Japanese Buddhism Examine the Respective Approaches to Salvation

One who is enlightened is a bodhisattva, and the enlightenment is that reality itself is emptiness. Nirvana is unity or conjunction with emptiness, or a freedom from the cares of the world, including care for the fate of the self. The full term Mahayana, or the One Vehicle, is associated with the escort or "Way" to the one or universality of enlightenment (Tsunoda, et al. 113, et passim).

Japanese culture or national character appears to puddle been an important factor in the manner in which Buddhism took hold in Japan. As Tsunoda, et al. back breaker out, however, Buddhist sects did not succeed each other or mature from one to another in history. Rather, they overlapped and converged and manifested religious rivalries. The commencement ceremony flowering of Buddhism was in the Nara Period (709-84), in which six screen sects were identified (Tsunoda, et al. 94). Buddhist doctrines of enlightenment and transcendent reality were rapidly identified with the state, notably in the Sutra of the Golden Light. The sutra dealt with reason, compassion, and salvation. Meanwhile, "The Revelation of the Mahayana" in the Lotus Sutra refers specifically to the Mahayana as the Great Vehicle of salvation, which is the experience of Buddhahood.

The Buddha himself is in the Great Vehicle (Mahayana)

And accordant with the Truth he has attained,

The doctrine appears to have been profane into the superstitious equation of ritual and benefit, and Tsunoda, et al. say that this may have motivated dissent and reformist sects. Buddhism's fortunes in Japan shifted as idiosyncratic doctrines emerged. Tsunoda, et al. cite the appearance of "warrior monks," who flourished in the late eleventh century, and the appearance of erotic sects such as the Tachikawa school (155), amid the exertion of aristocratic tendencies in classical Buddhism and in the social milieu in which it flourished. The appearance of Pure farming and Nichiren sects in the tenth century came closest to bringing the peasantry, including women, salvation. Tsunoda, et al.

say that doctrines of the Pure Land sect were partly a response to the desperate portion of the poor in the Japanese medieval period: "[T]he sense of despair, of inability to rise above the evils of the time, was met by a mightily movement offering salvation through faith alone, which brought the try for of new heart and light to thousands of Japanese untouched by the older forms of Buddhism" (Tsunoda, et al. 182)

and their characteristic forms of expression increasingly reflected the attitudes and manner of life which predominated at court. Thus, although both these forms of Buddhism were egalitarian in theory--that is, as outgrowths of the Mahayana teaching they aired that all men had the potentialities for Buddhahood--in the Japanese setting their activities were strongly conditioned by the aristocratic nature of court society. Again, in spite of the universalistic claims of the Mahayana . . . there was a noticeable tendency to stress the hierarchic order of these forms of religious consciousness in the heave to Truth (Tsunoda, et al. 110).

In the 9th century, two Buddhist sects were imported from China, cognize as Tendai and Shingon, even as Japanese culture became little and less Chinese and more specifically Japanese. Tsunoda, et al. say that the final political aspect
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