Why Anarchists Like Zen? A Libertarian Reading of Shinran (1173–1263)^107
Uchiyama Gudo (Berkeley: Institute of Buddhist Studies, 2013). Also,
instances of the tendency to present Zen as an inherently anarchist phi-
losophy separated from its history can be found in the writings of John
Clark, Kerry Thornley, Brad Warner and to some extent Gary Snyder.
- For Suzuki’s own account of the Zen tradition see Daisetz Suzuki,
Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993), pp. 3–18. Griffith Foulk, ‘Ritual in Japanese Zen Buddhism’, in
Zen Ritual. Studies of Zen Buddhist Theory in Practice, ed. by Steven
Heine and Dale Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 36. - James Brown.“The Zen of Anarchy: Japanese Exceptionalism
and the Anarchist Roots of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance”.
Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 19.2
(Summer 2009) p. 214. - For a brief discussion of this historical tendency see Rachelle
Scott, Nirvana for Sale. Buddhism, Wealth and the Contemporary
Dharmakaya Temple in Contemporary Temple (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2009), pp. 8–11. - Shinran uses the term Jodo Shinshu (literally ‘the true Pure Land
way’) to refer to his own doctrine, which in his view is a restate-
ment of what his teacher Honen taught. However, Shinran developed
Honen’s thought and substantially reinterpreted and enriched it in a
number of ways, as Alfred Bloom discusses at length in “Honen and
Shinran: Loyalty and Independence”, in Shindharmanet (http://www.
shindharmanet.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/pdf/Bloom-Loyalty.
pdf, 2012). Throughout this chapter, I will be using the term Jodo
Shinshu as synonymous with Shinran’s thought and not as referring
to any specific institutional denomination. - To make clear that the term tariki, literally “other power”, is not
meant to imply a power completely external to the individual but
simply other to her or his conscious self, Mark Blum offers these sug-
gestions for the translation of the term: “Tariki, also called butsuriki
[buddha-power] or ganriki [vow-power], denotes the transcendent
power of a buddha, but because of the ambiguity inherent in the re-
lationship between buddha and self in the tathagatagarbha [literally
buddha-seed, but generally translated as buddha nature] doctrines,
which have always been close to Pure Land thought, ‘spiritual power
beyond the known self’ is a more apt gloss for this term” (Blum, p. 8).