East Asian Religions Research Articles (Page 1)

Abstract The Japanese term ki 氣/気 (Chinese qì) is a fundamental concept in East Asian religions, medicine, and martial arts. In Euro-American settings, the dominant way to understand ki is in terms of vital energy or life force. However, when the martial art aikido (aikidō 合氣道) was introduced to the United States following World War II, ki was not explained in terms of “energy,” but rather as “mind” or “spirit.” This article examines the transnational development of ki discourse in aikido from pre-war Japan to the post-war United States, including its entanglement with religion and state power. It also compares aikido’s development and circulation in the North Pacific with that of the healing practice of Reiki 靈氣/レイキ.

Abstract This article provides an in-depth study of two occultist journals published in France at the turn of the twentieth century, namely, La Voie and La Gnose. Although ultimately commercially unsuccessful, both journals proved to be very important in the development of the influential esotericist René Guénon (1886–1951). Through a detailed analysis of all issues, it is shown how both journals initiated their publication as house organs of a neo-Gnostic organisation (the Gnostic Church of France), but soon moved to “Eastern” themes such as East Asian religions or Islam. In conclusion, it is argued that the history of these two journals is evidence of the “logic of bricolage” employed by occultists in their quest for religious meaning in the age of European Colonialism.

The religions of South and East Asia resist Eurocentric interpretations, such as the so-called World Religion Paradigm. However, they are subjected in various ways to hetero- and auto-orientalist representations that respond to Western ideals and expectations. This article analyzes how Italian Catholic teachers use online representations of East Asian religions in their lessons to teach these traditions. The aim is to shed light on the interplay, facilitated by online environments, between contemporary processes of Eurocentric and Orientalist interpretation and the educational and confessional motivations of confessional religious education teachers. The result of the analysis indicates that these factors concur to reinforce misleading representations, which contradicts the intercultural aims proclaimed by teachers and other Teaching of Catholic Religion stakeholders. Nevertheless, this article also individuates those elements that could be fruitfully framed in an academic study-of-religions perspective and suggests a modality of cooperation between Catholic Religion teachers and scholars of religions.

The recent initiation of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) brings about deep theological issues. The possibility that AGI can achieve digital omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence challenges the traditional doctrine of divine attributes. The anticipation that AGI will soon possess superintelligence endangers the validity of Western logos theologies that adopted the logos, a cardinal Greek concept, as the root-metaphor. Logos in Western thought has become narrowly defined as technical reasoning (intelligence) since the Enlightenment. This logos-centralism brought a theological reduction to perceive God as superintelligence, which could be equated with a superintelligent AGI. The advent of AGI could complete logos theologies with an ultra-intelligent and omnipotent God. In high-tech places such as Silicon Valley, new techno-religious movements already appear that enthrone and worship AI as a divine status. Furthermore, transhumanists fervently advocate a techno-utopian vision that, with the maximum use of science and AGI technology, humans can achieve the paradise foretold in the Gospel without tears, suffering, diseases, and even death. This paper critically analyzes these coming issues of AGI and Transhumanism to propose a macro theological paradigm shift from the theo-logos to theo-dao, adopting dao (Wisdom of transformative praxis) as an alternate root-metaphor in and through interreligious and interdisciplinary trialogue with East Asian religions (Confucianism and Daoism) and sciences/ technologies.

Abstract Cultural and religious representations may seem different from one culture to another. Yet the concept of the ‘Force’ that George Lucas developed in the Star Wars saga (1977–2019) has been compared to the Judeo-Christian and East Asian religions and traditions, and even to the Greco-Roman philosophical concept of ‘pneuma’. In turn, the Igbo of Nigeria believe in the existence of ‘Chi’, an enigmatic concept that has given rise to various interpretations. This article conducts a comparative analysis of the concept of ‘Force’ in Lucas’ Star Wars saga and the Igbo ‘Chi’ in Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta’s novel Kehinde (1994). It focuses on the principle of duality these works establish between the natural and supernatural worlds and its relevance for the twin characters in the narratives. The connections between the ‘Force’ and the twins Luke and Leia and between ‘Chi’ and Kehinde and her dead twin sister Taiwo evoke the epic structure of a hero that must, in Joseph Campbell’s terms, “slay [the] dragon” (Campbell and Moyers 1988/1991: 182). The article examines the relevance of religion and myths in these twentieth-century narratives that readdress the development of the heroes’ identity and their struggle to offer audiences role models to confront modern social and political questions.

Teaching about East Asian religions all too often presents them as artifacts of the premodern past. This can encourage students to assume that modernization has rendered the East Asian past, especially religious traditions, obsolete. Teaching with contemporary East Asian films is a way to remedy that oversight, challenge that assumption, and bring students into contact with East Asian religious cultures as living traditions in modern societies. Since contemporary East Asian societies have been shaped by what Chang Kyung-sup calls “compressed modernity” – a process by which “economic, political, social and/or cultural changes occur in an extremely condensed manner in respect to both time and space,” resulting in “the dynamic coexistence of mutually disparate historical and social elements” such as modernity and tradition (Chang 2010: 320) – films that explore the interplay between such “mutually disparate… elements” can be used as highly teachable “texts” in the classroom. Examples of such films include Jia Zhangke’s Tian zhuding (2013) and Shinkai Makoto’s Kimi no na wa (2016), which juxtapose traditions such as Confucianism, Chinese popular religion, and Shintō with critical views of social reality in contemporary China and Japan, respectively. These and other films depict the ways in which religious traditions continue to inform how contemporary East Asians negotiate and construct identity, memory, and power. Moreover, they show how these countries’ contrasting experiences of compressed modernity produced different kinds of interactions between modernity and tradition, which in turn explains why religion can look so different in these countries today. This paper was part of a panel on “Teaching Asian Religions Through Film” presented at the Association for Asian Studies conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, March 24­–27, 2022. The panel offered concrete examples on how to adopt cinema and TV to discuss Asian religions, culture, and modernity in the classroom and contributed to the developing analysis concerning the use of visual media in Asian studies pedagogy.

This article presents reflections on Chien’s, Richey’s, and Mixon’s articles on the benefits of using film as a component of courses about Asian religions. I first explore how incorporating film can help meet the goals that instructors set as part of their course planning, and then shift to analysis of the various pedagogical strategies Chien, Richey, and Mixon employ, highlighting how the techniques that they use for East Asian religions and Islam can be valuable in teaching about other Asian religions as well. This paper was part of a panel on “Teaching Asian Religions Through Film” presented at the Association for Asian Studies conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, March 24­–27, 2022. The panel offered concrete examples on how to adopt cinema and TV to discuss Asian religions, culture, and modernity in the classroom and contributed to the developing analysis concerning the use of visual media in Asian studies pedagogy.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 48, Issue 2 p. 299-300 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: East Asia BUDDHIST STATECRAFT IN EAST ASIA , Stephanie Balkwill and James A. Benn. Studies on East Asian Religions, 6. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022. Pp. xi + 191. Hardback, $125.00. First published: 20 September 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.15911Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume48, Issue2June 2022Pages 299-300 RelatedInformation

Sino-Japanese religious discourse, more often than not, is treated as a unidirectional phenomenon. Academic treatments of pre-modern East Asian religion usually portray Japan as the passive recipient of Chinese Buddhist traditions, while explorations of Buddhist modernization efforts focus on how Chinese Buddhists utilized Japanese adoptions of Western understandings of religion. This paper explores a case where Japan was simultaneously the receptor and agent by exploring the Chinese revival of Tang-dynasty Zhenyan. This revival—which I refer to as Neo-Zhenyan—was actualized by Chinese Buddhist who received empowerment (Skt. abhiṣeka) under Shingon priests in Japan in order to claim the authority to found “Zhenyan” centers in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and even the USA. Moreover, in addition to utilizing Japanese Buddhist sectarianism to root their lineage in the past, the first known architect of Neo-Zhenyan, Wuguang (1918–2000), used energeticism, the thermodynamic theory propagated by the German chemist Freidrich Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932; 1919 Nobel Prize for Chemistry) that was popular among early Japanese Buddhist modernists, such as Inoue Enryō (1858–1919), to portray his resurrected form of Zhenyan as the most suitable form of Buddhism for the future. Based upon the circular nature of esoteric transmission from China to Japan and back to the greater Sinosphere and the use of energeticism within Neo-Zhenyan doctrine, this paper reveals the sometimes cyclical nature of Sino-Japanese religious influence. Data were gathered by closely analyzing the writings of prominent Zhenyan leaders alongside onsite fieldwork conducted in Taiwan from 2011–2019.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 47, Issue 2 p. 256-256 Short Reviews Of Recent Publications: East Asia A HISTORY OF CHINESE BUDDHIST FAITH AND LIFE. By Kai Sheng. Studies on East Asian Religions, 3. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020. Pp. x + 596. Hardback, $192.00. First published: 08 August 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.15305Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume47, Issue2June 2021Pages 256-256 RelatedInformation

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 47, Issue 2 p. 248-248 Short Reviews Of Recent Publications: East Asia THE TRANSNATIONAL CULT OF MOUNT WUTAI: HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES. Edited by Susan Andrews, Jinhua Chen, and Guang Kuan. Studies on East Asian Religions, 2. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021. Pp. xiv + 471. Hardback, $146.00. First published: 08 August 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.15196Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume47, Issue2June 2021Pages 248-248 RelatedInformation

Transforming the Void: Embryological Discourse and Reproductive Imagery in East Asian Religions, edited by Anna Andreeva and Dominic Steavu

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 46, Issue 3 p. 436-436 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: East Asia CHINESE AND TIBETAN ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. Edited by Bentor, Yael and Shahar, Meir, Studies on East Asian Religions, 1. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2017. Pp. xii + 450, Hardback, $145.00. First published: 11 November 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.14699Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume46, Issue3Special Issue: Religion and SexualitySeptember 2020Pages 436-436 RelatedInformation

This article centers around the Anavatapta Lake. In East Asian pictorialization of worldview, Maps of Mt. Sumeru, which depict the mountain at the core of the world, are often paired with Maps of India, in which the Anavatapta Lake occupies a significant place. When the concept of the Anavatapta Lake was transmitted from India to China and Japan, it was understood through the lens of local cultures and ideologies, and the lake was envisioned as a site spatially connected to various places in China and Japan. As a result, the idea of the Indian lake located at the center of the human world helped China and Japan formulate their statuses and positions within the religious and geopolitical discourse of Buddhist cosmology. Through investigations of both pictorial and textual sources, this article explores the significance and place that the Anavatapta Lake occupied in East Asian religion and literature.

The current issue of Poligrafi focuses on this historical period and explores different aspects of the contact with East Asian religions at that time. The text by Chikako Shigemori Bučar focuses on the visits Alma Karlin made to the temples and shrines in Japan and the traces that remain of those visits in her work and her collection. Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik focuses on how Alma Karlin met with Chinese funerary rituals and mourning practices and how she interpreted them. In the third paper Byoung Yoong Kang provides a detailed reconstruction of the events behind an image in Alma Karlin’s collection that depicts a Korean funeral. In the fourth paper, Klara Hrvatin analyses Japanese musical instruments from the collection of Alma Karlin and their relation to religious music. The last paper, by Helena Motoh, talks about the many ways in which Confucian tradition was understood and interpreted in pre-WWII Slovenia.

Reviewed by: Empreintes du tantrisme en Chine et en Asie orientale: Imaginaires, rituels, influences by Vincent Durand-Dastès Martin Lehnert Vincent Durand-Dastès, ed., Empreintes du tantrisme en Chine et en Asie orientale: Imaginaires, rituels, influences. Institut Belge de Hautes Études Chinoises, Mélanges Chinois et Bouddhiques, vol. 32. Leuven, Paris, and Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2016. vi, 380 pp. €80 (pb). ISBN 978-90-429-3034-6 As a follow up to a symposium held at the Centre d’études chinoises of INALCO, Paris, on May 15, 2009, this volume traces Tantric practices and beliefs in China and East Asia by focusing on the related imaginations, rituals, and influences in the wider religious contexts both in pre-modern and (to a lesser extent) modern society. The variety of contexts requires a heuristic, subject-related approach that would allow one not to get lost in the diversity of particular phenomena. In his “Introduction,” Vincent Durand-Dastès defines a set of criteria that help to delimit the subject: (1) the importance of sophisticated rituals, in particular rituals of consecration and for the evocation of deities; (2) a particular pantheon related to such rituals; (3) the importance of thaumaturgical practices; (4) the purported immediate “magical” efficacy of ritual actions and objects; (5) affirmation of “passions” and practices in soteriological terms which Buddhist doctrine would not [End Page 73] otherwise consider; (6) implementation of such means for individual as well as governmental ends, the latter often based on notions of sacral kingship. As none of these criteria exclusively apply to Buddhist formations, the editor and authors prefer the concept of “Tantrism” (instead of, e.g., esoteric Buddhism, although this terminological decision is not adhered to in a strictly programmatic manner), which also allows for more flexibility in tracing the variety of relations to Daoism, Shintō, and vernacular religion. Such an approach, on the one hand, keeps up the tradition of Michel Strickmann’s groundbreaking studies (to the memory of whom the volume is also dedicated), and, on the other hand, further differentiates scholarly conceptions of “Tantrism” in the context of East Asian religion. The volume is divided into three sections. The first section, “Imaginaires,” comprises three chapters dealing with Tantric influences on the iconography, literature, and mythology of pre-modern China: Caroline Gyss examines liturgical furnishings and paintings (largely from Baoningsi 寶寧寺) pertaining to the “purificatory ritual of water and land” (shuiluzhai 水陸齋) and highlights local dynamics that helped to define the status of Tantric and/or Daoist deities during the Ming period. Vincent Durand-Dastès gives a detailed analysis of the perceived moral ambiguity of Tantric practices as they are described in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Chinese novels. Finally, Meir Shahar maps out the background, sources, and developments which nourished the Chinese imagination about the Nezha 那吒 deity with particular regard to Kṛṣṇa and Indian mythology. The second section, “Rituels,” deals with the socio-historical aspects of ritual practice: With special focus on the “Records of Yijian” (Yijian zhi 夷堅志), a famous collection of stories about things divine and supernatural compiled around 1198, Liu Hong examines lay Buddhist uses of the still popular “Dhāraṇī of Great Compassion” (Dabei zhou 大悲咒) and highlights its therapeutic and apotropaic significance in the context of medical practice vis-à-vis shamanism. In the only chapter written in English, Ester Bianchi discusses pre-modern as well as modern Chinese versions of the “Chanting of the Names of Mañjuśrī” (Mañjuśrī-nāma-saṃgīti) and their reception in twentieth-century China, which was also motivated by the growing interest in Tibetan Buddhism. Addressing contemporary Daoist ritual and the influence of Tantric mūdra-practice, Brigitte Baptandier gives an account of the various thaumaturgic and therapeutic competences maintained by the ritual experts of the Lüshan pai 閭山派 tradition located in Fujian and Taiwan. The third section, “Contrepoints: Japon et Corée,” comprises two chapters addressing Tantric practices in Japan and Korea, respectively: François Macé outlines certain synthetic aspects of Tantric Buddhism in Japan which reflect the ambiguity of tutelary deities venerated for their protective as well as transgressive assistance to the clergy and the lay people. With a length of 86...

内在的超越の宗教観 : 東アジアの宗教との対比において(西田幾多郎の宗教思想,パネル, 第六十八回学術大会紀要)

Reviewed by: Shi'ism in South East Asia: 'Alid Piety and Sectarian Constructions ed. by Chiara Formichi and R. Michael Feener Majid Daneshgar Majid Daneshgar, Michael Feener, Chiara Formichit, Shi'ism, 'Alid, South East Asian religion, Shia Islam, Islamic magic chiara formichi and r. michael feener, eds. Shi'ism in South East Asia: 'Alid Piety and Sectarian Constructions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 397. There have been many academic studies examining the history and literature of minorities (e.g., Shi'is) in South East Asia, most recently the present work, produced by Chiara Formichi and Michael Feener, a collection of essays originating in a workshop held in the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore in 2010. This book would have much to offer a reader approaching it through the lens of Southeast Asian Studies; nevertheless, given the context of this review I decided to highlight its references to Islamic rituals. [End Page 404] The book is divided into four parts. Part One deals with the historical foundations of Shi'ism in Southeast Asia. It includes a comprehensive chapter by Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti that addresses the evolution of Shi'i devotional literature in light of the religious and political conditions of the Middle East and South East Asia. Part Two is dedicated to literary legacies. For instance, 'Alīb. Abī Ṭālib is known as the scribe of the Messenger of Islam in "the earliest surviving Javanese manuscript of Samud narrative dating from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century" (53). As Ronit Ricci explains, 'Alī is portrayed in this manuscript as the faithful representative of Muhammad, who is fully knowledgeable. Ricci also shows that Javanese works display 'Alī as a great warrior who was able to defeat non-Muslims, including the Jewish people. Wendy Mukherjee introduces the theme of the piety (taqwa) and morality (akhlaq) of Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad, in Malay texts. A Malay folk prose narrative called Hikayat Ali Kawin or "The Story of 'Alī's Marriage" provides local young brides with ethical lessons. In an Acehnese text regarding Muhammad's admonitions, and thoroughly in contrast to Middle Eastern sources, the so-called sinless Fatima (the wife of 'Alī) is replaced with the one who is accused of a major sin, adultery. Muhammad is then shown instructing his daughter on how to obey her husband. For instance: "The woman who perishes in childbirth dies a martyr's death. There is no salvation for a woman who is unfaithful to her husband; hell is her portion" (75). This is despite the fact that upon translating and interpreting some Western and South Asian religious and mystical literature dealing with Muhammad and his household (ahl al-bayt), Malays added additional fictional/imaginary elements to the body of literature. They produced both concise and lengthy folk prose narratives and treatises focusing, for example, on 'Alī (Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law as well as the first imam of Shi'a) and Fatima, whose acts, according to Shi'ism, are errorless. Malay stories also suggest that one may easily manage one's life through learning about supernatural and magical qualities (khawass) found in the Malay version of holy figures' instructions (e.g. ahl al-bayt and Sufis). Following Edwin Wieringa, who had stated that "other texts in which 'Ali and Fātimah appear, seem to be of a more obscure nature, dealing with magic and eroticism/mysticism,"1 some chapters of this volume pay particular attention to such themes. [End Page 405] On this subject, Faried F. Saenong tries to demystify the role of 'Alid's family in Southeast Asian sexual arts. He outlines different stages of intercourse in Bugis manuscripts in which "'Alī and Fātima appear in a magic formula that is supposed to be uttered by the wife, in which 'Alī and Fātima are referred to as exemplary practitioners of foreplay" (107). Furthermore, there are several pre-twentieth-century Malay manuscripts with particular references to sensual pleasure (ladzat) and the sensation of orgasm (panas) discussed by Teren Sevea. Part Three revolves around modern Southeast Asia. For example, the chapter by R. Michael Feener argues the development and reception of an old [religious] feast...

Reviewed by: Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan by Heather Blair David Quinter (bio) Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan. By Heather Blair. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2015. xviii, 345 pages. $49.95. Heather Blair’s Real and Imagined is a rich analysis of the devotional activities and cultural imaginary surrounding Mt. Kinpusen in the Ōmine range, south of Nara. Blair focuses on the discourses and practices shaping Kinpusen as a pilgrimage destination and cultic site in early medieval Japan. The study can be situated within a series of recent monographs by religious studies scholars on mountain sites in East Asia, including D. Max Moerman’s Localizing Paradise, on Kumano (2005); Barbara Ambros’s Emplacing a Pilgrimage, on Ōyama (2008); and James Robson’s Power of Place, on Nanyue (2009). (That all four monographs were published by Harvard University Asia Center is, for this reviewer, a coincidence—though perhaps not for Blair or the press.) All four scholars leverage their focus on place to transcend sectarian boundaries that delimit much scholarship on East Asian religions. All (including Robson on China) have been influenced by Allan Grapard’s emphasis on studying Japanese religions in situ and particular cultic sites. All use such threefold formulations of space as Henri Lefebvre’s “perceived, conceived, and lived space” and Michel Foucault’s “utopia, dystopia, and [End Page 393] heterotopia.” Blair finds inspiration especially in Edward Soja’s model of “real, imagined, and real-and-imagined,” which helps transcend binary oppositions between physical and imagined space (pp. 2–3). And similarly to Robson on “Buddho-Daoism,” Moerman’s, Ambros’s, and Blair’s spotlight on combinatory cults of Buddhist deities and kami (the latter often analyzed as Shintō) transcends oppositions between Buddhism and “native” religions. Blair’s monograph also belongs to recent work applying and reformulating Kuroda Toshio’s theories of the “power-bloc system” (kenmon taisei) characterizing medieval rule. Kuroda viewed medieval Japan as dominated by competing but interdependent blocs associated with the court, warrior houses, and religious establishments. Within this system, leading temples and shrines played key ideological roles but were also military and economic powers. One ramification of Kuroda’s theories has been to promote more-integrated studies of medieval political and religious history, taking close account of the social and ideological dynamics among the power blocs. Blair’s work can be read fruitfully alongside similarly positioned studies such as Mikael Adolphson’s The Gates of Power (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000). In many ways, Real and Imagined is an extended case study of Kuroda’s power-bloc theory, using Kinpusen and shifting relationships among Fujiwara regents, retired emperors, and the Fujiwara house temple Kōfukuji as exemplar. Blair focuses on the periods of rule by Fujiwara regents (mid-tenth to late eleventh century) and retired emperors (1086–1221), showing how pilgrimage to Kinpusen was both devotional and political. Divided into three parts, Real and Imagined devotes part 1 to Heianperiod (794–1185) representations of Kinpusen, or “the mountain imagined” (p. 13). Chapter 1 shows tenth-century lay pilgrims to Kinpusen subverting divisions between the mountains as alien realm and the capital as civilized center. Starting with Fujiwara no Kaneie (929–90), successive regents undertook carefully orchestrated pilgrimages from the Heian capital to Kinpusen, appropriating the otherworldly charisma of the mountain “and expanding the domain of the civilized center” (p. 13). However, as Blair’s analysis aptly suggests, this appropriation simultaneously depended on such conceptual binaries to “bring home” the boundary-crossing benefits of pilgrimage. Blair places Kinpusen’s longstanding ban on women in this context (pp. 48–56). She suggests that “pushing women into the role of the excluded other” enabled male pilgrims “to imagine themselves as a single group united by gender” (p. 49). I found this contextualization, including the interweaving of past precedent and modern circumstance, compelling. But given the author’s invocations of Kinpusen as the only Japanese mountain still maintaining the ban year-round, I longed for some explanation of how Kinpusen does so despite the ban’s illegality under the postwar constitution. [End Page 394] Chapter 2 analyzes the mountain’s pantheon. It centers on...

Reviewed by: Buddhist and Christian Responses to the Kowtow Problem in China by Eric Reinders Amos Yong BUDDHIST AND CHRISTIAN RESPONSES TO THE KOWTOW PROBLEM IN CHINA. By Eric Reinders. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. ix + 187 pp. The very brief acknowledgments paragraph by this Emory University associate professor of East Asian religions intimates that the subject of this book was researched and first written in the 1990s but does not explain the almost two-decade delay in [End Page 234] publication. The title of the published version correctly suggests a more comparative stance than the doctoral dissertation—“Buddhist Rituals of Obeisance and the Contestation of the Monk’s Body in Medieval China,” which was awarded a PhD by the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1997—although it is perhaps more accurate to say not only that the book engages with Christian resistance (not merely “responses”) to the bowing rite but that the original study that focused more narrowly on seventh-century China has been expanded into a broader historical approach that includes the modern Christian encounter with China and other more specifically history-of-comparative-religions concerns. Further, the bibliography of the volume under review indicates that the author has attempted to keep up with the literature on the topic that has appeared in the intervening years. Last, although perhaps most important, Reinders has in the intervening years built on and extended the line of inquiry charted in his doctoral studies—including two books: Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion (University of California Press, 2004), and Buddhism and Iconoclasm in East Asia: A History (with Fabio Rambell, Bloomsbury Academic, 2012)—and these have in turn now also influenced his revisioning, rewriting, and expanding of the original research and thesis. Readers of Buddhist-Christian Studies will appreciate at least the following three lines of comparative inquiry. First, Reinders cut his scholarly teeth riding one of the first waves of research on religion and the body, and this book exhibits the expertise honed by one who has inhabited this realm of inquiry since it appeared in the religious studies academy. Although almost half of the book (chapters 2–4, of seven) is devoted to the imperial debate in 662 that pitted Confucian pro-bowing arguments against Buddhist anti-bowing apologetics—led by the monk Daoxuan (596–667)—Reinders helpfully situates the affair historically, textually, philosophically, and religiously. From an intra–East Asian perspective, the dispute exhibited how and why Confucians and Buddhists, while imbibing each other’s traditions over the millennia, have not always seen eye to eye (pun intended). On the one hand, both granted deferentiality was innate to the human condition, whether manifest in filial piety or when oriented respectfully to the Buddha as symbolic of human awakening and enlightenment; on the other hand, bowing to one’s parents, or to the emperor, was not the same as obedience to the Buddha and his representatives (monks in the Buddhist order and its various levels), and certainly not always to be demanded. While the more philosophically inclined will be drawn to assessments regarding bowing in relationship to power or authority, to the gendered aspect of postures of obeisance, or to theories of verticality and hierarchy as illuminating the sociality of the bow (all explicated in chapter 6), others interested in the materiality of religion will be treated episodically to how human relationships are structured spatially and habitually, how sacred space (Buddhist temples, for instance) is defined topographically and ritually, and how spiritual awakening is not only manifest in embodied practices but also achieved through acts of obeisance conducted on the proper occasions. The phenomenological insights into the kowtow that appear at crucial junctures throughout the book highlight the symbolic density encoded in the act of bowing, although it is not just what is socially and conventionally accepted about the import of the rite that may [End Page 235] be most important, but how its habituated intentionality expressed multiple layers of enlightened or awakened self-consciousness in approaching others or interacting with one’s environment (whether construed “naturally,” interpersonally, or apropos the Buddha and “his” representatives). Overlooked in the modern world as no more than a perfunctory...