Japanese Buddhist Tradition Research Articles

Navigating inclusion: ‘home-making’ in the UK Shin Buddhist community

ABSTRACT This contribution focuses on narratives and experiences of belonging and exclusion among convert members of Three Wheels, a Japanese Shin Buddhist temple in London, to investigate how difference is incorporated into transnational Buddhism. Three Wheels, whose members include both diasporic Japanese and convert Buddhist Europeans, occupies a marginal position within both transnational Shin Buddhism and the UK’s Buddhist (and broader religious) landscape. By embracing individual and collective marginality, I argue, priests and members foster affective connections that allow for a shared minority space to emerge where its diverse members can feel at home. To explore the dynamics of this ‘home-making’, I focus specifically on how convert members negotiate their own space in the community and the processes of inclusion and exclusion through which they navigate the linguistic, religious, and cultural barriers they encounter as convert members of a Japanese Buddhist tradition. This discussion of home-making within Three Wheels as a shared minority space highlights the complex dynamics of minority status and marginality in transnational Buddhism. It also shows how, in this case, convert Buddhists have worked with Asian migrants to build what appears to be a successful mixed local Buddhist sangha that accommodates the diverse needs of its members.

The Account of How Nichiren Miraculously Escaped Beheading and Its Modern Critics: History and Hagiography in a Japanese Buddhist Tradition

The Account of How Nichiren Miraculously Escaped Beheading and Its Modern Critics: History and Hagiography in a Japanese Buddhist Tradition

When One Religion Isn't Enough: The Lives Of Spiritually Fluid People by Duane Bidwell

Reviewed by: When One Religion Isn't Enough: The Lives Of Spiritually Fluid People by Duane Bidwell Paul O. Ingram WHEN ONE RELIGION ISN'T ENOUGH: THE LIVES OF SPIRITUALLY FLUID PEOPLE. By Duane Bidwell. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018. 180 pp. In Northern Europe and the United States, most people assume that religious identity (meaning "Christian," "Jewish," "Muslim," "Buddhist," "Hindu," or Native American or other primal religious Ways) are clearly defined, singular, and static. This understanding of religious identity as static, unchanging, and self-defining assumes an Enlightenment understanding of the nature of things and events, particularly the views of René Descartes. But, in actuality, religious identity is fluid, processive, and pluralistic because of what Duane Bidwell identifies as "spiritually fluid people." Spirituality fluid people have two or more religious identities, identities that cross complex, multiple religious traditions that blur social categories, evoke prejudices, and complicate religious communities. Their presence also raises important questions: How and why do people become spiritually fluid? Are they merely confused and unable to commit to a particular religious Way? In When One Religion Isn't Enough, Bidwell describes and analyzes the lives of spiritually fluid people, and in so doing reveals that while some people choose multiple religious identities, many more inherit them. Bidwell addresses three questions: (1) In a world that privileges singular religious identities, how people come to be claimed by multiple religious identities? (2) How do spiritually fluid people integrate conflicting religious beliefs and practices as they participate in multiple religious Ways? And (3) How do spiritually fluid beliefs and practices help people and communities flourish? To answer these three questions Bidwell describes three "pathways"—choice, inheritance, and collaboration. These three "pathways" allow people to sculpt the pluralism inherent in inhabiting multiple religious identities into coherent individual and communal identities that transform human lives and disclose truth over and beyond their adherence to a single religious Way. [End Page 324] Bidwell notes that three types of people choose religious multiplicity. There are those born into and committed to one religious Way but attracted to another for a variety of reasons. Second, some people convert from one religious Way to another and begin to explore what they experienced as lost when they left their original religious Way. Finally, some religiously multiple people see value in several religious Ways but might not identify with any. Of particular interest to members of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies (SBCS) is the example of Ruben Habito. After Pope Paul VI's 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate, which encouraged relationships with non-Christian religious Ways, many Catholic Christians began to assume multiple religious identities. Habito was a Jesuit in the Philippines preparing for Catholic ordination. When the Church sent him to Japan as a missionary, he was asked to study Japanese Buddhist tradition as a means of helping the Church understand what God had given to humanity through Buddhism. When he encountered Zen Buddhism, he began an interior dialogue that brought Catholic teaching and practice, Buddhist teaching and practice, and his formation as a priest into conversation. Eventually, Habito left the Jesuit order and Catholic priesthood. He remains a Catholic lay leader and was ordained as a teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan linage of Japanese Zen. Accommodation and assimilation, Bidwell argues, have their own particular structure. As people learn about a new religious Way, they first tend to assimilate the new Way's teachings and practices into the categories of the old. For example, the idea of nirvana/Buddhist liberation "might be placed in a mental file" entitled "Heaven/Christian Salvation" (48). Later as people explore with greater nuance, they begin to accommodate new religious Ways by making changes to their own original religious Way as they gradually realize that "nirvana needs its own folder because its not a subset of, or equivalent to," what Christian teachings mean by "salvation." (Ibid.) For example, Paul Knitter (another member of SBCS) in his book, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, appropriates Buddhist doctrines to shed light on traditional Christian teachings and practices. His conceptual dialogue with the Buddhist Way correlates the Buddhist doctrine of interbeing or interdependence with the activity of the Holy Spirit, equates Christian salvation...

Materiality, Labor, and Signification of Sacred Objects in Japanese Buddhism

Recent studies on Buddhist materiality tend to focus on specific objects and their ritual uses, without dedicating much attention to processes of production of those objects and their actual makers. This article begins to redress this situation by outlining a general theoretical framework for the study of Buddhist objects and material culture in general through their continuous transformations—a framework that takes into account not only the ontological status and phenomenological features of individual objects, but also their signification and the various types of labor involved in their production and fruition. After proposing a general typology of objects, in order to gain a better sense of the ontological extension of Buddhism, the article also discusses the types of labor and practical activities involved in the production and use of Buddhist objects. Next, it deals with different aspects that determine the value of Buddhist sacred objects, and addresses modes of transformation affecting Buddhist objects through time and space, envisioned here as instances of broader processes of semiotic transformation (semiomorphosis). While this paper mostly examines objects within the Japanese Buddhist tradition, it hopes to offer a contribution to the study of practical materiality and labor in other Buddhist traditions as well.

Storytelling in the Rashomon Gate: Kurosawa, Konjaku monogatari-shu, and Buddhism

This article is concerned with the relationship between Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon and Konjaku monogatari-shu, an anthology of anecdotes from the Heian period. Kurosawa’s film is adapted from two short stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, which are in turn based on three Konjaku tales. This article consists of four parts. In the first part, plot summaries of the three Konjaku tales are provided, and the role of the narrator is examined in each. Special attention is paid to the elements of reflexivity in the commentaries by the Konjaku narrator. The second part of the article investigates the narrative structure of Rashomon and then discusses a striking affinity between the medieval storytelling conventions and the verbal interactions among the three characters in Kurosawa’s frame story. The extensive role of the monk-narrator in Rashomon is analyzed in light of the didactic use of the Konjaku tales in a Buddhist temple in late Heian society. The third section relates Kurosawa’s concern with the enigma of human nature to the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness. The epistemological issues raised in Rashomon are defined as the results of each character’s self-delusion. In cinematizing the interrelated subjects of elusive reality, epistemic crisis, and indeterminacy of meaning, Kurosawa makes brilliant use of his fluid camera. The last section of the article reviews the critical controversy surrounding the foundling sequence and also the problematic association of this episode with Kurosawa’s espousal of Western humanism. Three pieces of evidence are presented to argue that the sequence can be more coherently and meaningfully understood when it is contextualized in the Japanese Buddhist tradition rather than Western humanism.

Global Communication versus Ethno-Chauvinism

Globalization intensifies the range, intensity, and diversity of interactions among world societies, but along with phenomena of hybridization, glocalization, or creolization it is just as likely to produce counter-reactive phenomena of resistance or conservative radicalization. In the case of the major Japanese Buddhist tradition of Shin Buddhism, the interactive possibilities that could have been theoretically imagined for its modern encounter with North American society were overwhelmed by the ethno-chauvinism which became embedded in the nikkei population particularly in the context of early twentieth-century competition between the Japanese and American empires. The chauvinism took form, in Shin Buddhism as in certain other domains of nikkei life, as a pervasive, persistent pressure for an “equal but separate” structuring of nikkei relations with White society. The analysis suggests that in at least some instances—although North America is a quite major instance—issues of race consciousness and racial formation need to be given more attention in globalization studies.

Flagging Up Buddhism: Charles Pfoundes (Omoie Tetzunostzuke) Among the International Congresses and Expositions, 1893–1905

Charles James William Pfoundes (1840–1907), a young emigrant from Southeast Ireland, spent most of his adult life in Japan, received a Japanese name ‘Omoie Tetzunostzuke’, first embraced and then turned against Theosophy and, from 1893, was ordained in several Japanese Buddhist traditions. Lacking independent means but educated, intellectually curious, entrepreneurial, fluent in Japanese and with a keen interest in Asian culture, Pfoundes subsisted as a cultural intermediary, explaining Japan and Asia to both Japanese and foreign audiences and actively seeking involvement in global expositions and congresses, in Asia and beyond. Drawing on a previously unstudied collection of Pfoundes' personal documents, this paper first outlines Pfoundes' unusual career and then focuses on his engagement, in the last 15 years of his life, in actual or proposed international congresses and expositions in London, Chicago, Japan, Hanoi, St Louis and Oregon. The paper thereby draws attention, through the forgotten figure of Charles Pfoundes, to the distinctive nineteenth century phenomenon of great international expositions and their associated congresses, viewing these complicated events as another kind of crossroads; innovative nodes and material stimuli to the kinds of travel, cultural communication and interaction which, like monastic, trade, political and ethnic networks, helped to exchange and promote modern representations of Buddhism.

Shōtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist Tradition (review)

Shōtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist Tradition (review)

Shōtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist Tradition (review)

Shōtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist Tradition (review)

The Mirror of Memory: Constructions of Hell in the Marukis' Nuclear Murals

How does art cultivate moral reflexivity? Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, eyewitnesses to the atomic aftermath at Hiroshima, were the first artists to publicly display works showing the effects of nuclear irradiation on the human body. While their work has long been considered antiwar, few attempts have been made to theorize how their compositions structure an ethical response to aggression. Three interconnected zones of representation are explored: the artists' murals, Toshi's testimonials regarding the creation of the murals, and the museum in which the murals are displayed. Bringing Japanese Buddhist traditions for the depiction of suffering (etoki ‘picture explanation,‘ hell screen art) into conversation with contemporary theories of performance (Turner's concept of the “subjunctive mood,” Taylor's notion of “the repertoire”), memory (Kansteiner's “collected memory,” Auron's “pain of knowledge”), and museum studies (Crane's “distortion”), I articulate a contemporary Japanese model of nuclear criticism.

Shōtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in Japanese Buddhist Tradition – By Michael Como

Shōtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in Japanese Buddhist Tradition – By Michael Como

Prophets, Priests, and Religious Markets

Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: The One, the Few, and the Many. Edited by Ted Gerard Jelen, Clyde Wilcox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 350 pp., $60.00 cloth (ISBN 0-521-65031-3), $23.00 paper (ISBN: 0-521-65971-X). In Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective , Ted Jelen and Clyde Wilcox have compiled an eclectic set of essays on the history and evolution of religious politics in Asia, Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East. Well known for their individual and collaborative contributions to the study of religion and politics in the United States, in this volume Jelen and Wilcox tackle the daunting task of gleaning theoretically significant cross-national generalizations from twelve case studies encompassing more than twenty-five countries. Following Samuel Huntington (1996), the editors argue that religion is an important focus for political study because it plays a key role in explaining political mobilization, policy disputes, identity politics, and other important political outcomes (p. 1). The primary dependent variable in the case studies that comprise Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective is the general nature of religious politics. The authors conceptually divide this variable into two categories: a priestly or accommodating role of religion; and a prophetic or oppositional role (p. 7, also see Leege 1993). The contributors offer several explanatory factors for why religious politics tends to move in one or the other of these two directions, including the concept of religious markets, as outlined by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (1992) and by Anthony Gill (1998), and the content of religious beliefs and practice, with a particular focus on the distinction between the universalism and monotheism of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity and the syncretism of the Japanese Buddhist and Shinto traditions. In each case, the authors …

Etoki, or deciphering pictures, of Buddhist propaganda

Japanese Buddhists have been preaching their tenets using complex images that illustrated Buddhist canons and moralizing stories since the twelfth century. Using paintings in didactic storytelling is a prosaic, timeworn method found virtually everywhere in the world;1 what separates Japanese Buddhist tradition from others is how pictorial storytelling was perceived. Instead of coining the term to describe the act of ‘telling’ stories, the Japanese medieval audience saw the pictorial sermon as an act of magically ‘deciphering’ images into words. That is why a visually aided sermon is called ‘e (pictures) toki (deciphering).’ The difference between telling and deciphering is perhaps inconsequential, but why is the word ‘decipher’ chosen? Were paintings viewed as puzzles to be solved? Who could decipher images? What does it mean by deciphering images?

"Zen Is Not Buddhism" Recent Japanese Critiques of Buddha-Nature

AbstractHongaku shisō, the idea that all beings are "inherently" enlightened, is an almost universal assumption in the Japanese Buddhist tradition. This idea also played an important role in the indigenization of Buddhism in Japan and in the development of the syncretistic religious ethos that underlies Japanese society. Through most of Japanese history, the idea of the inherent enlightenment (including non-sentient beings suchs as plants and rocks-which expanded to include assumptions such as the non-differentiation between "indigenous" kami and the Buddhas and bodhisattvas, and the transcendence of all dualities (including good and evil) as an ideal-was pervasive and unquestioned in much of Japanese religious activity and thought. Recently some Japanese Buddhist scholars, notably Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shiro of the Sōtō Zen sect Komazawa University, have questioned the legitimacy of this ethos, claiming that it is antithetical to basic Buddhist ideas such as anātman ("no-self"), and that it is the source of many social problems in Japan. They call for a conscious recognition and rejection of this ethos, and a return to "true Buddhism." After presenting a brief outline of the history and significance of these ideas in Japan, Hakamaya and Matsumoto's critique is explained and examined. Some of the academic and social reactions to this critique are also explored.

Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest in Prewar Japan: The Career of Seno'o Girō

The interplay of religion and political protest is a familiar theme in Western studies of Japanese Christians who contributed significantly to the socialist movement in their country from the late Meiji period to World War II. Less well known is the fact that a minority of Japanese Buddhists likewise applied the ideals of their faith to political dissent in the movement. Their defiance of the State and the predominantly conservative Buddhist sects which generally supported Emperor, nation, and Empire in Asia constitutes in effect a modern Japanese Buddhist tradition of protest comparable in kind if not in scale to that found in Japanese Christianity. The purpose of the article in hand is to explore this tradition through a study of the Nichiren priest and Buddhist socialist, Seno'o Girō (1889–1961) whose career provides a striking illustration of the Buddhist dimensions of socialism in prewar Japan.

Miraculous Stories From The Japanese Buddhist Tradition: The Nihon Ryoiki of The Monk Kyokai

Miraculous Stories From The Japanese Buddhist Tradition: The Nihon Ryoiki of The Monk Kyokai

Miraculous stories from the Japanese Buddhist tradition: The Nihon ryōiki of the monk Kyōkai. Translated and edited by Kyoko M. Nakamura. (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series Vol. 20.) pp. xii, 321. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, Oxford University Press, 1973. £6.25.

Miraculous stories from the Japanese Buddhist tradition: The Nihon ryōiki of the monk Kyōkai. Translated and edited by Kyoko M. Nakamura. (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series Vol. 20.) pp. xii, 321. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, Oxford University Press, 1973. £6.25. - Volume 108 Issue 2

Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition: The Nihon ryōiki of the Monk Kyōkai

Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition: The Nihon ryōiki of the Monk Kyōkai

Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition: The “Nihon ryōiki” of the Monk Kyōkai. Translated and annotated with an introduction by Kyoko Motomachi Nakamura. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973. xii + 322 pages. $12.50.

Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition: The “Nihon ryōiki” of the Monk Kyōkai. Translated and annotated with an introduction by Kyoko Motomachi Nakamura. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973. xii + 322 pages. $12.50. - Volume 2 Issue 1

Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition: The Nihon Ryōiki of the Monk Kyōkai. Translated and edited by Kyoko Motomochi Nakamura. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973. xii, 322 pages.

Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition: The Nihon Ryōiki of the Monk Kyōkai. Translated and edited by Kyoko Motomochi Nakamura. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973. xii, 322 pages.