Right Thoughts at the Last Moment: Buddhism and Deathbed Practices in Early Medieval Japan by Jacqueline I. Stone

Abstract

Reviewed by: Right Thoughts at the Last Moment: Buddhism and Deathbed Practices in Early Medieval Japan by Jacqueline I. Stone Charlotte Eubanks Right Thoughts at the Last Moment: Buddhism and Deathbed Practices in Early Medieval Japan by Jacqueline I. Stone. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. Pp. xviii + 597. $68.00 cloth. Around three o’clock in the morning of September 29, 2014, I listened to my father’s breathing: haggard, then jagged, lagging, finally stopping altogether. Sitting side by side in our pajamas, my mother, sister, and I held his hands, whispering into his ear, “You’ve run a good race, you’ve fought a good fight, it’s OK to let go.” These words from 2 Timothy 4:7 were the ones, it seems, that my father, a lifelong Baptist, most needed [End Page 630] to hear. Each time we whispered these words, his chest would fall on a long, slow outbreath. When we paused to catch our own breath, he would struggle to take in another lungful himself. It was only with the assistance of hours of continuous chanting, the hand-to-hand touch of human warmth, and the repeated rehearsal of crossing the spiritual finish line that he finally let go. Jacqueline Stone’s book is about moments like these—it is not about how people die but about how people have prepared to let go. Right Thoughts at the Last Moment is a rigorously researched, deeply footnoted, clearly written, and convincingly argued study about how Buddhists in early medieval Japan prepared to face their final moments; it is about how and why they readied themselves to die. As with her first book, Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism, this book, Right Thoughts at the Last Moment, is published through the auspices of the Kuroda Institute.1 A major center for English-language scholarship on East Asian Buddhism, the Kuroda Institute has sponsored a monograph series for the last twenty years. Monographs in the series typically focus on a specific text (such as The Scripture on the Ten Kings 佛說預修十王生七經), a Buddhist figure (such as Dōgen 道元), a set of ritual practices (such as the vinaya), a locale (such as Hokkeji 法華寺), or a conceptual category (such as sudden versus gradual enlightenment). Each monograph brings extensive archival and critical sources to bear, producing a critical historiography of its subject as it unfolds in primary- and secondary-source literature over a lengthy period of time. Jacqueline Stone’s impressive study follows this pattern as she brings her insights and acumen to bear on the subject of deathbed practices in medieval Japan. This monograph has been long in the making and follows on the heels of Stone’s two coedited volumes: The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations (2007) and Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism (2008).2 Buddhist Dead is a comparative investigation of the ritual and material cultures of death in India, Sri Lanka, China, [End Page 631] Japan, Tibet, and Burma. (Stone has a chapter in this volume: “The Secret Art of Dying: Esoteric Deathbed Practices in Heian Japan.”) Death and the Afterlife is a transtemporal study of death rituals in Buddhist Japan, spanning the tenth century to the present. (Stone’s chapter, “With the Help of Good Friends: Deathbed Ritual Practices in Early Medieval Japan,” focuses on the crucial role that monks who attended the dying played as religious guides.) Building on these earlier publications and expanding their scope, Stone’s goals in Right Thoughts at the Last Moment are to “investigate the emergence and development in Japan of discourses and practices surrounding the ideal of exemplary death, focusing on the late tenth through the early fourteenth centuries,” which she refers to as the “early medieval” period (p. 1). She is particularly interested in how monastic ideals of “right thoughts at the last moment” (rinjū shōnen 臨終正念) were communicated to and mimetically appropriated by the laity. The study draws on a vast archive of primary sources, including ritual manuals, hagiographies, doctrinal writings, didactic tales (setsuwa 説話), courtier diaries, small-scale liturgical performances (kōshiki 講式), poems (both waka 和歌 and ge 伽), historical accounts, oral transmissions of private teachings (kuden 口伝), personal letters, and a variety of...