Book Review by Steve Lane in Pure Land Notes (the Journal of the Shin Buddhist Fellowship UK) Great Faith, Great Wisdom: Practice and Awakening in the Pure Land Sutras of Mahayana Buddhism by Ratnaguna and Śraddhāpa, published by Windhorse Publications, 2016. This is a wonderful book. One every Pure land Buddhist, of whatever denomination, needs to read. Great Faith, Great Wisdom provides new and enlightening commentaries on the three Pure Land sutras and new translations of the Sanskrit editions, plus an audio reading by Ratnaguna. Why the latter is provided I will explain later. This remarkable book wears its scholarship lightly, takes you on a journey informed by deep, broad research and brave, insightful speculation. It will change your understanding and appreciation of the sutras that are the foundation stones of our faith. Many Mahayana sutras, especially sutras like the three Pure Land sutras, are not intended, Ratnaguna persuades us, to be philosophical expositions of the dharma. Rather they are intended to uplift, inspire, bedazzle and through the sense of wonder they create transform us. Ratnaguna quotes Paul Harrison as saying they should be viewed more as, “scripts for plays, or scores for pieces of music.” They are art, religious art. This is not to say they are merely works of fiction. Our Pure Land sutras were written by people awakened to the transcendental reality that shines through our world if we can but see it. The sutras were meant to bring us to that elevated state. It is not nirvana, but rather a meditational awareness of beauty and wonder. They are “liberation through the beautiful”. As the canvasses of the Fauvists like Andre Derain are intended to help us see the world afresh by bedazzling us with colour and thereby freeing us from our mundanity.
How they were meant to achieve this, Ratnaguna argues, was through repeated reading, listening, reciting, copying them and teaching the sutras to others. This is why we have the audio downloads. Shut your eyes and listen; be transported into those magical stories and magical lands. Let them become meditations. Great Faith, Great Wisdom offers many challenges. The assertion our sutras were authored by Mahayana monks rather than taught by the historical Buddha; that those authors believed Sukhavati was somewhere we incarnated to after death – really, not metaphorically; his account of the evolution of Amitabha from the meditation practice of visualising the Buddha after his death, the nembutsu from the practice of reciting the Buddha’s name; his demonstration of the Vows of Amitabha arising from the Pali Metta Sutta – more popularly known as The Sutra of Loving-Kindness; all serve as examples of how the Mahayana imagination goes cosmic. But this would mean our sutras are not verbatim copies of lectures by Shakyamuni then, but an evolving understanding and practice shaped by many generations of monks; their connection with Shakyamuni real but in the way my connection with my great greatgreat grandfather is real. The commentaries are themselves fascinating insights into interrelatedness and co-dependent origination as Ratnaguna employs the staff training techniques for supermarket check-out staff, William Blake, the poet Shelley on love and Pali suttas. This book will challenge every Pure Land Buddhist, encouraging us to reconsider these foundational texts afresh. And perhaps our practice also. Its virtues arise from the brilliant mind of its author and the fact that he is not a Pure Land Buddhist of any persuasion. His response to the texts is not already predetermined by doctrine and
custom. Reading Great Faith, Great Wisdom is exciting, surprising and thoroughly rewarding. It is a book that needs to be read again and again – not because it is difficult, but because it offers us, like the paintings of Andre Derain, the opportunity to see the familiar anew. That is always worthwhile.