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12/16/2005

Nembutsu & no utopia

Some time ago I set off on a journey, elsewhere called Sailing West that is in the direction of the Pureland where Amida resides. This direction or vector one can call the teleological vector. Sometimes visible, sometimes not, but unmistakable there always, as an eternal path cutting through the erratic movements of the mind. Telos can be translated as the destination or goal of the journey and one can read the logos as the logistics of the path leading to it. This vector points to ‘the other shore’ it is the vector of one’s aspiration to accord with the good, the true and the beauty, which exceeding our present state, can heal us and teach us to cope with our desires that orisinating from our innate lack of being, the nagging feeling of an absence. Or the realm of ‘in between,’ the bardo, the sometimes unbearable dualism between this world and the Pureland.


Impatience is a form of the desire to be relieved of this uncomfortable state, this dis-ease this dukkha. People try to make shortcuts, try to make circumstances in which dreams can come to realization, one tries to construct its own utopias. One has to know however that utopias come in the end only in two flavours, represent a clear and radical solution for all of human suffering brought back to a simple set of causes, and cannot exist without exclusions. This is the lesson, individual and collective of the attempts to bring the paradise ‘in culture:’ Paradise lost and Paradise regained.
The two flavours of utopia in practice are the extreme individualistic radical solution and the collectivistic radical solution. Both are strategies against the most uncomfortable circumstance of our life that is the realization that we are born in one singular body, but are with many. So the two flavours of utopia are on the one hand: to do away with or exclude the many others we have to live with by make a cult out of our singular bodily state and claim as much ‘Lebensraum’ (life space) for our own (propria) being, without the danger that we can be disturbed by the other who knocks at our door. Eunesco said: ‘When somebody knocks at our door, you never know who is there.’ So in order to live as a proper German of pure blood on purified soil, symbolized in the membership of the Nazi party, those of impure blood that pollute the land that belongs to us, the Jew, the Gipsy, the homosexual, the mentally retarded, have to die, they sacrifice their life for a higher purpose, a clear and pure space of blond, blue eyed half gods, that can live in peace for the coming thousand years. That means that ‘We’ or the notion of being ‘With’ others is a reassuring matter because ‘We’ are the same and not other.
On the other hand one can deal with the unbearable tension between singular and plural, by making the collective the Paradise, that means that is no place for singularity, no place for the sleepless that suffer, those who carry the burden of thinking for themselves, those who are haunted by the face of the other, those who listen to the appeal that is written in the vulnerability of the human face that cries out for mercy. ‘I do not see any problems, I only see people with (or that make) problems,’ said one of the revered fathers of the workers paradise, Stalin. We know better now, 50 million people lost their lives in the realization of some utopian experiments. And the experimentation goes on. The super-individualistic Pax Americana, the shameless playing with the word Empire. The plead of the extreme rich to be left alone, because they are becoming sick of the constant moral attack on their possessions. ‘It is difficult enough to be rich,’ one of this plagued individuals said in an interview.
So the crux of this lessons of recent and not so recent history is the role of the Other.
And this brings us to the other hand:
If the one vector of Pureland Buddhism is of a teleological nature, then the other vector is of an interpersonal nature. The revelation of the Pureland to us in human terms, its relation and movement towards it. This vector develops in us as a dualism between self and Buddha.

So as a safeguard against the bitter historical experiences, and as two criteria for living a non utopian life, or so to say, two criteria for reality there are this two dualisms, the ignorance of which will eventually lead to destruction:
The dualism of this world and the Pureland.
The dualism of self and Buddha.
There is NO solution for this dualism or this tension, every attempt to bring this dualism conceptually or practically to unity or to synthesis leads eventually to the destruction of that what one aspires for.
The Pureland becomes than just an exotic somewhat bizarre mythos, one of many that function as the solution of human lack by creating an object of desire one can fantasize about, a temporary abode as an opium-dream. An escape in sugary fairy-tale, a romantic main stream Hollywood production. Here remember Marx words: ‘Religion is the opium of the people.’
In the second dualism, the Buddha is destroyed, by thinking that one can become Buddha by one’s own will. Here Buddha is made to more of the same, a comfortable construction, and extension of self, of that which one can own, for instance Buddha-nature, the name for an innate mental and spiritual capacity that residing in us only waits to be awakened as the beautiful maiden kissed in the fairy-tale. Buddha as a sweet chap, a peaceful statue, just what need on the mantlepiece. But in the end of the day the same as me but then somewhat better. Here I prefer to define Buddha as a much more disturbing OTHER, who cannot now nor never be brought together with my self in a comfortable economical arrangement.
And to be honest, there is virtually no word that can make me so hellish as the easiness with which non-dualists speak about the Pureland in this world as ‘worldpeace’ and as me becoming a Buddha.


I rather prefer to die in the war of my senses than to give up the space of tension that gives my life a bite, a burn, a frostbite, a jolt, an appeal, a scream, a creation and a birth out of an unbearable longing. This tension gave me back my life, the movement, the colours, the whole poetry that brings the tears in my eyes, that allow me to make spontaneously a tender gesture to another face that is wet of tears and hurt. And life is on its very best when the waterways of sadness that are etched in my soul are overflowing of a deep and unbearable painful love, that can only be sublimated by the power from without.

Nembutsu is the meeting place of this world and the Pureland.
Nembutsu is the place where I appear uneasy before the Buddha that is just the transcendence of me in the prison of my self. The ultimate face of the OTHER, that asks me time by time by time: ‘What are you going to do now, what are you going to do with me?’
So the Nembutsu is the tranquillity that comes by laying off one’s desire and impatience to construct a Pureland here, by abiding in an ever and ever deepening longing, giving up the wish for an easy way out, for a satisfactory solution, knowing that such a solution would be murder and stagnation of that which is in it’s very nature as ungraspable as the faint whiff of a rose in summer. In the knowledge that the Pureland that one can visualize or construct is impermanent and that fixing it is just be thrown back to the world from which one just departed. So the Nembutsu is more an absurd battle call on a blackened battle field after a battle lost. The one scream that sounds where is no sound heard than the moaning of the last one’s dying of the violence we inflict on each other. The Nembutsu is not a medicine that can prevent war and violence but can certainly give rise to deep feeling of contrition, the deepest part of it I mean, the black realm where the silence is, and where mysterious enough one finds joy, one finds solace for one’s malignant sadness in the soft breeze of an infinite mercy.
So the Nembutsu is the courage to look and to witness one’s own foolishness…
The Nembutsu is standing with one leg firmly grounded in stupidity and ignorance and with the other leg making an attempt to a step in another realm, never a proud and firm step, always seeking, always a bit dizzy, always a bit wobbly, always a bit as if I just learned the first steps as a child, only just learning to keep my balance in an upright state after only being able to creep and walk on my parent’s hand before.
But I have to walk, I have to move, I have to sing with all the others, endless repeating and repeating till I may trust, giving up my hope at last that I can do it all myself, till Amida and his helpers give me faith and declare my crooked path as good enough as it is. Till at last I appear before them and they before me trembling and hurt but at the same time full of love and tenderness, aggressive and able to strike and at the same changing the nappy of my grandson who is very smelly little chap indeed.

Namo Amida Bu

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