Paper short abstract:

Philosopher Tanabe Hajime argues that Pure Land myth reveals a dialectical understanding of history. This paper explores how Tanabe builds on a temporal structure suggested by Soga Ryōjin, and considers the ethical and political significance of Tanabe's treatment of history in its post-war context.

Paper long abstract:

Modern Japanese thinkers interested in Pure Land have paid special attention to the way in which the Buddha at the center of the Pure Land imagination, Amida Buddha, is figured as infinite life and infinite light. This understanding of Amida in terms of infinity complicates the orthodox modern understanding of Amida and his Pure Land as located in the future, and offers an opening for using Pure Land thought as the basis for a philosophical interrogation of time. In this paper, I examine Tanabe Hajime's mobilization of Dharmākara Bodhisattva and Amida Buddha as figures for time and eternity. Tanabe draws upon Jōdo Shinshū thinker Soga Ryōjin's treatment of the three minds of faith, according to which sincere mind (or the mind that dwells on the past) and the mind wishing for birth (or the mind that dwells on the future) arise simultaneously within the bodhisattva's mind of serene faith, which dwells in an uninterrupted present; time, Soga asserts, is nothing other than the present, and consciousness of time is consciousness only of the single thought moment within which infinity unfolds itself. Tanabe takes up this analysis of the structure of time as the basis for his own analysis of the structure of history, arguing that within the circular or dialectical movement of history, time must pivot around an eternal present, within which every new becoming (or movement toward the future) is simultaneously a return to original being (or a return to the past). That this circularity can be discerned within the narrative of Dharmākara and Amida is, for Tanabe, a sign that Pure Land thought discloses the dialectical structure of history. After laying out how Tanabe expands upon Soga in developing his interpretation of the movement of history, I consider the political and ethical significance of Tanabe's theory of historical time as circular in the context of the historical moment at which he is developing this theory—at the end of the war and in the months following Japan's surrender, at a time when the meaning of the past and the shape of the future are open to re-examination.