Exile and Otherness. Ilana Maymind
“Similarly everyone of whom you have had need some day, everyone who was useful to you and whom you found in a time of stress, even if afterwards he treated you ill, ought necessarily to have merit attaching to him because of the past.”231
Maimonides’ Genres in Writing and His Intended Audience
We already mentioned the centrality of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. The Guide carries perhaps the same immense significance as does Shinran’s Kyōgyōshinshō. We posit here that Shinran’s and Maimonides’ goals carry a similar undertone: in the former, to preserve the democratized way of Shin Buddhism; and, in the latter, similar to the intentions of the Talmudic scholars, leave a trace or maybe even a specific outline for the generations to come. However, we might need to consider a possibility that Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed might have intended a different audience than his other writings. We should also accept a speculative proposition that Maimonides might be arguing different things to these different audiences. In addition, we need to accept a likehood of Maimonides addressing different target audiences even within the same text. In the Guide, Maimonides uses carefully crafted arguments that can be understood according to “a pyramid-shaped model of human intellect. Ultimate meaning lies within the exclusive domain of the superior intellect.”232 The Guide might not be a “guide” in its traditional sense, but rather a product of an ongoing attempt to rethink and rearticulate certain issues. It represents Maimonides’ effort to implicitly engage with the thinkers who influenced his thought and in such way, the Guide is a response to the dilemmas which arose from a comparison between Jewish views and Islamic (Aristotelian) philosophy.
We previously suggested that Shinran’s writings also addressed different audiences and yet we argued that perhaps the intention was broader and encompassed all audiences at once. Here we are making a similar argument. We recognize that the Mishneh Torah as a religious text stands alongside the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, and that the Guide for Perplexed is Maimonides’ philosophical magnum opus. We point out, however, these works’ interrelatedness and intertextuality “the Mishneh Torah’s prescriptive enterprise demands location in the philosophical discourse of the Guide, while the Guide’s discourse demands rootedness in the prescription of the Mishneh Torah.”233 Does it mean that Maimonides’ intended audience is the same for all of his texts or did he, like Shinran, aim his works for different audiences? Maimonides’ audience is, without saying, Jewish as Maimonides’ goal was to preserve the Jewish culture by preserving its canon and aiming it to be followed. However, his writing, in a somewhat similar vein as Shinran’s given that Shinran was exiled for following his mentor Hōnen’s teachings, was colored by “the anxiety of writing for a private audience, all the while conscious of its inevitable appearance in the public forum.”234 Notwithstanding the anxiety, the need was great and in the Introduction to the Guide, Maimonides writes: “I have never ceased to be exceedingly apprehensive about setting down those things that I wish to set down in this Treatise. For they are concealed things; none of them has been set down in any book—written in the [Jewish] religious community in these times in Exile.”235 So who was Maimonides’ intended audience? Was his audience for the Guide for Perplexed philosophers like in the case of Kyōgyōshinshō? According to Leo Strauss, the GP is “not a philosophical book—a book written by a philosopher for philosophers—but a Jewish book: a book written by a Jew for Jews.”236 So perhaps, like Shinran who claimed to write for everyone, Maimonides’ goal was also much broader?
While we admit that Maimonides can be seen as an elitist, Shinran is known for his egalitarianism. Does it necessarily mean that Shinran’s magnum opus was intended for all audiences without privileging anyone with a higher intellect? If this is true, how do we explain some equally obscure statements that can be similarly observed in his Kyōgyōshinshō? While the argument is made that Shinran’s writing represents his “personal practice [rather] than a vessel for instruction for others,”237 when turning to his letters, we need to question the assumption that Shinran’s intention was purely personal and was not intended for his disciples. In addition, whereas Maimonides’ presumed elitism is often observed, especially when one is focusing on the Guide for the Perplexed, Shinran’s interpretation of the Buddhist sutras can also point out to a certain elitism. After all, this type of interpretation and complexity of its exposition are predicated upon Shinran’s knowledge of texts. Moreover, the manner in which these texts are explicated most likely was not accessible to the unlearned and illiterate common people.
Regardless of the implicit goal and the possibility of various audiences, we maintain that the overall intention remains the same—the advancement of a more inclusive practice for Shinran, and the preservation of the Jewish community placed in the conditions of exile. Honoring the divine and observing God’s commandments remain an important component for the continual existence of Jewish community which connects all of Maimonides’ works.238
NOTES
1. Yoshifumi Ueda and Dennis Hirota, Shinran: An Introduction to His Thought (Kyoto: Hongwanji International Center, 1989).
2. Alfred Bloom, Strategies for Modern Living. A Commentary with the Text of the Tannishō (Numata Center, 1992).
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