Original enlightenment (hongaku)

Chinese Tiantai teaching had already argued that buddha nature extends to insentient things, but medieval Japanese Tendai scholiasts pressed the claim to its most literal edge, holding that grasses and trees themselves attain buddhahood, not as a figure of speech about interconnection but as a doctrinal statement about what enlightenment already is. Jacqueline Stone's history of the doctrine traces its rise from roughly the eleventh century through material transmitted in oral and quasi secret lineage documents inside the Tendai school called kuden, teachings passed master to disciple and eventually written down, rather than through public treatise writing aimed at a wide readership. The doctrine's core distinction is between hongaku, original enlightenment, the buddhahood every being already possesses simply by existing, and shikaku, acquired enlightenment, the buddhahood reached through practice and realization understood as a process; hongaku thought increasingly treated the second as a derivative or even illusory restatement of a fact, original enlightenment, that never actually needed producing in the first place. Stone stresses this was not fringe speculation. It became the operating assumption behind mainstream medieval Tendai institutional teaching for several centuries.

Beginning in the 1980s a group of Japanese scholars working under the banner of Critical Buddhism, principally Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shiro, argued that original enlightenment thought functioned as an ideology of unquestioning affirmation, one that by declaring the world already perfect as it stands gave religious cover to existing social hierarchy and specifically to Buddhist institutions' historical entanglement with caste-like discrimination against burakumin communities in Japan. Jacqueline Stone's history takes the criticism seriously enough to test it against the medieval sources directly and reports that the textual record does not support treating hongaku thought as having been used, at the time, as an explicit argument for accepting social rank or political rule; the absolute affirmation it taught was aimed at a metaphysical claim about buddhahood rather than stated as a claim about social order. What is easier to establish is hongaku's influence on the new Buddhist movements founded during the Kamakura period by monks trained inside Tendai, Honen, Shinran, Dogen and Nichiren among them, each of whom scholars read as answering the doctrine in a different direction, whether by radicalizing its implications or by building a practice discipline meant to correct what they took to be its complacency.