Echoes of the Name

Under development (Last updated: 15th Nov. 2011)

Calculation (in Jōdo Shinshū context) – see ‘Hakarai’

Chomon -  ’hearing and listening’ [to the Buddha-dharma]; also the name of a special ‘introspection session’: a type of  Jōdo Shinshū retreat.

Epistemology; Epistemological – “the study of knowledge and justified belief; [it is to do with] questions such as ‘What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge?’ ‘What are its sources?’ ‘What is its structure, and what are its limits?’ ‘How we are to understand the concept of justification?’ ‘What makes justified beliefs justified?’ ‘Is justification internal or external to one’s own mind?’” (SEP)

Existential (~ism, ~ist) - “… [broadly conceived] it refers to the radicalized “subjective turn” initiated by the mid-nineteenth-century reaction of Kierkegaard (1813-55) against Hegel’s Idealism and developed during the second quarter of the twentieth century in opposition to objectivity-oriented (naturalistic and positivistic as well as idealistic and rationalistic) treatments of human reality … It is to be understood … in terms of its focus upon “human existence”, its assignment of priority to the account of “what it means to exist as a human being” over all merely objective descriptions of the kind of creature human beings may be observed to be, and its adoption of a mode of elucidating the character of such “existing” that is attuned above all to our “lived experience … in terms of our irreducible and inescapable “subjectivity”.” (Richard Schacht; Ed. Kim, Sosa and Rosenkrantz,  A Companion to Metaphysics, Wiley-Blackwell 2009)

Faith (in context of this site) – paraphrasing Keiji Nishitani: “[Not as in] ordinary usage an act performed by the self, immanent in the self, and arising from within the self as an intentionality toward some object but “an actualization” in which “the self takes on the shape of reality”, and which only comes about on a horizon where the  field of self-consciousness has been overstepped and the framework of the “ego” has been broken through.” In the Jōdo Shinshū context ‘shinjin’ (信心): ‘true mind’; also ~ Pure Faith; ~ True Faith; ~ Entrusting. 

Hakarai (in Jōdo Shinshū context) – “[a Japanese word], the noun form of a verb meaning to deliberate, analyze, and determine a course of action. It further means to arrange or manage, to work out a problem, to bring a plan to conclusion. In Shinran’s more common usage a synonym for self-power” (VHBT); Trying to solve or overcome existential challenges and life problems through self-oriented designs that bear little or no relation to the reality of a given situation; sometimes misleadingly translated as ‘reasoning’ which ignores its emotional aspect; the Jōdo Shinshū teacher Kenryo Kanamatsu translates ‘hakarai’ as ‘self-will’.  (See also: ‘Hakarai’ in Zen context)

Jidan (示談) -  personal interviews to assist in the attainment of shinjin. These usually take place in the context of Chomon (see above).

Jinen (自然 ch. tzu jan / zi ran, skt. sahaja) – naturalness, ‘made to become so’: (1) in Jōdo Shinshū: ”Persons cannot realize dharma-body as suchness through human calculation, but it works in them as dharma-body as compassionate means to make itself known. Shinran calls this working “jinen,” which literally means, “It is not through the practicer’s calculation; one is made to become so.” Jinen works in persons constantly, and to experience this working (i.e., to realize shinjin) is also a kind of awakening.” [CWS]; (2) in Daoism: natural and spontaneous, and without any set purpose or preference: “spontaneity,” or “naturalness”; literally, “self-so-ing,” or “so of itself”), the natural state of the constantly unfolding universe and of all things within it when both are allowed to develop in accord with the Cosmic Way (Dao).” [EB] ; (3) in Mahamudra: ‘Sahaja’ – ‘produced together, co-emergence, simultaneous arising of ultimate and relative. [MoM]

Jōdo Shinshū (浄土真宗, “True [Essence of the] Pure Land Way”) – School of Buddha-dharma originating in the life, thought and practice of Shinran (1173–1263) which emphasises awakening and personal transformation within a lay context.   Jōdo Shinshū teaching is traditionally explicated within the context of the Pure Land  Sūtras and the practice of nembutsu.

Metaphysics; Metaphysical – “The branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, cause, identity, time, and space” [ODO]; it is not identical to Ontology as, for example, “someone quite unworried by the possibility that the world might really be otherwise than it appears (metaphysical question) … might still be engaged by the question of whether there were any general truths applicable to all existing things (ontological question).” [REP]

Ontology / Ontological – “the study of what there is … what exists, what the stuff is reality is made out of, and secondly, what the most general features and relations of these things are” (SEP).

Stoicism – A philosophical movement originating in the Hellenistic period.  “They define philosophy as a kind of practice or exercise (askêsis)  concerning expertise in what is beneficial.  Once we come to know what we and the world around us are really like, and especially the nature of value, we will be utterly transformed … ” (SEP).  “Stoic ethical teaching is … based upon the maxim, “Live according to nature” [which] means, in the first place, that men should conform themselves to nature in the wider sense, that is, to the laws of the universe, and secondly, that they should conform their actions to nature in the narrower sense, to their own essential nature, reason.” (IEP)

Transcendence – “going beyond”; [1] in Buddhism ‘self-overcoming’ culminating in Nirvana; [2] in Christian theology, especially used of God: beyond all finite limits of the world and thought; [3] in Kantian philosophy: beyond the limits of possible experience (e.g. ‘things-in-themselves’); [4] in Existential philosophy: that we are always “more” than the ‘givens’ of our situation and have the capacity and freedom to continually go beyond this ‘facticity’ by looking at a situation in the mode of negation and thus from outside of the causal series of being i.e. “going beyond what simply is toward what can be“; [4] in the thought of Luc Ferry 

Zazen – A Japanese word often used on this blog as a generic term for seated-meditation.

Please feel free to suggest refinements to any of the definitions on this page by emailing us at: midlands dot jodoshin at gmail dot com