Now, my teacher Shinran had provided me with the dharma antidote for the terrible poison of such anguished thoughts and feelings: at the end of this life, as a person of SHINJIN of true entrusting I would take rebirth in Amida Buddha’s Pure Land, and become a Buddha, at last.

As a Buddha, I would have all the transcendental powers only a true Buddha has, to find my beloved daughter and to save her, no matter how deeply she might be immersed in karmic suffering in one of the six realms of rebirth.

As the power of this dharma truth settled in my head and my heart, I felt a great shift. Of course, I was still a grieving father. But here was the answer to my existential despair arising from my all too human sense of HELPLESSNESS in the face of such tragedy.;

In my next letters to the teacher I had been corresponding with I wrote with real joy about this new awareness of just HOW I was going to fulfill my heart of compassion to my daughter, who was now beyond my reach, having taken rebirth in some other life in one of the six realms - where, I did not know.

Talking at the same time to another Buddhist, a woman who had just lost her husband to suicide, I conveyed the same message of Great Compassion the compassion of becoming a Buddha in the Pure Land and then helping those we had loved and could not help as plain people in this life. Though she had never even heard of Shin Buddhism, she too began listening deeply, finding comfort and hope in the message of Shinran.

Now: here’s where the difference between TRUE teachers, and FALSE teachers, reveals itself:

When I talked with this Shin Buddhist teacher, he said to me that I shouldn’t take these words of Shinran LITERALLY - that they were symbols pointing to something else entirely.

I was STUNNED by his words.

Hardly in the place for theological or philosophical discourse in this most terrible time of my life, I tried feebly to point out that this was simply what Shinran the man had taught, and his student Yuien was conveying, sometime after his death. Their audience was essentially laypeople like me - not very educated - and it didn’t seem possible that Shinran would say such things if he didn’t believe them to be true literally true himself. In fact, Yuien said specifically that he was conveying Shinran’s teaching to dispel doubt and confusion:

As I humbly reflect on the past [when the late master was alive] and the present in my foolish mind, I cannot but lament the divergences from the true SHINJIN that he conveyed by speaking to us directly, and I fear there are doubts and confusions in the way followers receive and transmit the teaching.

For how is entrance into the single gate of easy practice possible unless we happily come to rely on a true teacher whom conditions bring us to encounter? Let there be not the slightest distortion of the teaching of Other Power with words of an understanding based on personal views.

Here, then, I set down in small part the words spoken by the late Shinran Shonin that remain deep in my mind, solely to disperse the doubts of fellow practicers.

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