Shinmon Aoki, Coffinman

• Dark Sides - layers and inversions: In Shin Buddhism, karmic evil and the blind passions of a foolish being are the dark side. Shinran, the founder of Shin Buddhism (1173-1232) defined this not only universally and philosophically, but also socially and institutionally, coming to see the wealthy monks of the dominant Tendai order as corrupt and too blind to see their own arrogance.
  
• By the time of Aoki in the early twentieth century, Shin Buddhism itself had come to constitute the largest Buddhist institutions. As their primary source of income, Buddhist priests were largely preoccupied with funerals and memorial services, leaving little time to attend to the spiritual path. Aoki, the coffinman, was an outcast as his family and society rejected him for doing the dirty work of handling dead corpses and of making his livelihood off of the dead. Yet, without him, the 'high class' priests could not do their work, showing the dark side of Buddhist clerics.
• As Aoki attends to the dead, he comes to see death more intimately, and the inseparability of life and death. He uses the metaphor of mizore, the sleet-like state in which rain and snow are inseparable. This Life-Death inseparability or nonduality is only given in the awareness of the present moment, in which each person, each living being begins to disclose in true nature, emanating a kind of infinite light that is expressive of a nonduality or oneness beyond words.
• 'Light' thus comes to take many different meanings: 1) the usual, visible light, 2) the metaphorical light of illuminating insight, and 3) a palpable, experiential light that comes from beyond words and yet is not the same as the usual, visible light.
• Turning points: In this autobiographical account, we see Aoki undergo a series of transformations. Each one can be seen as a turning point that signals his self-transformation. Included among these are: encounter with his ex-girlfriend, who accepts him unconditionally; he encounter with the maggots coursing through a dead corpse, in which he comes to see each maggot as conveying the infinite light of the oneness of all things; and deathbed encounter with his uncle, who had earlier rejected him but now thanks him, and with whom he reconciles in the gentleness of the light of oneness.

• death taboo, confrontation with death
  
• classism
  
• social arrogance and spiritual irrelevance of the priesthood
  

Comparisons