Why a Japanese Man Prays at Both

A coffee shop in Kitahama, late afternoon. Nicholas has a folded printout on the table.

Nicholas: I read your piece. The two temples, fifteen minutes apart, telling people the opposite thing about how to be saved. Good essay. But it left me with a question, and it’s been at me all week.

Takeshi: Go on.

Nicholas: Last month you mentioned you’d stopped at a shrine on the way to meet me. You do your family’s funerals at the Pure Land temple. You drop in on the Zen one when you’re near it. And now you’re telling me those last two openly disagree about the most important thing there is. So which one are you?

Takeshi: All of them. None of them. I’ve never had to answer that.

Nicholas: That’s the part I can’t make fit. Where I’m from, you pick. You’re Catholic or you’re not. My family still doesn’t speak to a cousin who married a Presbyterian, and that was 1994.

Catherine: (who has been listening) That reaction is the whole subject, by the way. I built half my fieldwork around it.

Nicholas: Which reaction.

Catherine: Yours. The assumption that a person picks one. Can I guess what else you assumed? That Zen is the Protestant one. The stripped-down, do-it-yourself, no-priest-between-you-and-the-truth one.

Nicholas: Sure. The austere one.

Catherine: It’s the reverse. The one that lines up with the Reformation is Pure Land. Listen to what it says. You can’t save yourself, so stop trying. Someone else’s vow does it for you. Faith, not works. That is grace alone. That is Luther.

Nicholas: The chanting guys are the Protestants.

Catherine: The theologian Karl Barth looked at every religion he could and said Pure Land was the closest thing to Reformation Christianity he found outside of it. And he wasn’t the first to notice. The Jesuit missionaries who landed here in the 1500s were alarmed by it. One of them complained that these Buddhists held the very doctrine the devil had taught Luther.

Takeshi: Shinran, who pushed the Pure Land teaching furthest, gets called the Luther of Japan. He got there about three hundred years before Luther did.

Nicholas: Okay. So if the chanters are the Protestants, the meditators are the Catholics. The works, the discipline.

Catherine: Loosely. Don’t lean on it. Catholic against Protestant is already a cartoon the second you say it that fast. The match isn’t why it matters. What happens next is.

Takeshi: What doesn’t happen next.

Nicholas: Meaning.

Takeshi: In Europe, that difference got people killed for a hundred years. Grace against works. Here, the same split sat in my childhood home and nobody raised their voice. My grandmother chanted the Buddha’s name. I sit on a cushion. We lived under one roof and neither of us thought the other was lost.

Nicholas: That’s exactly what I don’t get. Same opposite beliefs. You got a quiet house. We got the Thirty Years’ War.

Catherine: Three reasons, and the first does most of the work. For most people here, the sect was never about belief at all. In the Edo period the government made every household register at a temple. It was paperwork. It recorded who you were, like a census. So your sect is which temple holds your grandparents’ bones, not a doctrine you ever signed. Ask most Japanese what school they belong to and they’ll tell you where their family is buried.

Nicholas: You’re saying it’s an address, not a creed.

Catherine: I interviewed a woman last year. I asked what school her family temple was. She said, “Buddhist.” That was the whole answer. I looked it up myself afterward. It was Shingon, a third kind again, and she had lived her whole life not needing to know. Second reason: for a thousand years the gods and the buddhas weren’t even two things. There was a doctrine, honji suijaku（本地垂迹）, that said the local gods were the same reality as the buddhas, dressed in local clothes. People worshipped them together in the same place. The clean line you’re trying to draw between Shinto and Buddhism got drawn in 1868, by a government, on purpose, and it took force.

Takeshi: And the third is older than either of us can see the bottom of. The tradition always said there are many roads up the mountain and one moon over the top. Different teachings for different people, arriving at the same place. The disagreement was built in from the start. It was never a scandal.

Nicholas: So walk me through your year. Honestly. How confused are you.

Takeshi: Most months I visit a shrine near home. When I get a free day I call on the old ones the way you’d visit distant relatives. Ōmiwa, down in Nara, where there’s no real hall to speak of because the mountain behind it is the god. My family’s rites are Pure Land. I stop at the Zen temple when I’m passing it. Once a year I go to Shitennō-ji, which was set up on purpose to belong to no sect. And the service club I’m in remembers its dead every year up on Mount Kōya, in the Shingon rite, which is yet another kind of Buddhism.

Nicholas: And not one piece of that feels like a contradiction.

Takeshi: Someday someone will write my name on a candle at Shitennō-ji, a temple that was never mine, and a Shingon priest I never met will say words over me in a form my own family doesn’t use. That’s fine. I’d go further. That’s good.

Nicholas: It would keep me up at night. Not knowing which one was actually mine.

Takeshi: I asked my grandmother that once, when I was small. What’s the difference between all these places we keep going to. She told me the feeling of mourning someone doesn’t belong to a sect, so there was nothing to worry about. I’ve looked for fifty years and never improved on it.

Nicholas: That’s a dodge.

Takeshi: It’s the least evasive thing anyone has ever said to me. But here’s the version I use at dinner. It’s like arguing cuts of beef and how to cook them. Yakiniku, a steak, sukiyaki. Argue the method all night. As long as the beef is good, who’s wrong?

Nicholas: (laughs) That one I follow. I’d still fight you on the cut.

Catherine: I want to stop both of you before this turns into a warm story about open-minded Japan. It isn’t a national virtue, and I’d lose my committee if I let that stand. There’s a hard counter-example. The one time this country took a faith, made it a creed you had to hold, and put the state behind it, was State Shinto. Emperor worship, running up to 1945. It leaned on other sects and on Christians. It fed a war. The moment belief here became the thing you had to get right, with power behind it, this place built the same machine Europe had.

Takeshi: She’s right, and it’s worth saying plainly. We aren’t gentle by nature. For most of our history belief simply wasn’t the point. Behavior was. Showing up was. The year someone made belief the point, we were as dangerous as anyone has ever been.

Nicholas: (after a moment) You know what’s funny. I run a trading floor that lives and dies on models. Numbers and probabilities, no room for anything you can’t put a price on. And I have not washed my cap since the Yankees started winning in May.

Catherine: So you carry two systems that flatly contradict each other.

Nicholas: Every single day. I just don’t have a building to keep the second one in.

Catherine: Then maybe the question was never why a Japanese man holds two. Maybe it’s why you assumed a person holds one.

Takeshi: At Shitennō-ji in August the candles stand about waist high, thousands of them down the length of the courtyard, each one carrying a name somebody wrote. They lean and right themselves in the dark on their own time, none of them agreeing with the one beside it. After a while you can’t tell one flame from the next. Someday I’m one of them, and whoever is standing there won’t know my sect, and it won’t cost me a thing. I find I’m in no hurry to decide before then.

Nicholas: (says nothing)

Catherine: I think that’s the first time I’ve watched you not have a comeback.

Nicholas: I’m thinking about the cap.