102 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
attempts to redefine his own authority in a decentralizing way,
and his nonconformist attitude towards what he perceived as cor-
rupt secular and religious powers, can inspire a fruitful reflection
about the social relations at work in Buddhist anarchist commu-
nities and their relationship to their larger societies. Moreover,
as Buddhist anarchism grapples with its own relationship to the
state, the history of Buddhists who wrestled with the state and
kept a respectful but resistant distance can yield many poetical
and political lessons. In these ways, the critical and rebellious side
of Shinran can be extrapolated and re-engaged for resisting other
and more recent practices of domination and oppression.
6. Concluding Thoughts
This discussion of the libertarian potential of Shinran fulfills a
dual purpose: to reveal the more anarchistic aspects of Shinran’s
teaching, using them for formulating a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist an-
archism; and to offer some of his insights as a counterbalance
to the privileging of an orientalist and ahistorical conception of
Zen in recent Buddhist anarchist rhetoric. Offering an alternative,
though not necessarily incompatible, Buddhist foundation for
forging a different Buddhist anarchism, could enable the Western
Buddhist anarchist tradition to question its own assumptions and
histories of power. Furthermore, Shinran’s emphasis on trust and
devotional language destabilizes Buddhist anarchist orientalist
imaginings of Buddhism as exclusively meditative, non-religious
and, in a post-enlightenment sense, rational. However, a Shinran-
based anarchism shows how Buddhist anarchism need not be
couched in the language of exceptionalism that regards Buddhism
as “the religion of no-religion”.^85
A clear example is the logic of tariki, which is grounded in
Buddhist rationality and philosophy, but which sits awkwardly
with a purely meditative Buddhism stripped of “religious” ele-
ments. Nonetheless, tariki frees up the Buddhist practitioner from
traditional Buddhist regimes of practice, which often involved hi-
erarchical and disciplinary elements. Since the unmediated agency
of the Amida Buddha acts directly on the practitioner it might be
said to be a Buddhist “right of private judgment”, enabling the