One could, of course, dismiss this as a misunderstanding of what real Buddhism is, but then one would probably have to jettison most of the history of Buddhism in Japan as wrongheaded delusion as well. The cost is considerable.

The piece is organized into three sections, in which I comment on misrepresentations of what I have tried to do; on “silences” in the history of morality, or, alternately, on what constitutes evidence in studies of that history; and on gender-specificity as it relates to these questions.

From small-scale shrines to handheld icons and votive tablets, portability has long factored into the design and reception of Buddhist art.

The article first examines the circulation of miniature icons that served as diplomatic gifts in the sixth and seventh centuries. It then turns to figurative plaques from Tang-dynasty China (618–907) that were modified for votive and architectural uses in early Japan. Lastly, the article examines the reasons underlying the enduring popularity of portable shrines in the [Japanese] archipelago.

The article outlines some of the ways in which professional musicians and music virtuosos among the aristocracy conceptualized gagaku and bugaku instrumental music in Buddhist terms between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries. In addition to providing doctrinal justifications for artistic endeavors, they also contributed to the development of new ritual forms, such as bugaku hōyō and kangen kōshiki. This article explores influential Buddhist canonical ideas about music and shows how they were developed by musicians in medieval Japan.

Because of the war, the mission of the Shōjuin bell swung drastically…

During the Asia-Pacific War, as metals grew scarce, temple bells became a material resource for munition production. Why were temples and shrines convinced to give up their bells that embodied the hopes and vows of past donors? What was the process of transformation from a religious instrument used to comfort the dead into an object that would destroy life?

The Konjaku monogatari shu (今昔物語集) is a Japanese anthology dating from the early twelfth century. The original work contains more than one thousand systematically arranged tales from India, China, and Japan. It is the most important example of a genre of collections of brief tales which, because of their informality and unpretentious style, were neglected by Japanese critics until recent years but which are now acknowledged to be among the most significant prose literature of premodern Japan.

We explore how Japanese Buddhists of varying contexts drew upon Buddhist ideas and practices to make sense of their lives, to solve problems, and to create a meaningful world – a cosmos – out of chaos.

This academic overview of Japanese Buddhist history serves as an excellent launching pad for further study as it makes passing reference to a large number of historical events and figures showing how they fit into the larger evolution of Buddhist thought in Japan.

the ritual texts and proselytizing efforts of Jōkei 貞慶 (1155–1213), a prominent monk in the Hossō 法相 school of the early medieval era in Japan. I will seek to interpret his personal devotion and evangelism in the context of broader ideological clashes taking place. More specifically, this study will ask how we should make sense of Jōkei’s gradually evolving devotional allegiance to Kan-non 観音 in the last ten or so years of his life. I will contend that Kannon served as the perfect symbolic foil for Jōkei to counter the popular senju nenbutsu 専修 念仏 (exclusive practice of the nenbutsu) teachings expounded by Hōnen 法然 (1133–1212) and the threat it represented to established Buddhism in Japan.

Despite its successful Buddhist polemics, Sōtō’s Buddhist teachings in Korea were basically political propaganda viable only within the framework of Japanese colonial imperialism.

This surprising fact shows that the abbot was likely more interested in courtly trends than in Buddhist piety and was perhaps appointed for political reasons: a trend all too common in places where the state is entangled with the monastic Saṅgha. These panels also demonstrate how trends in non-Buddhist art and fashion can come to influence Buddhist temple art proper.

Only in one area was Tokugawa Buddhism innovative and successful: the development of a complete liturgical system for funeral services and remembrance of ancestors. For better or for worse, this feature henceforth became central in popular Buddhist piety.

A history of Japanese Buddhism, explaining how the Kamakura reforms (by such extraordinary individuals as Honen, Shinran, Dogen, and Nichiren) led, eventually, to the practices we see in Japan today.

Women bundled together and stitched their hair into the most sacred parts of the image—the deity’s hair or robes and Sanskrit seed-syllables—as a means to accrue merit for themselves or for a loved one.

This paper focuses on a set of embroidered Japanese Buddhist images said to incorporate the hair of Chūjōhime (753–781), a legendary aristocratic woman credited with attaining rebirth in Amida’s Pure Land. Chūjōhime’s hair embroideries served to show that women’s bodies could be transformed into miraculous materiality through corporeal devotional practices and served as evidence that women were capable of achieving enlightenment.

Dorogawa became the place where male travelers made last-minute preparations for the climb and afterwards availed themselves of worldly pleasures at the many inns and teahouses

How Japan’s sacred mountains are selectively remembered.

Yuishin, however, chooses to present Rāhula’s six-year gestation period as a “miraculous sign” (霊瑞), a decision that is in keeping with the kōshiki’s broader goal of praising Rāhula as a divine being.

How a thirteenth-century Japanese sect sought to revive “original Buddhism” as they understood it.

This study focuses on the life and death of Uchiyama Gudō (1874–1911), a disrobed Sōtō Zen priest, who had his priestly status posthumously restored to him on April 13, 1993, eighty-two years after his execution by the Japanese government

The relationship between Buddhism and society was apparent in nearly every aspect of medieval life…

Thaumaturgic thinking and a polytheistic outlook pervaded premodern agricultural life. Much as we in modern times depend on scientific technology, people in premodern times relied on magical ceremonies for an abundant harvest.

This study takes as its focus the medieval deification of Prince Shotoku’s mother, Anahobe no Hashihito. Long associated with the Nara nunnery Chuguji, Empress Hashihito was resurrected as patron goddess of the nunnery in the medieval period, when Chuguji was restored and expanded by the nun Shinnyo (1211-?). Images of Empress Hashihito and the Nun Shinnyo take center stage in the literature and art associated with Chuguji. This article argues that medieval Chuguji narratives effectively ignore androcentric Buddhist teachings in favor of popular legends that present Empress Hashihito as a female deity and Shinnyo as a female Buddhist exemplar. That Chuguji materials offer these seemingly positive images of Buddhist women challenges the commonly held scholarly assumption that medieval Japanese women fully internalized the disparaging views of the female body disseminated in Buddhist doctrinal texts.

The demonic female, an object of male anxiety and desire, has long been a stock character in Japanese Buddhist literature. This article examines two female realms in the Japanese literary and visual imagination: Rasetsukoku, a dreaded island of female cannibals, and Nyogogashima, a fabled isle of erotic fantasy.

I trace the persistence and transformation of these sites in tale literature, sutra illustration, popular fiction, and Japanese cartography from the twelfth through the nineteenth century […] until what was once a land of demons south of India was rediscovered as an erotic paradise south of Japan.

In the poetic commentary Nameless Notes (1211–1216), the poet-priest Kamo no Chōmei explains that unlike prose, a poem “possesses the power to move heaven and earth, to calm demons and gods,” because, among other attributes, “it contains many truths in a single word.”

The supernatural powers of Japanese poetry are widely documented in literature of Heian and medieval Japan. Twentieth-century scholars have tended to follow Orikuchi Shinobu in interpreting and discussing miraculous verses in terms of ancient (pre-Buddhist) beliefs in kotodama, the magic spirit power of special words. In this paper, I argue for application of a more contemporaneous hermeneutical approach: thirteenth-century Japanese dharani theory, according to which Japanese poetry is capable of supernatural effects because it contains truth (kotowari) in a semantic superabundance.

This essay takes up how state regulation of religion was managed by Soto Zen Buddhism, with particular attention given to rules governing the clerical ranks and robes.

The 1627 purple robe incident is examined as an emblematic case of the new power relationship between the new bakufu’s concern about subversive elements that could challenge its hold on power; the imperial household’s customary authority to award the highest-ranking, imperially-sanctioned purple robe; and Buddhist institutions that laid claim on the authority to recognize spiritual advancement.

Seno’o Giro’s personal pilgrimage spanned tradition and modernity, and took him from the political right to the extreme left such that in the vicissitudes of this one life is somehow recapitulated the whole dilemma of Japanese Buddhism since the Meiji Restoration. It highlights well the unresolved conflicts at the heart of modern liberal Buddhism.

What is meant by its central philosophical concept of “absolute nothingness,” and how did the Kyoto School philosophers variously develop this Eastern inspired idea in dialogue and debate with Western thought and with one another?

In response to Shintoist criticism of Buddhism in the early 1930s, a group of prominent Buddhists and Buddhologists wrote articles on Buddhism and Japanese spirit for a special issue of Chūō Bukkyo in 1934. They highlighted historical connections between Japanese Buddhism and the state, and drew correspondences between Buddhist doctrines and various Shinto and Confucian concepts that were central to discourses on Japanese culture and the imperial system in the early-Showa period. In drawing those doctrinal correspondences, they aligned Japanese Buddhism with main components of the imperial ideology at that time.

… when the Japanese kept insisting that Buddhism was a specific religion that originated in north India, westerners were puzzled. There was no cult of Buddha in India, and northern India in particular was largely Muslim.

On the early modern encounters between Europeans and Japanese Buddhists and how they shaped each other’s understanding of Asia.

I think it’s really a different dimension, but an important one that needs to be explored if only because of the change in perspective that it gives us. Instead of taking for granted the land, and the philosophy and conceptual systems based on land, place yourself in a shifting, fluid context—the sea. What kind of sensorial universe, what systems of meaning would you be exposed to if you did that?