Life should be lived with passion.  Passion is a devotion, a decision to tie your finite life to something.  Rather than hedging bets, this devotion must take place in the awareness of the opportunity cost it presents – to devote yourself to one thing implies the inability to devote yourself to another.  To try to pretend otherwise encounters two deficiencies: a lack of fatality and a lack of depth.  Lacking fatality in your passion results in your discovering you were never really passionate at all.  To lack fatality means that that which has captured your attention remains a game, something playful where even the worst of outcomes can be tolerated.  Because the stakes are small, the results are also of little overall effect.  Watch a man who makes a twenty dollar bet with a friend on a sporting event.  Now imagine a man who has wagered his home, savings and the lives of his loved ones on the same game.  With everything at stake, nothing in the world is more important.

To have passion means to have devotion, the way one is devoted to one’s own child.  We regularly use expressions like “to live and die with” when referring to our interest in any number of diversions.  He lives and dies with that team.  She lives and dies with that show.  We equate that feeling with passion, but when compared with the idea of living and dying with the well-being of one’s family, the previous use of the same expression loses a degree of its sense of importance.  Hence, such passion lacks fatality – one’s life is not set in a determined direction upon the winds of fortune which blow from such pursuits.  Without the awareness of the cost being paid, which is one’s own finite life, as a wager in the devotion, there will always persist in one’s mind an assurance that all mistakes can be corrected, all offenses redressed simply by starting everything all over again, taking another chance to build up from scratch.  Any failure can be met with optimism that it will not be made again, and as a result failures are only considered by means of measuring the time given to their perpetuation.  Time, when the immediacy of fatality is not present, is infinite – and so any measurable portion of infinity can, in the end, be considered infinitely trivial.

Fatality’s partner is depth.  People object to the idea of devoting themselves single-mindedly to a purpose, saying that it is arbitrary to require them to give all of their attention to only one cause in life.  This is not what I mean by devoting oneself single-mindedly.  However, let’s assume that a man does disperse his passion through a handful of activities he enjoys or in which he finds meaning.  The result is a man who is quite wide in learning, his knowledge covering an impressive range of fields and disciplines.  He is capable of holding a conversation on almost any topic and where his knowledge is lacking he is able to wrangle the flow of the discussion towards an area in which he is more fluent.  His wit can cover for the lack of time we all suffer from in studying up on an inexhaustible stream of information that circulates through the popular media, trickling down to dinner table debates and friendly back-and-forths with strangers and acquaintances alike at apartment parties.  If he’s at a total loss, he can even muster up the resolve to ask you to tell him what your opinions are, since he is admittedly ignorant regarding the topic at hand, though in the back of his mind he knows if he really cared about whatever it is that is up for discussion, he’d have already formed an opinion on it, if he hasn’t already despite his ignorance - a certain go-to, gut instinct that never fails him – all of this taking place in a context where we know that no one really ever changes a dearly-held opinion anymore.  So we have a man thought of as intelligent and charismatic who lacks any kind of depth - while the moniker of “straw man” does not fit in this sense, our fathomless man could perhaps be called a paper man.  You can poke or prod the paper man to see what is behind him, but you can never get around his width.  He is always much too glib to be cornered, always too full of explanations, always too willing to befriend you.  But he has no true passion, for his frenetic nature is what leads him to run the length of the coast without ever plunging into the water, which is the most terrifying thing his mind can imagine.  No, choosing to enter the deep waters would leave him a dissolved mass of pulp, and the wider he has become, the thinner he is stretched, giving him less matter with which to reform himself if he has the misfortune of being dragged along unexpectedly to sea.  Even that crisis, though, would be manageable – the paper man has little riding on this unreflected accumulation of knowledge he regards as a self, and with a proper measure of amnesic fortitude he will be right back cutting himself out a flimsy new costume to wear.  He is seduced by beginnings, constantly going from port to port yet landlocked the entire time, never leaving his native continent.  He can give you plenty of quotations on love or beauty, and he could tell you what to do to live happily - you will probably even think he’s rather wise, but he will never live for himself, be happy himself.  What he fails to understand is that it is not the scope of metaphors one can call upon, but the depth of the metaphors that conveys a true sense of passion, a true sense of experience, not from simply being knowledgeable, but from having one’s eyes cracked and wrinkled in their corners from staring at the horizon under the sun, one’s forehead weathered from venturing into countless storms.  Depth of passion reflects a depth of character.  It reveals in a person the capacity to love.  Our paper man, he has many infatuations, but no true love.

Take any person who is sufficiently passionate about anything – baseball, for instance.  We can all picture the crusty old man, his better days long past, whose love of the game was so true and deep that he could understand baseball through his experiences in life and life through his experiences from baseball, both informing one another in harmony.  Ask him about music, and he might recall a tune or two he can still whistle, but press him to go further and he’ll unabashedly tell you he really didn’t have time for music in his more productive years.  He might have traveled extensively, and perhaps a few memories of places been or people come and gone will leave him feeling wistful for what has been lost, but in the end his love had been decided long ago, and it continues to inform him in his waning years.

We might consider such devotion as the old man has as quaint, if not outdated.  After all, in our times we have so many pressing matters to consider, and even if we have the luxury to think beyond our personal itineraries of endless tasks and errands we must see to every day, certainly we can imagine something more worthy of our passion than baseball – doesn’t its very nature of being a game betray an inherent lack of fatality?  How can a game compare to love, friends, family, the plight of the oppressed, wherever they may be?  Obviously there are many things in our lives worthy of our attention, our thorough attention – but only one can truly be an object of passion.  Give a wife the grim choice of deciding the fate of her husband, mother and two daughters – only one of them can live and it is up to this daughter/wife/mother to decide who that will be.  What a horrible fate - how can she possibly go about the decision?  Most people would immediately discount the idea of saving the husband, he’s too old, and a man to boot (as if men had less regard for their mortality than women), perhaps the mother as well – so without having to bring this macabre example to a conclusion, we can already agree that there is a hierarchy even amongst causes to which we would otherwise attribute supreme importance.  Now consider that in most of our lives all of these players will be at work – filial love, romantic love, love of our children, love of self, love of justice, love of aesthetic pleasure.  Consider also that we are without the impetus that our poor woman has in clearly setting her priorities for the world to know.  In the modern sense of being people searching for meaning in life, we are without such clear direction.  The point is not who the woman chooses, the point is that she must make a choice, just as we must make a choice in what our priorities are, and by the necessity of this choice it shows that what the object of our passion should be is not axiomatic, the answer contained in the definition of passion itself.  Though perhaps one could argue there are degrees of worthiness that characterize the possible objects of our passion, the point under consideration with which to begin is simply whether or not one has passion.  So leave our old man be, let him have his true love – if he found it important enough to love, who are we to begrudge him?

1. Both Shinran and Luther rejected the idea that good works proved effective towards reaching salvation.  While there are differences, obviously, between Shinran’s belief in the Pure Land and Luther’s belief in heaven, both men held that humans lack the capacity for pure spiritual practice.  Shinran believed that we reach the Pure Land completely by results of Amida Buddha‘s Primal Vow and the accumulated merit of Amida’s religious practices while still the Bodhisattva Dharmakara.  Luther subscribed to the doctrine of Sola fide, or “faith alone,” which states that the granting of salvation is entirely dependent upon whether or not one has faith in God, not by one’s acting “good” in order to deserve such salvation.  Ironically enough, Shinran would often refer those who had questions regarding his beliefs to a work by a priest named Seikaku entitled, “Essentials of Faith Alone.”  Something important to keep in mind when discussing these parallels is that you can’t simply swap out God for Amida Buddha, or heaven with the Pure Land as if they are perfect analogs for one another.  Lutheranism is not simply a Christianized version of Pure Land Buddhism, nor is Pure Land Buddhism a version of Protestantism differing only in visuals and terminology.  Pure Land Buddhists are notoriously defensive when it comes to comparisons drawn between their beliefs and those of Protestant Christianity, at times going to absurd intellectual lengths trying to refute what similarities both traditions undeniably share.  On the other hand, in the defense of Pure Land believers, specifically those of Shinran’s Jodo Shinshu school, they do have a few hundred years’ worth of dibs on those similarities versus Protestants.

2. Both had anti-clerical beliefs.  Shinran and Luther both held that rigid religious hierarchies and institutions were corrupt and unnecessary.  Because the source of salvation in their respective systems originates from outside of the believer, there is no differentiation amongst followers according to their levels of spiritual attainment, and thus both traditions were created along more egalitarian lines in respect to members of their religious communities.

3. Both married, discarding the tradition of celibacy.  Luther married Katharina von Bora while Shinran married Eshinni.  According to both men, religious vows were of no value in attaining salvation.  During their times, this was considered a radical stance and at least Shinran is credited as the first Japanese priest to openly marry.

4. Both changed original readings of texts.  A charge leveled against Luther in his translation of the Bible into German was that he was not absolutely faithful to the text, adding words to passages to give them meanings more compatible with his beliefs.  The same accusations were made against Shinran (rightly so), his renderings of certain passages of Pure Land sutras leading critics to question whether or not he fully understood the classical Chinese in which Buddhist texts were written then.

5. Both began in and eventually broke from the major religious centers of their day.  Luther broke with the Catholic church while Shinran broke with Mt. Hiei and the Tendai school of Buddhism.

Now, after having briefly glimpsed at these similarities, especially number five, the question that arose in my mind was, “Why does anyone become a preacher or philosopher?”  Leading up to their break with their institutions, both Shinran and Luther went through a period of isolation, study and despair in response to the failure of their sincere efforts to find peace through the standard monastic course of religious devotion set before them.  They were sincere in their desires, not for fame or wealth, but for real spiritual fulfillment.  Their struggles were individual ones, concerned for their own spirits and removed from a context of political or economic circumstances - men set on their courses, answering only to themselves and their own sense of attainment of their goals.  These paths led them to break with the institutions which set out the beliefs and practices that shaped their conceptions of religious life – for Luther that institution was the Catholic church, while in Shinran’s case it was the Tendai school of Mt. Hiei.

At some point, though, this intense and personal struggle changed from an inward concern, that of personal salvation, to an outward one, preoccupied with teaching others.  What is it that brings about this turn?  How was it that these men began to view their personal problems and the solutions to them as universal?  My initial answer was that it could only be ego which could make a person think he or she was in a position to tell others how they should view the efficacy and validity of one religious path or practice versus another.   In the case of philosophy, as well – as Nietzsche pointed out – most philosophers’ philosophical output comes as a sort of confession to the issues that plague them personally.

To make the leap from the thought, “I have found something which has benefited me,” to “I have found something which will benefit a great number of others,” requires, in my mind, an impetus that supersedes a humble desire just to be of service to others.  It is in this context that I understand Johannes de silentio’s words in Fear and Trembling, “As for the knight of faith, he is assigned to himself alone, he has the pain of being unable to make himself intelligible to others but feels no vain desire to show others the way.  The pain is the assurance, vain desires are unknown to him, his mind is too serious for that.  The false knight readily betrays himself by this instantly acquired proficiency; he just doesn’t grasp the point that if another individual is to walk the same path he has to be just as much the individual and is therefor in no need of guidance, least of all from someone anxious to press his services upon others.  Here again, people unable to bear the martyrdom of unintelligibility jump off the path, and choose instead, conveniently enough, the world’s admiration of their proficiency.  The true knight of faith is a witness, never a teacher, and in this lies the deep humanity in him which is worth more than this foolish concern for others’ weal and woe which is honoured under the name of sympathy, but which is really nothing but vanity.  A person who wants only to be a witness confesses thereby that no one, not even the least, needs another person’s sympathy, or is to be put down so another can raise himself up.  But because what he himself won he did not win on the cheap, so neither does he sell it on the cheap; he is not so pitiable as to accept people’s admiration and pay for it with silent contempt; he knows that whatever truly is great is available equally for all.”

I don’t mean to say that I view Luther or Shinran as frauds – by no measure.  But I wonder what turns that individual concern outwards.  What makes anyone have confidence that what works for him or her will work for another – and even if it did work, what makes anyone think, as de silentio points out, that a person can be led down that same path to reach the same results?  After all, the solution at which you arrive in response to your own troubles was arrived at in the context of solitude and struggle.  Remove that solitude and struggle from the process, don’t you also remove the necessity, the key component which spurred you to your solution and which allowed the solution to actually work?  The individual component of struggle, the fiercely personal nature of it is what causes us the most despair – but it also gives us the opportunity to overcome – to achieve something truly difficult and transcend one’s limits.

What I believe up to this point is that one person’s revelation in response to whatever crisis he or she may face in life is personal to him or her alone – it can’t be of use to another because the process of searching for and discovering an answer is replaced by a devotion to routines which worked for another person.  I don’t mean that we shouldn’t study the thoughts of others, or that we shouldn’t belong to religious organizations, but that we shouldn’t view that study or that membership as taking the place of our own spiritual or intellectual work.  Everything must come down to the personal level where you struggle with your own hands to work out things for yourself – no mode of thought, no matter how relevant it is to you can take the place of your own effort and thought.