Premodern, modern, and postmodern: Doctrine and the study of Japanese religion

Abstract

The perennial involvement of religious traditions in economic, social, and political events is well attested. Unfortunately, the study of these aspects of religious traditions lags far behind the concern for doctrinal discussion, almost as though the actual historical development of the tradition is a perhaps inevitable, if frequently neither consonant nor salutary, by-product of the doctrinal center. In this context we are refreshed by Neil McMullin's recent discussion of the importance of political and social aspects of Japanese religious behavior and the dangers of fragmenting the historical record of lived religiosity according to the politically sectarian prism of our own historiographic bias (MCMULLIN 1989a). In this essay McMullin expands a critique raised in his Buddhism and the State in Sixteenth-Century Japan (MCMULLIN 1984, pp. 3-9) regarding the relative importance of institution, ritual, and doctrine, in the context of both the historical record and our modern historiographical viewpoint (see also MCMULLIN 1989b, the reply of Gary EBERSOLE 1989, and MCMULLIN response [1989c]; also MCMULLIN 1989d). His arguments, although perhaps overstated to serve a provocative purpose, are a valuable corrective to the lack of attention these areas have received in the past. It is indeed important to remember that religions are constituted as much by what religious people actually do as by what they say and write. Being myself primarily concerned with the economic and social institutions of the Buddhist tradition and their relation (or lack thereof) to normative doctrinal and cultic statements, I was especially interested in how McMullin would theoretically relate his concern for the societal dimension of Japanese religions to the spiritual and doctrinal claims of the practitioners. I was particularly intrigued as I was interested at the time in the role that doctrine plays in modern Japanese Buddhism (HUBBARD 1988a, 1990), an aspect of contemporary Japanese religiosity far more