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This chapter discusses the history of Ekoji—how it was founded and when different groups joined and occupied the temple. It describes the temple's layout and the ways in which the former house was converted or reconfigured into a Buddhist temple. The chapter also introduces Reverend Takashi Kenryu Tsuji, the founder of Ekoji. Methodists referred Tsuji as a “circuit rider” and praised his efforts to spread Buddhism in the South. Besides being a Buddhist circuit rider, Tsuji also represents another type of Buddhist leader: the modernist Shin Buddhist priest.

Jan Kiely’s chapter on early 1950s Suzhou is the first archivally-based study to illustrate how the dismantling of institutional Buddhism in the early PRC was actually carried out and also considers the consequences for Buddhism in China thereafter.

This chapter examines the flexible nature of religion by focusing on Buddhist temples as multiaspirational sites in contemporary Beijing. More specifically, it considers the role of public Buddhist sites such as the Temple of Universal Rescue in post-Mao urban China. It argues that such sites function as arenas for urban aspirations that find little expression in the nonreligious spaces of secular cities like Beijing. Using the Temple of Universal Rescue as an example, the chapter shows how urban religious spaces in post-Mao China, particularly Buddhist ones, can function as sites for multiple aspirations that challenge state and market visions that dominate the urban geography of the secular Chinese city. After a brief review of the social history of religion and the secular in modern China, the rest of the chapter explores how the post-Mao phenomenon of religious spaces emerged as sites for alternative aspirations and looks at the aspirations of three temple goers: Wang Yi, Li Xiangqian, and Jiang Mei.

This chapter discusses the history, construction, utilization, and excavation of the temple Asukadera. Asukadera is not only the first full-scale temple built in Japan, it is really the first proper Buddhist temple in any meaningful sense. The chapter demonstrates that all of the key figures of the period either were directly associated with the process or were believed by some to have had such an association; consequently, it is shown that the history of Asukadera is a microcosm illuminating the larger picture. The people involved include Empress Regnant Suiko (r. 593–628), Prince Stable Door (Umayado no ōji, also known as Crown Prince Saintly Virtue, Shōtoku Taishi, 574–622), and Soga no Umako (?–626), the leader of the Soga family.

This chapter examines food festivals at the Wat Thai of Los Angeles, the first and largest Thai Buddhist temple in the nation, which was established in 1979, as a window on the relationship between food, race, and place in the suburbs during the 1980s. It charts Thai American suburbanization in the East San Fernando Valley near Wat Thai and traces the history of the temple, including how it evolved into a community space that became popular for its weekend food festivals. The festivals, which attracted thousands of visitors, fostered a public-oriented Thai American suburban culture that was a claim for a "right to the global city." The festivals, however, sparked complaints from a group of nearby residents, who used zoning laws to try to shut them down. The chapter contends that the residents who opposed the festivals articulated a liberal multiculturalism to maintain the white spatial imaginary of the neighborhood.

This chapter examines British work on Chinese and Japanese studies. It explains that for a significant part of the twentieth century British sinologists have been trendsetters worldwide in the field of medieval studies. Most of the British research focused on Tun-huang studies, the Taoist canon, Buddhist temple art, Chinese landscape painting, Sung porcelain and Chinese poetry. This chapter also stresses the need to examine the concepts of gender and egalitarianism with the framework of current trends in medieval sinology.

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. It argues that the conceptualization of the Four Great Temples group was intimately related to many of the most significant political developments of the seventh century. In tracing this process, it is evident that Asukadera is different from the others since it was not a “royal” temple, but one founded by the powerful Soga clan; consequently, it was only later, somewhat reluctantly, included in the group. Nevertheless, it was in many respects the great temple of the seventh century, even if not initially a “great temple.” The chapter also identifies a common thread running through the process of the establishment of the Four Great Temples, as each ruler and court vowed and built a grand temple as a sign of supremacy. However, the extent to which this process was motivated by politics or personal piety is unclear.

This introduction provides an overview of the four Buddhist temples discussed in this volume—Asukadera, Kudara Ōdera, Kawaradera, and Yakushiji—by far the most important architectural projects of the initial phases of Buddhism in Japan, during the seventh century (i.e. last decade of the sixth and the first decade of the eighth centuries). It analyzes two problems of the early Buddhist period that have most occupied scholars: the dating of the west compound (saiin) of “Hōryūji” and the status of the Yakushi triad and east pagoda of Heijōkyō Yakushiji. In both cases, reliance on the documentary sources and other existing data led essentially to an impasse prior to archaeological investigation. The chapter also presents a historical background prior to the Four Great Temples.

This chapter discusses the history, construction, utilization, and excavation of the temple Kudara Ōdera. In contrast to the Soga patronage of Asukadera, a crucial significance of Kudara Ōdera is its status as the first documented instance of a royal temple, vowed by the monarch Jomei. The chapter presents a detailed discussion of the excavations at Kibi Pond, now believed by most scholars to be the site of Kudara Ōdera, the location of which was previously unknown. It presents the results of each season at Kibi Pond in considerable detail, with the goal of describing the nature of a recent archaeological project. Contrasting with the Asukadera data, which have been in the public domain for almost fifty years, that of Kudara Ōdera is very recent and generally not widely disseminated. Building on the material presented in Chapter 1, this chapter attempts to indicate some of the main refinements in excavation methodology as developed in recent years.

This chapter discusses the history, construction, utilization, and excavation of the temple Yakushiji, the most well-known member of the Four Great Temples group. Three of the four temples were transferred from the old capital, Fujiwarakyō, to the new capital, Heijōkyō, in the early part of the Nara period. In contrast to the other two that were transferred (Asukadera and Kudara ōdera), Yakushiji retained essentially the same plan in its new location; this allows a comparison of seventh- and eighth-century manifestations of a single religious institution. Particularly important is the actual nature of the “transfer” of temples, an issue that has engaged scholars for a long time and can be especially well studied in the case of Yakushiji. The chapter attempts to elucidate key factors related to the “transfer” of the great temples from the old to the new capital as well as the manner in which Yakushiji was integrated into the first full-scale capital in Japan, Fujiwarakyō, thereby initiating a relationship between capital and temple that remained important in subsequent centuries.

This chapter discusses the history, construction, utilization, and excavation of the temple Kawaradera. An important feature distinguishing Kawaradera from Asukadera and Kudara Ōdera is the occurrence of related ground plans and roof tiles at temples located throughout the country. This situation relates to important developments taking place in political institutions during the third quarter of the seventh century, which are different in character from those of the first half of the century. Thus, the chapter emphasizes the impact of Kawaradera on a number of other temples, including those located around the Ōtsu capital; on Kanzeonji in Kyushu to the south-west; and on Shimotsuke Yakushiji in the Kantō region to the northeast. This analysis offers new insights into the broader situation of at least one of the Four Great Temples. Particularly important is the elucidation of historical connections between an important capital temple and a variety of other temples located in other areas.

From collectivization to the Cultural Revolution, communal temples deprived of land routinely came under attack, from political campaigns and encroachments on their property and religious sites. By the early 1970s, the vast majority of communal temples in Rui’an were either shut down, occupied, or destroyed—a massive deterritorialization on a truly unprecedented scale in local history. Followers quickly learned to deal with the expropriation of traditional communal religious space through various tactics to carry on worship. The restoration of temples did not lack the support of Communist Party cadres, the new village leadership. However, since the political climate affected the stability of religious spaces, as well as the material foundations and leadership of communal religious activities, attempts to restore temples and temple practices could only persist at a minimal level. But this persistence had a crucial role in laying the groundwork for the post-Mao revival of communal temples.

The Communist government after 1949 did not have a systematic program to crack down on religion. Yet the sweeping land reform—Mao’s core revolutionary agenda—dealt a huge blow to religious communities. Land reform, however, did not impact all religious traditions in the same manner or to the same extent. Land seizures removed one of the main sources of livelihood for Buddhist and territorial temples, but salvationist groups and Christian churches, whose “ways of organizing actions” were less bound by locality, were hit less hard economically. The most significant consequence of land reform’s uneven effects on religious life may have been the dramatic expansion of indigenous salvationist groups during land reform, followed shortly thereafter by the swift downfall of the same groups. This marked a critical shift in the local religious landscape since the turn of the twentieth century.

This chapter examines the symbolic geography of Ceylon as a scientific site. It suggests that the scale of inquiry in Ceylon included the ways in which nineteenth-century networks of colonial understanding about that island could not be separated from questions about the physical topography of the island itself. This chapter also contends that the twin topography of Ceylon and their long-standing iconic associations were constitutive of relations between British natural history and the natural knowledge that Kandyans cultivated around Buddhist temples.