Pure Land Buddhism In "The Priest And His Love""

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Redeemed by Love: Pure Land Buddhism in “The Priest and His Love” “Religious experience and reflection have always engendered poetry and literature, prompting the imagination and moving beyond speculative thought” (Detweiler & Jasper, xi). Pure Land Buddhism plays a key role in Yukio Mishima’s “The Priest and His Love.” Though polar opposites in the way they live and view life, the Great Priest and his love, the Great Imperial Concubine, both hope to be reborn into The Pure Land (Jodo). The Pure Land Buddhism in “The Priest and His Love” displays the redemptive power of love shown to followers of Amida. At the beginning of the story, the Great Priest of Shiga is “a man of the most eminent virtue”: so ascetic that he is completely unattached to the material (Floating) world, and so righteous that he is “completely devoid of conceit”— an “effect of his own eminent virtue.” This present world is a “sad and evanescent dream” to the Great Priest, less real than the Pure Land that he lives in during his nightly reveries (Anderson 817). Here the Great Priest evinces his faith by “[d]well[ing] in imagination on the joys of paradise” (Eliot 383). An aged man, the Great Priest seems destined to enter the Pure Land at any moment. However, all of this will change “[i]n the twinkling of an eye.” While the Great Priest is meditating by a lake, an ox-drawn carriage pulls up. Its passenger is the woman known as the Great Imperial Concubine. The blind is raised. The Great Priest “glance[s] in her direction and at once…[is] overwhelmed by her beauty” (Anderson 818). Their eyes meet, and he is unable to look away. The blind is lowered. The carriage drives off, and the Great Imperial Concubine returns to her court in Kyogoku. From this point on, she is all he can think about. When reading the sutras the Great Priest finds himself “heaving
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