The Dreaded Power of Influence
Its tenets were at once revolutionary and simple. Senju-nembutsu immediately aroused a sympathetic popular response so abundant as to threaten the religious order of things. Jien (1155-1225), younger brother of Regent Kujo Kanezane and three-time Tendai abbot, registered Honen's popularity with a cool gaze in his Gukan-sho:

During the Ken-ei reign, a holy priest called Honen, residing in Kyoto, founded a nembutsu school that he called senju-nembutsu. He preached, "simply to recite namu-amida-butsu, for all other practices are not in one's duty." The mysterious inanities pleased the ignorant nuns and monks, became popular, and spread through the world...1

Extolling Honen, however, was not solely a mass phenomenon; in fact, Jien's Regent brother had also acquired a profound inclination for nembutsu. We can imagine the chagrin of Mount Hiei's highest authority.

Myozen Hoin, another Tendai scholar-priest, reports in Jukkai-sho: "Many have advanced the Pure Land and preached nembutsu in our country, but this saint has surpassed all others in both fame and infamy."2 That Honen's power of influence was extraordinary may be fathomed from the reaction of Myoe, who in Zai-jarin describes his first impression of the Senchaku-shu as follows: "Now I know in minute detail how the various heresies of innumerable zaike (lay men) and shukke (priests) spring from this tome."3 And of Honen himself Myoe bemoans in Zai-jarin shogon-ki, "The noble and the vulgar join in venerating him."4

Likewise Nichiren (1222-1282), who mounted the stage of history half a century after Honen made his exit, notes in his Rissho ankoku-ron, and in a calamitous tone, the immense influence of senju-nembutsu:

Thanks to Honen's tome, people have turned away from Shakyamuni toward Amida in the faraway West, away from Shakyamuni's bodhisattvas, Bhaisajyaguru, away from all scriptures but the Pure Land Triad Sutras, away from all temples other than Amida's. They turn away monks unless they are Pure Land sectarians. Temples are disintegrating: their moss-grown roofs resemble pine trees, and only the thinnest strands of smoke are to be seen; the cells are dilapidated, and in the wild grass the dew is deep. And yet people have reconstructed neither the temples nor their faith; thus neither holy monks nor benevolent gods have returned to the temples. Honen is to blame. Alas, for the past few decades, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands have been waylaid by the demonic phantasmagoria and have lost sight of the sacred laws. If they have turned away from the central Lotus Sutra toward the marginal nembutsu, is it any surprise that the gods rage while demons take courage? A thousand prayers will not avert disaster; instead may we seal this one evil.5

Of course, one of Nichiren's master tropes is hyperbole, and we would do well not to take his words at face value; nevertheless, we may surmise that Honen's influence did not entirely eclipse after his death.

The Jodo priest not only elicited critiques from contemporary antagonists but was also the rare religious persona to appear by name in literary works such as The Tale of Heike, Azuma Kagami, and Tsurezure gusa.6 In early medieval Japan, Honen had a presence that was already, in a historical sense, auratic.

The Polemic in the Senju Nembutsu
Honen had not intended to initiate a religious movement by preaching senju-nembutsu; rather, in the course of an existential self-questioning, he had finally settled on a ruling paradox: salvation in and through an affirmation death. A religious system that took death rather than life as its point of origin, however, could not simply conform to preceding systems. Honen simply would not recognize the raison d'etre of quasi-professional forms of askesis - very possibly a waste of time and effort in a social context of crisis - and took a distinctly negative stance towards all pursuits other than the vocalization of nembutsu. In a gloss on Shan-tao's Kangyo-sho in his Senchaku-shu, Honen asserts: "Nembutsu is a superior practice selected from the twenty-one billion lands of Buddha; other practices, opted against, are inferior. Thus we say, 'They do not compare.' Nembutsu was vowed by Amida; not so the other practices."7 To posit a one-in-twenty-one-billion choice is consciously bold.

Pure Land Buddhists had always thought of vocal-nembutsu as an inferior practice suited for those incapable of contemplative-nembutsu, but Honen made an about-face to advance precisely that supplementary mode. The physiognomy of Honen presented in biographies is that of a man flexible and tolerant enough to receive people from all classes heartily, but on the nembutsu issue, he was trenchantly exclusive. In another gloss on Shan-tao, this time on Ojo Raisan, Honen insists, "Senju-nembutsu which guarantees salvation for a hundred out of a hundred, must not be relinquished for practices that save only one out of a thousand. Focus on nembutsu, and forget the others."8 Honen justified nembutsu not by appealing to his own personal conviction but by invoking none other than the ultimate authorities. "About nembutsu only can it be said that Shakyamuni, Amida, and all other buddhas chose the practice in unison."9 Nembutsu was defined as the most orthodox of Buddhistic practices; it was not simply a component of Pure Land dogma but the proper, consecrated choice of the omniscient and all other buddhas.

Since vocal-nembutsu was thus the one and only Buddhism, Honen never considered it to be some merely smooth path fit only for those lacking opportunities and perseverance. It is not surprising, then, that he writes in his "Reply to Kita-no-Mandokoro of Regent Kujo": "When those who are ignorant of the paths to salvation say that nembutsu is an easy practice for those incapable of better ones, the ignorant are also terrible slanderers."10 It amounts to an assertion that practices other than vocal-nembutsu are being rejected not because of their difficulty but for their utter pointlessness. Honen's "Correspondence with Hokujo Masako" bespeaks an even more self righteous view: "Those who do not believe in nembutsu are those who have committed serious sins in their past lives and who will promptly return to hell."11 Honen's dogmatic and obsessive faith in nembutsu pushed him so far as to use that last word, which he seldom did.

A maximal recommendation of nembutsu as the creative expression of a transcendental truth could have coexisted with an acceptance of other practices, but for Honen it necessitated a fundamental denial of the value of all other traditional pursuits of salvation. His attitude toward other Buddhist leaders reveals a belligerent hostility whose sole basis and motive in dogmatic confrontation we must be prepared to doubt.

Liberation Theology in Japan
We shall make a detour through the Latin America of our own century to flesh out the polemic in senju-nembutsu. For many Latin American Catholic missionaries who worked in villages and in slums - in other words, for the proponents of a "liberation theology"- a serious engagement with popular suffering under perennial tyranny was added to the tasks of the Christian. In the sixties, the Council of Latin American Bishops, held in Colombia, as well as the second Vatican Council, adopted a manifesto: Catholic ecclesiastics must act toward abolishing the oppression of and discrimination against Latin American believers.

In 1971, the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez wrote Teologia de la liberacion and established the theory and practice of the liberation of the masses as a form of Christian theology. In the Old Testament, Jehovah liberated the Jews from Egyptian rule; in the New Testament, Christ expounded the good news mostly to the poor; thus it followed, in Gutierrez's argument, that true belief must always be accompanied by practice, and that upon hearing the voices of the oppressed, a Christian must stand up in alliance and fight structural injustice. According to Gutierrez, the kingdom of God is to be realized not in another world but in and through our own, through struggles for freedom.

The universality of Christian love is only an abstraction unless it becomes concrete history, process, conflict; it is arrived at only through particularity. To love all men does not mean avoiding confrontations; it does not mean preserving a fictitious harmony. Universal love is that which in solidarity with the oppressed seeks also to liberate the oppressors from their own power, from their ambition, and from their selfishness. . .But this cannot be achieved except by resolutely opting for the oppressed, that is by combating the oppressive class.12

Such a liberation of the Bible from metaphysical interpretation founded a rock on which to confront the temporal world and its endemic exploitation of the masses.

"Liberation theology" unearthed spiritual force in the interests of revolution and it influenced not only democratic movements in the Philippines and Korea but also, in the United States, battles against racial discrimination and gender subordination. When in Latin America, however, this religious movement against institutional violence joined hands with the Marxist movement against dictatorial politics, the amalgam of extremism provoked the Papal District to denounce liberation theology and to impose a gag rule on one of its leaders, the Brazilian Father Boff, in 1984 and 85 respectively.

Despite the radical difference in time and place, Honen's senju-nembutsu might be thought of as the "liberation theology" of medieval Japan, for the presence of dual vectors, secular and religious, generated a liberating potential against the hierarchic nature of the nanto hokurei Buddhism (of Nara and Mt. Hiei) and the otherworldly orientation of ancient Jodo belief. By the end of the Heian period, the temples had become religious landlords of sacred and inviolable shoen estates, whose lands were Buddha's lands and whose peasants were Buddha's slaves; the ancient system had turned medieval. For the peasants, taxes and labor on religious land were obligatory offerings to the buddhas and the kami, while for the landlords, other temples were rivals to be cursed ritually, along with any unfaithful taxpayers. Just as the major temples transformed not only the mechanism of land-rule and tax-rule but, through those measures, transformed themselves, the faces of the buddhas and the kami were refigured for the peasants: divinities did not at all lose their appearances as objects of worship, but were henceforth also looked upon as physical and financial oppressors.13

Honen was not only well-acquainted with the power structure of Buddhist organizations but himself experienced discrimination, being a "mere" nembutsu preacher of "mere" provincial warrior class origin. Hence it is difficult to imagine that Honen was only interested in the theoretical dimensions of nembutsu and not in the dissolution of the reactionary social regime. Nembutsu in of itself - without the resolute negation of all other practices and of the gargantuan Buddhist machine turned oppressive - was a flower in a mirror. Was that not perhaps Honen's absolute choice?

Indeed, if Honen had followed his Jodo predecessors and had characterized nembutsu as an inferior practice for inferior spirits, and had shown respect for other routes to salvation, he would not have been seen as the rather aged enfant terrible that he came to be. On the contrary, Honen's teachings denied any importance to the traditional religious hierarchy, and moreover, rasped against the grain of the estates system that supported and permeated the feudal order. As such, his teachings were no longer a petty dogmatic quibble for the powerful, in whose eyes instead was reflected an organized insurgency. The practitioners of senju-nembutsu were assigned persona non grata status by the established temples - just as the Vatican relegated the liberation theologians to a time-honored brand of exclusion - because senju-nembutsu exceeded its bounds as a revolutionary religious doctrine and grew into a social movement with politico-economic impact.

The insolence of nembutsu practitioners has been recorded in Shaseki-shu, written by Muju (1226-1312) after Honen's death. For instance, in the episode called "A Pure Land Buddhist Blasphemes the Gods and Incurs Punishment," a certain believer in Kyushu takes over part of the rice-paddies owned by a Shinto shrine. When the angry priests threaten to curse him, he simply retorts, "I have nothing to fear. Go ahead and curse me. We Pure Land Buddhists think nothing of divinity. The kami cannot punish those of us who do not bask in their light." Despite his mother's frenetic pleas, he refuses to repent, and the priests place a curse upon him. Madness overtakes him, and he dies.14 Hence by all means refrain from taunting the gods is the moral of the story, and probably such boisterous acts existed not only on paper. In Senji-sho, Nichiren has also recorded such disturbances of the social order by nembutsu fanatics.

Those who hope for the Pure Land curtail their faith in Enryaku-ji, To-ji, Onjo-ji, the seven ma]or temples of Nara, and others all over Japan. They rob the temples' lands in order to replenish nembutsu halls.15

Prior to the dissemination of senju-nembutsu, practitioners of nembutsu were not known for appropriating the precincts of powerful temples, at least according to extant texts; the tenets of senju-nembutsu were always the aegis for the new-found defiance.

Senju-nembutsu exhibited a tendency to remove moral obstacles and to outgrow Honen; it walked on its own, proceeded to extremes, and turned into a political movement, just like liberation theology. To allow senju-nembutsu to run amok amongst the masses posed the danger of economic upheaval to the powerful temples that required peasant labor to till their soil. In addition, the temples could repeatedly dispatch troops of warrior monks to dissenting aristocrats in the capital only because the ecclesiastics were backed by divine authority, whose authenticity, when questioned, directly destabilized the temple's political might.

Honen himself, however, was probably aware from the very inception of senju-nembutsu that its cliche-wracking doctrines could easily lead to anti-social behavior. Thus the final words of Senchaku-shu warn, "Once you have finished reading this book, do not leave it by a window but bury it under a wall, so that it may not corrupt those who would readily challenge Buddhist law."16 But it was improbable for the first articulation of a Japanese liberation theology to remain solely in the hands of trustworthy disciples. Its content resonated all-too-urgently with the religious and social demands of a people under oppression. Senchaku-shu eluded the grasp of the coterie and was born unto the world, and as Honen had feared, its public life begged for the organized repression of those with whom it had originated.

Disassembling the Estates System
The anti-sociality of Senju-nembutsu, which negated not only the validity of traditional pursuits of salvation but also the estates system that supported the religious order, is sensed from the sixth article of Kofuku-ji sojo:

On the day when an august emperor designates, at the court where he conducts affairs of state, the officials to act in his behalf, he requests service from the wise and the foolish, each according to their abilities, and from families both of high and low status. But to the foolish he does not entrust a position which would not be within their capacity even if they were to apply themselves from morning till night; and a person of low social status cannot advance to the rank of the nobility even if he is diligent in public affairs. In his own country the Great King of Enlightenment dispenses his ranks of Nine Stages at the gate where the wise and the foolish come to his court. His principle of selection is surely that one receives in accord with his performance in observing virtuous behavior in former lives. It would be an excess of stupidity for one to rely entirely on the Buddha's power without taking into account his own condition in life.17

In other words, just as the momentary successes, or even the sustained diligence of a subaltern cannot propel him through customary boundaries into augmented prestige in the temporal world, so in the realm of the spirit he is reincarnated only in accordance with his lowly birth; the minions of senju-nembutsu, however, believe that they can attain salvation through the power of Amida Buddha, despite their meanness. Such a view, on the one hand, betrays the arrogance of establishment monks coming from aristocratic origins, but, on the other hand, the strict co-relationship between temporal and religious class was in general an unquestioned fact.

Due to the perspicacity of early Buddhism which over a few centuries had faithfully and ravenously ingested continental religious thought. Japanese Buddhism was able to construct a sufficiently variegated system. But only an elite few who could pass the national entrance examination could pass through the pillars of and into a Buddhism proper; others could become private monks and practice outside its gates, but could not participate in the political and economic privileges of the institution. For those who were not officially "in", the gates of temples, which housed abbot-landlords, did not invite free access. The gears of the Buddhism machine repelled impurities. In short, a deep gulf divided the temples from everyday life.

In Honen's case, however, the core of his values was the transcendence of death. By the transcendence of death we do not mean that Honen attempted to transcend death; rather, it was for him death and its absolute irreducibility that transcended all else. He thus disregarded the intellectual framework, the horizon of the thought system of his contemporaries, that is, the estates system in both its secular and religious forms. In Senchaku-shu, he sweeps away the six paramitas - charity, the observance of precepts, perseverance, motivation, meditation, and wisdom - and instead sheds light on the darker, lower rungs of the ladder of salvation.

If financing towers and statues are a condition for salvation, the poor would be hopeless; if wisdom and capability are a condition, the foolish would be hopeless; if vast learning is a condition, the unschooled would be hopeless; if the observation of precepts is a condition, the disobedient would be hopeless. The list goes on; however, few are the rich, the wise, the learned, and the observant, while many are the poor, the foolish, the unschooled, and the disobedient, . . .Thus Amida vowed vocal-nembutsu, a practice open to all.18

The temples of the old Buddhist establishment craved ties to court nobles and other aristocrats precisely because the temples hoped for generous donations of statues and towers. For Honen to deny any causality between such generosity and salvation was a deliberate challenge, and the order of temples could not ignore it nor the absolute valuation of nembutsu that launched it.

The truism is that Honen presented a flat egalitarianism in which everyone, regardless of birth, ability, knowledge, and conduct, would be saved. On the contrary, just as he capsized the prevalent ethic, he reversed the order of salvation chiasmatically, or in a carnival not confined in the usual manner to momentary, tension-releasing festivities. "The Pure Land has nine categories supposedly. So be it. What matters is that a terrible sinner can be reincarnated into a higher life just as faithful students of sacred texts can be reborn as a lowlife."19 Thus Honen did not deny the traditional concept of nine categories (kuhon) but interpreted it in his own manner. If he had preached that both knowledgeable, high-ranking monks and those lesser souls who broke or lacked precepts were equally guaranteed salvation, senju-nembutsu would probably not have won such a vast following so rapidly. Honen clearly handed out the one-digit tickets of salvation to those who had been less prioritized, and sent the envied elite monks at the summit of the religious estates system to the very end of the line. The masses' acute feeling of political, economic, and moral oppression made them swallow with particular relish and relief the mirror-image derangement of the order of estates.

Honen made another major contribution to Buddhist thought; namely, he rectified its persistent misogyny. Before the absoluteness of death, the asymmetric gender distinction dissolved as did social status, and Honen won many female followers. In Nembutsu ojoyogi-sho, he says:

Amida's Vow was made so that we who live in the latter days of the law may attain Birth in the Pure Land (ojo). Do not despair that because you are women you are corrupt and sinful. Amida made his vow in the first place because he took to heart the sinful, sentient folk that were abandoned by the buddhas of three generations and the tathagatas of the ten directions. If you believe deeply in your salvation and chant namu-amida-butsu, namu-amida-butsu, then good or not man or not, ten out of ten, a hundred out of a hundred, all will be eventually saved.20

Honen, it is true, did not completely elude the prejudices of his epoch and thus repeated cliches such as henjo-nanji (women must transform into a men in order to be saved), and did not treat the two sexes with full equality.

That he was nonetheless the first monk to confront a given woman as another human being is suggested by his dialogic engagements with women recorded for instance in his correspondences and in the Ippyaku shiju-go kajo mondo. Hagiographies of Honen are replete with the motif of his encounters with the mean and the vulgar. who are saved through conversations with him. Let us quote Honen's well-known lecture to a prostitute in Muronotsu.

What you are doing is indeed sinful. The future retribution for your act is immeasurable. You received this bad fate due to past karma. The present bad cause will surely bring a bad effect in the future. If you have something else to do for a living, quit your job right now. Even if you do not have anything else to do, but instead have courage to ignore your life, still quit it. If you have neither another job nor courage, then keep reciting the nembutsu just as you are. .... In fact, women like you are the most invited guests of Amida's Vow.21

These are supposedly the words Honen uttered to a prostitute who lamented that the nature of her profession drastically reduced, to say the least, her chances for salvation. Of course, the historical veracity of the episode itself is moot, but it is certain that Honen was indeed so radical as to assert that "women like you are the most invited guests of Amida's Vow."

Further, we might ask: Was it not in fact the women of the capital who enlightened the renegade monk who had previously spent four decades in the single-gendered community of Mount Hiei? It is quite possible that Honen's attitude towards women was profoundly altered by the strong-willed, opinionated ladies, akin to those who produced Heian literature, who surrounded him. It was not Honen who liberated women, then, but women who liberated Honen from the prejudices of Buddhism.

Senju-nembutsu prioritized the salvation of the denigrated, including women, through an egalitarianism that was not uniform but complex and compensatory, and hence it exerted the immense social impact that previous nembutsu doctrines had lacked. Hagiographies represent Honen in free, direct, unprejudiced discourse with various personages, ranging from court nobles, aristocrats, and warriors, to merchants, peasants, fishermen, and prostitutes. We would do well to doubt the veracity of these fables, but we would do better to imagine that the freshness of Honen's disregard for the rigid estates system did indeed attract such various characters to him, If we take too lightly the principle of salvation as equality in death, which Honen discovered in a strictly categorized society from which neither ecclesiastics nor commoners could easily slip away, we will lose the entire meaning and function of senju-nembutsu.

Dangerous Elements
The forces of traditional Buddhism launched a counter-attack against senju-nembutsu, which was clearly a deranged theory for the medieval order of thought. Although the high priests admitted the value of nembutsu as one of many practices, they emphasized, to the imperial court, that Honen's assertions blasphemed the Buddhist order that shielded the state spiritually, and thus by extension jeopardized state sovereignty itself. In the first year of the Genkyu era (1204), the monks of Enryaku-ji appealed to their abbot, Shinjo, to denigrate senju-nembutsu. A year later, the imperial court received the Kofuku-ji sojo; Gedatsubo Jokei (1155-1213), it has been said, wrote up this appeal on behalf of eight orthodox Buddhist schools. The nine vigorously denounced wrongdoings of senju-nembutsu are as follows:

One: Founding a new school
Namely, "The court should have been requested for permission. It was improper to found a school privately." Since under the statute system the state was in charge of religious affairs, it was unforgivable for Honen to proceed in disregard of Buddhist tradition, that is, without the legation of a master.

Two: Depicting a new image
The followers of senju-nembutsu created a sesshu-fusha mandala in which the light of Amida shines upon lay nembutsu practitioners but eschew the scholars and monks of other schools, leaving them in the dark. The eight powerful schools feared that the masses would hence be brainwashed visually as well as verbally.

Three: Making light of Shakyamuni Buddha
Namely, "They do not pay their respects to all the buddhas " Amida was treated as the only Buddha. Indeed, Honen writes in Senchaku-shu that, "By the marginal practices is meant the worship of any buddhas other than Amida," and rejects the traditional multiplicity of Buddhism.

Four: Preventing good deeds
The followers of senju-nembutsu were criticized for asserting that "Those who read the Lotus Sutra are bound for hell" or that "Those who seek the Pure Land through the Lotus Sutra slander Mahayana Buddhism." They were also criticized here for rejecting the good deeds of financing religious edifices and drawing holy images. In Senchaku-shu, Honen says that donations, the observation of precepts, aspiration for enlightenment, almsgiving to monks, and reverence for one's parents have all been opted against by Amida as routes to salvation.

Five: Betraying the divine spirits
Namely, "The nembutsu cult has long ignored the virtues of kami, have failed to respect shrines, and have refused to distinguish the sacred manifestations of the Buddha and bodhisattvas from the spirits of animals and men. They say that believers in the kami plunge themselves into the realm of demons." Needless to say, the establishment Buddhist's claim that not submitting to the spiritual avatars is tantamount to not submitting to the Buddha himself was supported by the traditions of shinbutsu shugo and honji-suijaku (Japanese Shinto gods are reincarnations of buddhas and bodhisattvas).

Six: Neglecting the Truth of the Pure Land
Honen was attacked for dismissing the multiple practices, for misunderstanding Pure Land thought, and for misleading the people. Also criticized here was Honen's view, stated above, that absolutely everyone is saved equally through nembutsu, with no causal connection to degrees of goodness, wisdom, behavior, or merit, whereas the Buddhist establishment had set up ranks in salvation.

Seven: Misinterpreting nembutsu
Until then, Pure Land belief had ranked the contemplation of nembutsu above its vocalization, but Honen raised the latter from the bottom to the pinnacle of paths to salvation. Jokei points out that there is no basis to Honen's claim that out of Amida's forty-eight vows, only the eighteenth is authentic.

Eight: Insulting the ecclesiastics
Namely, assertions of senju-nembutsu followers like this: "Gambling does not conflict with our faith. Neither do adultery nor eating meat prevent salvation. The observers of the precepts of another world are tigers in our own world to be feared and hated. The fear of sin and the hatred of evil belong to those who do not have faith in Amida." For Jokei, who hoped to reintroduce precepts into Buddhist organizations, nembutsu believers who flaunted their transgression were virtually criminals.

Nine: Disturbing the national order
This final article begins, "Religious law and secular law are as mind and body; their health and fortunes reflect each other " The article in turn reflects the situation of the eight schools as the spiritual guardian of the state. They point to the political menace of a doctrine that called for an end to all state-ordained rituals, and which could easily produce anti-Buddhas such as King Pusyamitra of India and the Chinese Emperor Hui-Ch'ang.22

Like Myoe, Honen's most important contemporary critic, Jokei was striving to reinstitute the precepts. He held a belief in Shakyamuni Buddha that could be called absolute, a veneration for the gods based in honji-suijaku that made him author Kasuga Daimyojin Hotsugan-bun and in general a value system that exemplified traditional Buddhism; he held, also, that the aspiration for enlightenment was crucial in exiting the cycle of transmigration. He did not give vent, however, to the murderous rage against senju-nembutsu that we may rightly impute to him, for the appeal is logical and cogent. It is not certain whether Honen and his direct disciples had committed the acts listed, but among the followers of Honen many doubtlessly took their master's teachings to extremes. Jokei's appeal, in fact, contains a passage that sympathizes with Honen: "The priest is a wise man. He himself probably does not mean to slander the precepts. . . .We are not so sure about his disciples. Misdeeds have been perpetrated by the foolish sort amongst them, and in the future, all of them may well prove to be of the same sort."23 That Jokei is said to have written the appeal without ever having read the Senchaku-shu suggests that the antisocial conduct of senju-nembutsu believers was indeed rife, and ripe for criticism.

Honen was not the only leader among the new Buddhisms of the Kamakura period to be persecuted for radical teachings. Eisai and Nichiren also received violent feedback; however, national consciousness played a central role in the teachings of the authors of Kozen gokoku-ron and Rissho ankoku-ron, whereas the idea of the nation was entirely absent in Honen's senju-nembutsu. This did not elude the administrators, and so the persecution of senju-nembutsu, the foremost dangerous element of the medieval era, surpassed all precedents in Japan's religious history. The faith in nembutsu, for which sesshu-fusha was a first principle, and from which national consciousness was excluded, could easily tap the potential energy of a people wishing to resist power. Such a historical necessity, as Jokei had warned did arise in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when riots of nembutsu followers erupted again and again and all over Japan.

Honen's Agony
The imperial court could no longer neglect the proliferation of appeals that blew in from the Buddhist establishment. Two years after Jokei wrote his, the Ken-ei Persecution of 1205 took place: Honen, Shinran, and six others were condemned to exile; four including Anraku and Juren, to death. Shinran protested with these words:

The Emperor and his ministers betrayed truth and morality, and bore an unfair grudge and wrath. Thus Honen and several of his disciples were condemned without due consideration: some to death, and others to exile after having been stripped of their holy names. I was one of the latter.24

While Shinran, by no means Honen's closest disciple, raged against the violent persecution, curiously enough his master not only did not organize a frontal resistance but in fact took an attitude that appeared compromising. For Honen was no longer a lone seeker of the way but the leader of a rapidly expanding network of nembutsu practitioners, and as such, could no longer unhesitatingly voice his first-order principles.

For example, in 1204, when the monks of Enryaku-ji clamored for the cessation of nembutsu to the abbot of Tendai, Honen penned a request of prudence to his followers namely the Shichikajo seikai and submitted it to the abbot with the two hundred co-signatures of his disciples. In its first article Honen cautions against slandering other sects: "Self-righteous slander is external to Amida's vow. The certain punishment is the abyss." Although he claims in Senchaku-shu that only senju-nembutsu is the doctrine of right, here he effects, or affects, a volte-face. In the fourth article, he cautions against misdeeds and the breaking of precepts, going so far as to declare, "Precepts are the earth of Buddhism " If we recall that one of the main tenets of senju-nembutsu is the elimination of precepts, we can sense the extent of Honen's compromise. The man who urges in Ichimai kishomon to practice nembutsu "as if one were a dimwitted illiterate or an ignorant nun or monk, that is, without any pedantic air," here says instead, "In the last decade or so, there have been more and more bad, ignorant folk, who not only do injustice to Amida's vow, but pollute the teachings of the omniscient Buddha. They must and will be chastized,"25 It manifestly contradicts Honen's customary affirmation of sinners.

What loomed before Honen was a compendium of authoritative temples referred to sometimes as the Kenmitsu alliance. Compared to an organization that could and did manipulate the will of the imperial court, the senju-nembutsu collective was feeble. Honen's posture of submission attested to the anguished position of a man who was on the one hand an individual with an immovable religious experience in his interior cosmos and on the other hand a leader responsible for the destiny of a newborn association of faith. Of course, although Honen showed an outward face of humility, his principles probably had not wavered; for even after the Shichikajo incident, he transmitted the Senchaku-shu to disciples such as Ryukan and Shinran. The Kofuku-ji sojo had criticized Honen's followers for never truly reforming their attitudes and for mutually assuring, "The Shonin's words are all two-sided, and don't go to the heart of the matter. Don't be influenced by what you hear from outsiders!"26 Amongst them, an official proclamation like the Shichikajo quite lacked any significance, except perhaps a parodic one.

The persecution, however continued after Honen's death. Thirteen years hence, in 1224 (third year of Teio), Enryaku-ji submitted its report to the Throne, which moved to ban senju-nembutsu. In 1227 (third year of Karoku) Honen's tomb in Otani of Higashiyama was destroyed, and in response to an appeal from warrior monks, the imperial court reissued its ban. Ryogen, Kua, and Kosai were sentenced to exile, and forty-four others were chased out of Kyoto. In front of the grand auditorium of Enryaku-ji, the ideological foundation of senju-nembutsu, copies of the Senchaku-shu, were burned along with the woodcuts.

Thus it was that vocal-nembutsu, with its tenet of salvation in death, and as an expression of the consciousness of this salvation, originally a solution to Honen's personal agony, constructed a value system at odds with a religious tradition, and at blows with the religious and the interrelated secular authorities. Because the agonies of thirteenth-century Japanese had their cause not solely in the fear of karmic retribution after life but finally in the political and economic system that surrounded them, the new movement that attempted to liberate the people from such agony had to encapsulate a destructive kernel that could explode the twinned Church and State. In a sense, a faith that did not beckon persecution could not have helped a people to cope with the unbearable heaviness of a historical context.

This paper eventually became the book Renegade Monk : Honen and Japanese Pure Land Buddhism published by University of California Press

NOTES:
1. Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Vol. 86, ed. Akamatsu Toshihide (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1977), p. 294.
2. Jodoshu Zensho, ed. Jodo-shu Kaishu Happyaku-nen Kinen Keisan Junbikyoku (Tokyo: Sankibo Shorin, 1977), Vol. 16, p. 490.
3. Nihon shiso taikei, Vol. 15, ed. Tanaka Hisao (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974), p. 44-45.
4. Jodo-shu zensho, Vol. 8, p. 128.
5. Showa teihon Nichiren Shonin ibun, ed. Rissho Daigaku Nichiren Kyogaku Kenkyu-sho (Yamanashi: Kuon-ji, 1965). Vol. 1, pp. 216-17.
6. Cf. The Tale of Heike, trans. Helen Craig McCullough (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1988), pp. 334-335; [Coates and Ishizuka, p. 488]; Yasuraoka Kosaku, Tsurezuregusa zen-chushaku (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1978), Vol. 1, p. 191.
7. Honen zenshu, ed. Ohashi Shunyu (Tokyo: Shunjusha, 1989). Vol. 2, p. 229.
8. ibid, p. 157.
9. ibid, p. 309.
10. Showa-shinshu Honen Shonin zenshu, ed. Ishii Kyodo, (Kyoto: Heirakuji Shoten, 19S5), p. 533.
11. ibid, p. 532.
12. Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Liberation, trans. and ed. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (New York: Orbis Books, 1973), pp. 275-76.
13. Kuroda Toshio, Kuroda Toshio Chosakushu (Kyoto: Hozokan, 1994), Vol. 2, p. 22.
14. Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Vol. 85, p. 83.
15. Nichiren ibun, Vol. 2, p. 1006.
16. Honen zenshu, Vol. 2, p. 320.
17. Robert E. Morrell, Early Kamakura Buddhism (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1987), p. 82.
18. Honen zenshu, Vol, 2, p, 198-99.
19. ibid, p. 270.
20. Ishii, op. cit., p. 682.
22. Morrell, op. cit., pp. 75-88.
23. Shiso Taikei, Vol, 15, pp. 32-42.
24. Shinran zenshu, ed. Ishida Mizumaro (Tokyo: Shunju-sha, 1986), Vol. 2, p. 494.
25. Ishii, op. cit., p. 789,
26. Morrell, op. cit., p. 88