More than thirteen centuries of clergy, laity, and social conditions interacted to mold Japan's Buddhism. Today's resulting characteristics, which distinguish it from its mainland sources, include a proliferation of independent sects, emphasis on religion for lay members, and de-emphasis of clerical codes. The twenty main biographies and seventy-five sketches presented in this book reveal both the individual and social aspects of Buddhist evolution and in Japan, spanning from the sixth through twentieth centuries. They cover the many separate interchanges that brought Buddhist texts and practices from Korea and China as well as the innovations that arose in Japan.

The Pure Land sect of Japanese Buddhism is one of the strongest Buddhist sects in Japan, with three and a half million followers. In this book, Soho Machida provides the first detailed, objective account in English of the life and thought of its founder, Honenbo Genku (1133-1212), known as Honen. Opening with the destruction and chaos that beleaguered Kyoto during Honen's lifetime, Soho Machida explores Honen's social context to discover the roots of his thought and the source of his popularity. The Old Buddhist regime had a stranglehold on peasants, he shows, by concocting images of vindictive spirits, hell, and an apocalyptic collapse of the law in these chaotic times. Machida asserts that when Honen countered such negative, menacing images by focusing his imagination on the Pure Land and actually affirming death, he became not only a radical thinker but also the leader of a revolutionary social movement—a medieval Japanese "liberation theology." Clearly argued and informed by contemporary Western theory, this book will become the definitive source on Honen's life and thought for decades to come.

Bernard Faure's previous works are well known as guides to some of the more elusive aspects of the Chinese tradition of Chan Buddhism and its outgrowth, Japanese Zen. Continuing his efforts to look at Chan/Zen with a full array of postmodernist critical techniques, Faure now probes the imaginaire, or mental universe, of the Buddhist Soto Zen master Keizan Jokin (1268-1325). Although Faure's new book may be read at one level as an intellectual biography, Keizan is portrayed here less as an original thinker than as a representative of his culture and an example of the paradoxes of the Soto school. The Chan/Zen doctrine that he avowed was allegedly reasonable and demythologizing, but he lived in a psychological world that was just as imbued with the marvelous as was that of his contemporary Dante Alighieri. Drawing on his own dreams to demonstrate that he possessed the magical authority that he felt to reside also in icons and relics, Keizan strove to use these "visions of power" to buttress his influence as a patriarch. To reveal the historical, institutional, ritual, and visionary elements in Keizan's life and thought and to compare these to Soto doctrine, Faure draws on largely neglected texts, particularly the Record of Tokoku (a chronicle that begins with Keizan's account of the origins of the first of the monasteries that he established) and the kirigami, or secret initiation documents.

This book analyzes social aspects of Shin Buddhism (Jōdo Shinshū), a mainstream Japanese religious tradition. The contributions collected here especially focus on the intersection between Shin Buddhism, politics, education, social movements, economy, culture and the media, gender, and globalization.

Shin is the uniquely Japanese flowering of the type of Buddhism known as "Pure Land." It originated in the thirteenth century with the charismatic and prophetic figure Shinran (1172–1263), whose interpretation of the traditional Pure Land teachings was extremely influential in his own lifetime and remain so today. In a period when Japanese Buddhism was dominated by an elitist monastic establishment, Shinran's Shin teaching became a way of liberation for all people, regardless of age, class, or gender. Although Shin is one of Japan's greatest religious contributions—and is still the most widely practiced form of Buddhism in Japan—it remains little known in the West. In this book, based on several lectures he gave in the 1950s, D. T. Suzuki illuminates the deep meaning of Shin and its rich archetypal imagery, providing a scholarly and affectionate introduction to this sometimes misunderstood tradition of Buddhist practice.

Shin is the uniquely Japanese flowering of the type of Buddhism known as "Pure Land." It originated in the thirteenth century with the charismatic and prophetic figure Shinran (1172–1263), whose interpretation of the traditional Pure Land teachings was extremely influential in his own lifetime and remain so today. In a period when Japanese Buddhism was dominated by an elitist monastic establishment, Shinran's Shin teaching became a way of liberation for all people, regardless of age, class, or gender. Although Shin is one of Japan's greatest religious contributions—and is still the most widely practiced form of Buddhism in Japan—it remains little known in the West. In this book, based on several lectures he gave in the 1950s, D. T. Suzuki illuminates the deep meaning of Shin and its rich archetypal imagery, providing a scholarly and affectionate introduction to this sometimes misunderstood tradition of Buddhist practice.