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This book provides a comprehensive examination of the diverse writings of Dōgen (1200-1253), the founder of Sōtō (C. Ts’ao-tung) Zen Buddhism in Japan. Dōgen is especially known for introducing to Japanese Buddhism many of the texts and practices that he discovered in China. The context of Dōgen’s travels to and reflections on China are reconstructed by means of a critical look at traditional sources both by and about Dōgen. While many studies emphasize the unique features of Dōgen’s Japanese influences versus traditional Chinese models, this book calls attention to the fusion of Chinese and Japanese elements in Dōgen’s religious vision. It reveals many new materials and insights into Dōgen’s main writings, including the multiple editions of the Shōbōgenzō, and how and when this seminal text was created by Dōgen and edited and interpreted by his disciples. This book provides the reader with a comprehensive approach to the master’s life works and an understanding of the overall career trajectory of one of the most important figures in the history of Buddhism and Asian religious thought.

Prince Shōtoku, the purported founder of Japanese Buddhism, was one of the greatest cultural icons of pre-modern Japan. The cult that grew up around his memory is recognized as one of the most important religious phenomena of the time. This book examines the creation and evolution of the Shōtoku cult over the roughly 200 years following his death—a period that saw a series of revolutionary developments in the history of Japanese religion. It highlights the activities of a cluster of kinship groups who claimed descent from ancestors from the Korean kingdom of Silla. It places these groups in their socio-cultural context and demonstrates their pivotal role in bringing continental influences to almost every aspect of government and community ideology in Japan. It argues that these immigrant kinship groups were not only responsible for the construction of the Shōtoku cult, but were also associated with the introduction of the continental systems of writing, ritual, and governance. By comparing the ancestral legends of these groups to the Shōtoku legend corpus and Imperial chronicles, the book shows that these kinship groups not only played a major role in the formation of the Japanese Buddhist tradition, they also to a large degree shaped the paradigms in terms of which the Japanese Imperial cult and the nation of Japan were conceptualized and created.

Despite popular images of priests seeking enlightenment in snow-covered mountain temples, the central concern of Japanese Buddhism is death. For that reason, Japanese Buddhism's social and economic base has long been in mortuary services—a base now threatened by public debate over the status, treatment, and location of the dead. This book explores the crisis brought on by this debate and investigates what changing burial forms reveal about the ways temple Buddhism is perceived and propagated in contemporary Japan. It offers an account of how religious, political, social, and economic forces in the twentieth century led to the emergence of new funerary practices in Japan and how, as a result, the care of the dead has become the most fundamental challenge to the continued existence of Japanese temple Buddhism. Far from marking the death of Buddhism in Japan, the book argues, funerary Buddhism reveals the tradition at its most vibrant.

This study crosses the disciplinary lines of religious studies and art history/visual studies as it juxtaposes and qualifies two representative voices for and against the role of imagery in the enlightenment experience. Kūkai (774–835) believes that real and imagined forms are indispensable to his new esoteric Mikkyō method for “becoming a Buddha in this very body” (sokushin jōbutsu), yet he also deconstructs the significance of such imagery in his poetic and doctrinal works. Conversely, Dōgen (1200–1253) believes that “just sitting” in Zen meditation without any visual props or mental elaborations can lead one to realize that “this very mind is Buddha” (sokushin zebutsu), but then he also privileges select Zen icons as worthy of veneration. In considering the nuanced views of these two premodern Japanese Buddhist masters, this study updates previous comparisons of Kūkai’s and Dōgen’s oeuvres and engages both their texts and images together for the first time. It thereby liberates them from their respective sectarian scholarship that has pigeonholed them into iconographic/ritual vs. philological/philosophical categories, and it restores the historical symbiosis between religious thought and artistic expression well before the nineteenth-century invention of the academic disciplines of religious studies vs. art history. Theoretically speaking as well, this study breaks new methodological ground by proposing space and time as organizing principles for analyzing both meditative experience, as well as visual/material culture, and it presents a broader vision of how Japanese Buddhists themselves understood the role of imagery before, during, and after awakening.

The True Pure Land sect of Japanese Buddhism, or Shin Buddhism, grew out of the teachings of Shinran (1173–1262), a Tendai-trained monk. Shinran held that even those unable to fulfill the requirements of the traditional Buddhist path could attain enlightenment through the experience of shinjin, “the entrusting mind”—an expression of the profound realization that the Buddha Amida, who promises birth in his Pure Land to all who trust in him, was nothing other than the true basis of all existence and the sustaining nature of human beings. Over the centuries, the subtleties of Shinran's teachings were often lost. Rituals developed to focus one's mind at the moment of death so one might travel to the Pure Land unimpeded, and an artistic tradition celebrated the moment when Amida and his retinue of bodhisattvas welcome the dying believer. Many Western interpreters tended to reinforce this view of Pure Land Buddhism. This book introduces the thought and selected writings of Yasuda Rijin (1900–1982), a modern Shin Buddhist thinker affiliated with the Ōtani, or Higashi Honganji, branch of Shin Buddhism. Yasuda sought to restate the teachings of Shinran within a modern tradition that began with the work of Kiyozawa Manshi (1863–1903) and extended through the writings of Yasuda's teachers Kaneko Daiei (1881–1976) and Soga Ryōjin (1875–1971). For them, and Yasuda in particular, Amida did not exist in some other-worldly paradise but rather Amida and his Pure Land were to be experienced as lived realities in the present.

This book documents a sense of what is happening on the front lines as a growing number of Buddhist priests try to reboot their roles and traditions to gain greater significance in Japanese society. It profiles innovative as well as controversial responses to the challenges facing Buddhist priests. From traditional activities (conducting memorial rituals; supporting residences for the elderly and infirm; providing relief for victims of natural disasters) to more creative ones (collaborating in suicide prevention efforts; holding symposia and concerts on temple precincts; speaking out against nuclear power following Japan’s 2011 earthquake; opening cafés, storefront temples, and pubs; even staging fashion shows with priests on the runway) more progressive members of Japan’s Buddhist clergy are trying to navigate a path leading towards renewed relevance in society. An additional challenge is to avoid alienating older patrons while trying to attract younger ones vital to the future of their temples. The work’s central theme of “experimental Buddhism” provides a fresh perspective to understand how priests and other individuals employ Buddhist traditions in selective and pragmatic ways. Using these inventive approaches during a time of crisis and transition for Japanese temple Buddhism, priests and practitioners from all denominations seek solutions that not only can revitalize their religious traditions but also influence society and their fellow citizens in positive ways.

Few periods in Japanese history are more fascinating than the seventh century. This was the period when Buddhism experienced its initial flowering in the country and the time when Asukadera, Kudara Odera, Kawaradera, and Yakushiji (the “Four Great Temples” as they were called in ancient texts) were built. These structures have received only limited attention in Western literature, primarily because they are now ruins. This book seeks to restore the four great temples to their proper place in the history of Japanese Buddhism and Buddhist architecture. Three of the temples have been studied archaeologically, but one, Kudara Odera (the first royal temple in Japan) has until recently been known only through textual references. A series of digs carried out between 1997 and 2001 at Kibi Pond yielded what are thought to be the remains of Kudara Odera. A platform, the appropriate size for a large pagoda, has been uncovered at the site, indicating the reliability of the textual sources. These results have necessitated a rethinking of early Buddhist architecture in Japan. The book gives the first detailed account in the English language of these excavations. It considers historiographical issues, settings and layouts, foundations, tiles, relics, and icons and allows readers to follow their chronological evolution. The book looks at broader political and religious developments that serve as a context for the study. It further makes an effort to unify data on great royal temples in China, Korea, and other parts of Japan.

In 1223 the monk Dōgen Kigen (1200–1253) came to the conclusion that Japanese Buddhism had become hopelessly corrupt. He undertook a dangerous pilgrimage to China to bring back a purer form of Buddhism and went on to become one of the founders of Sōtō Zen. Seven hundred years later, the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) also saw corruption in the Buddhism of his day. In his search for Japan's intellectual past, Watsuji discovered writings by Dōgen that had been hidden away by the monk's own sect. Watsuji later penned Shamon Dōgen (Dōgen the monk), which single-handedly rescued Dōgen from the brink of obscurity, reintroducing Japan to its first great philosophical mind. This book is the first English translation of Watsuji's landmark text, which delves into the complexities of individuals in social relationships, lamenting the stark egoism and loneliness of life in an increasingly Westernized Japan. It considers the nature of faith and the role of responsibility in Watsuji's vision of Dōgen's Zen. It also examines the technical terms of Dōgen's philosophy and the role of written language in Dōgen's thought.