueID=10.html
[viii] Tanahashi, Kazuaki. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo (p. 528). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
[ix] Ibid
[x] “Anjin, Peaceful Awareness in Zen and Shin” by D. T. Suzuki, in online magazine Buddhism Now. https://buddhismnow.com/2010/07/31/peaceful-awareness/
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SarKaLay စာကလေး, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
