Hōnen

Hōnen (法然, 1133–1212) is the founder of the Jōdo-shū, the first independent Pure Land school in Japan. Born Seishi-maru in Mimasaka Province (present-day Okayama prefecture), he entered Mt. Hiei in 1147 and trained in the Tendai curriculum for nearly thirty years. The decisive turn came at age 43 (1175), when he read Shandao’s Commentary on the Sutra of Contemplation on Amitāyus and arrived at the conviction that exclusive recitation of Amida’s name — senchaku nenbutsu — is the practice that the cosmic Buddha selected as sufficient for sentient beings in the age of mappō, the final dharma.

The doctrinal statement of this position is the 1198 Senchakushū (Senchaku Hongan Nembutsu Shū), composed at the request of the regent Kujō Kanezane. The text argues that of the many practices the Buddhist tradition records, the nenbutsu of Amida is the one practice the Original Vow itself selects; the others are “miscellaneous practices” (zōgyō) whose efficacy depends on the practitioner’s capacity, while the nenbutsu is universally available.

Hōnen’s teaching attracted a large following across the social register — courtiers, samurai, peasants, women — and provoked sustained opposition from the established Buddhist institutions. In 1207, after a court incident in which two of Hōnen’s disciples were accused of impropriety with court ladies, the Kennin persecution stripped Hōnen of his monastic status under the lay name Fujii Motohiko and exiled him to Sanuki Province on Shikoku. He was pardoned in 1211 and returned to Ōtani in Kyoto, where he died in 1212.

His disciple Shinran (1173–1263), exiled in the same 1207 incident, would extend Hōnen’s doctrine into the Jōdo Shinshū, the True Pure Land School, which became the largest Buddhist denomination in Japan by the early modern period. Through Shinran, and the parallel lineage of Benchō and others, Hōnen is the doctrinal head of the entire Japanese Pure Land tradition.

The Hōnen Shōnin Eden — the Illustrated Biography of Hōnen — is the principal pictorial source for his life, composed in forty-eight scrolls between roughly 1307 and 1317 at the order of Emperor Go-Fushimi, and held at Chion-in, the head temple of the Jōdo-shū in Kyoto. The Met’s Hōnen Shūikotokuden-e fragments are among the cleared Western-institutional witnesses to the visual programme.

Sources

1. [1] ↵ — Mark L. Blum, The Origins and Development of Pure Land Buddhism: A Study and Translation of Gyōnen's Jōdo Hōmon Genrushō (Oxford University Press, 2002) print reference

   Doctrinal genealogy of Pure Land from the continental sources through Hōnen and his successors.

2. [2] ↵ — Senchakushū English Translation Project, Hōnen's Senchakushū: Passages on the Selection of the Nembutsu in the Original Vow (University of Hawai'i Press / Kuroda Institute, 1998) print reference

   Standard English translation of the 1198 doctrinal treatise.

3. [3] ↵ — Sōhō Machida, Renegade Monk: Hōnen and Japanese Pure Land Buddhism (University of California Press, 1999) print reference

   Biographical and doctrinal study; the persecution and exile of 1207.