Mysteries of Speech and Breath: Dohan's (1179-1252) Himitsu nenbutsu sho and Esoteric Pure Land Buddhism.

Abstract

Through my analysis and translation of Dohan’s (1179-1252) Himitsu nenbutsu sho (Compendium on the Secret Contemplation of Buddha), I have investigated the broader Japanese and East Asian Buddhist context for “Esoteric” (aka, Tantra, Vajrayana, etc.) approaches to rebirth in the “Pure Land” paradise of the Buddha Amitabha, and opened up new avenues for academic inquiry into ritualized speech acts as technologies for negotiating the perceived gulf between enlightened Buddhas and ordinary beings, as well as Buddhist theories of religious diversity, death, and rebirth. In Part I (Chapters I-III), I synthesize traditional and contemporary Chinese, Japanese, and English language scholarship on the history of Esoteric Buddhism and Pure Land Buddhism, and read across a diverse range of premodern Chinese and Japanese ritual and doctrinal texts in order to demonstrate that throughout East Asian Buddhist history, Pure Land Buddhism and Esoteric Buddhism functioned not simply as two discrete or exclusive “kinds” of Buddhism, but rather as mutually informative dimensions of a diverse Mahayana ritual and devotional environment. In Part II (Chapters IV-VI), I investigate Dohan’s contemporary and local context, focusing in particular upon the Koyasan mountain monastic complex where Dohan became one of the most significant scholar-monks of the medieval Shingon tradition, and demonstrate that the nenbutsu (the ritual chanting of the name of the Buddha Amitabha, “Namu Amida Butsu”) was fundamental to the religious lives of the elite monastics and peripatetic ascetics that made up the heterogeneous groups on Koyasan.

In Part III, I present my annotated translation of the first fascicle of Dohan’s Himitsu nenbutsu sho. In the first fascicle of this text, Dohan lays out his vision of the diversity of Pure Land practice, wherein exoteric “dualist” (this world and the Pure Land are separate) and esoteric “non-dualist” (this world and the Pure Land are one) conceptions of the nature of salvation are allowed to stand together in an exo/esoteric dialogic tension, without necessarily being resolved.