(HONGAKU) thought—the chief religious issue was of-
ten cast in terms less of how one might purify and per-
fect the self than of how one might best contact the
realm of universal buddhahood and tap into its power.
The new Buddhist movements of the Kamakura pe-
riod can themselves be seen as variant strategies for an-
swering this question.
Thus, for example, the Pure Land teachings tended
to treat the symbol of buddhahood in anthropomor-
phic terms, as the figure of the Buddha AMITABHA, and
to understand the universality of enlightenment as the
unlimited power of Amitabha’s compassionate con-
cern for all beings. The religious strategy, then, was to
access this power by surrendering the pride that sepa-
rated us from Amitabha, humbly accepting his help,
and calling his name (nenbutsu) in faith and thanks-
giving. In contrast, the new Zen movement preferred
to think of universal buddhahood less in anthropo-
morphic than in epistemological terms, as a sublimi-
nal mode of consciousness shared by all beings. Here,
the prime religious problem lay not in pride but in the
habits of thought that obscured the enlightened con-
sciousness, and the chief religious strategy was to sus-
pend such habits, through Zen meditation (zazen), in
order to “uncover” the buddha mind within.
For its own part, the esoteric tradition itself tended
to conceive of buddhahood in cosmological terms, as
the hidden macrocosm of which the human world was
the manifest embodiment. An elaborate system of ho-
mologies was developed between the properties of the
buddha realm and the physical features of Japan, be-
tween the deities of the Buddhist pantheon and the lo-
cal gods of Japan, between the virtues of the cosmic
buddha and the psychophysical characteristics of the
individual, and so on. The chief means of communi-
cation between the two realms was ritual practice—
recitation of spells and prayers, performance of mystic
gestures, repentance, sacrifice, PILGRIMAGE, and the
like—through which the forces of the other realm were
contacted and channeled into this world, and the peo-
ple and places of this world were mystically empow-
ered by (or revealed as) the sacred realities of the
buddha realm.
This cosmological style of religion is often now held
up as one of the key unifying forces of Japanese Bud-
dhism, a force that flows across history, from theJAPAN
The famous Zen garden at the Ryoanji, Kyoto, Japan, which probably dates from the late fifteenth century. © Abe Ahn and Tim Cic-
cone, http://www.orientalarchitecture.com. Reproduced by permission.