Tag Archives: Japan

Review: Precepts, Ordinations, and Practice in Medieval Japanese Tendai

ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 31, 2024

Precepts, Ordinations, and Practice in Medieval Japanese Tendai. Studies in East Asian Buddhism 31. By Paul Groner. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2022, xvii + 376 pages, ISBN 978-0-8248-9274-6 (hardback), $68.00, 978-0-8248-9328-6 (paperback), $20.00.

Reviewed by Bryan D. Lowe

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Review: Buddhism and Waste

ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 30, 2023

Buddhism and Waste: The Excess, Discard, and Afterlife of Buddhist Consumption. Edited by Trine Brox and Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg. Bloomsbury Studies in Material Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2022, 208 pages, ISBN 978-1-3501-9553-0 (hardback), $115, 978-1-3501-9554-4 (e-book), $103.50.

Reviewed by Mark Speece

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Review: Buddhism under Capitalism

ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 30, 2023

Buddhism under Capitalism. Edited by Richard K. Payne and Fabio Rambelli. London: Bloomsbury, 2022, 280 pages, ISBN 978-1-350-22832-0 (hardback), $90.00, 978-1-350-22833-7 (paperback), $29.95, 978-1-350-22835-1 (e-book), $26.95.

Reviewed by Stephen Christopher

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Democratizing “Engaged Buddhism”

ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 30, 2023

Beyond Queen and King: Democratizing “Engaged Buddhism”

Donna Lynn Brown
University of Manitoba

What counts as Buddhist social engagement? Why, in Buddhist Studies, do certain forms of engagement and certain Buddhists often not count? This article argues that the limits that scholars Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King placed around Buddhist engagement in the 1990s—limits that produced a rough consensus in Buddhist Studies—should be democratized to include all Buddhists and their social engagement. For years, criticism of these limits and research that circumvents them have appeared without seriously undermining them. However, 2022 may mark a turning point. In that year, two publications, by Paul Fuller and Alexander Hsu, offered comprehensive and convincing arguments for considering all Buddhists’ socially oriented activities “engaged.” This article examines the consensus on the nature of Buddhist engagement, its origins in activism, research that dissents from it, and critiques it has faced. The article assesses dissent and critiques and considers why, until recently, they have had little effect. It then discusses why Fuller’s and Hsu’s publications represent a turning point and proposes new areas of research beyond those even these two scholars suggest.

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Principles for Jōdo Shinshū Social Engagement

ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 29, 2022

Principles for Jōdo Shinshū Social Engagement

Jeff Wilson
Renison University College, University of Waterloo

Despite omission from much of the record of scholarship on Engaged Buddhism, Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism has significant potential for positive involvement with social causes. Here I propose six principles based on elements of the Jōdo Shinshū teachings that might inspire or inform efforts at reducing harm in the world. I further provide some examples of social engagement from Jōdo Shinshū history that demonstrate how they might be applied.

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A Buddhist Chaplain in Occupied Japan

ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 25, 2018

Prison and the Pure Land: A Buddhist Chaplain in Occupied Japan

Melissa Anne-Marie Curley
Ohio State University

In November 1945, the United States military took over the use of Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison in order to house those charged by the Allied Powers with war crimes. For close to three years, Hanayama Shinshō served as the prison’s volunteer Buddhist chaplain, attending thirty-six executions. Hanayama did not protest the imposition of the death penalty but this essay argues that in his work as chaplain he nonetheless resisted the carceral logic shaping life and death inside Sugamo by mobilizing the ritual and narrative repertoire of Pure Land Buddhism. In Hanayama’s framing, Sugamo was a site of liberation as well as confinement, affording the condemned a unique opportunity to reflect upon the past and commit themselves to a different future, even in death. As Hanayama tells it, the peace discovered by the dead was an absolute peace, transcending politics; he also insists, however, on a connection between this absolute peace and the ordinary peace that the living might hope to secure. The article concludes with a consideration of the political and ethical implications of Hanayama’s reading of the dead as having “found peace” in light of larger conversations about how best to remember—or forget—the nation’s dark past, and what it means to share responsibility for crimes against humanity.

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Review: Gods of Medieval Japan

ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 24, 2017

Gods of Medieval Japan, Volume 1: The Fluid Pantheon by Bernard Faure. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015, xii + 496 pages, ISBN 978-0-8248-3933-8 (hardback), $55.00.
Gods of Medieval Japan, Volume 2: Protectors and Predators by Bernard Faure. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015, x + 512 pages, ISBN 978-0-8248-3931-4 (hardback), $55.00.
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Reviewed by Joseph P. Elacqua

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Buddhism and the Morality of Abortion

ISSN:1076–9005
Volume 5 1995

Buddhism and the Morality of Abortion

Michael G. Barnhart
Kingsborough, CUNY

It is quite clear from a variety of sources that abortion has been severely disapproved of in the Buddhist tradition. It is also equally clear that abortion has been tolerated in Buddhist Japan and accommodated under exceptional circumstances by some modern Buddhists in the UṢ. Those sources most often cited that prohibit abortion are Theravādin and ancient. By contrast, Japanese Buddhism as well as the traditions out of which a more lenient approach emerges are more recent and Mahāyāna traditions. Buddhism itself, therefore, speaks with more than one moral voice on this issue, and furthermore, the nature of the moral debate may have important applications for similarly situated others and constitute an enlargement of the repertoire of applicable moral theories and rationales.

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Abortion, Ambiguity, and Exorcism

SSN:1076-9005
Volume 5, 1998

Abortion, Ambiguity, and Exorcism

William R. LaFleur
University of Pennsylvania

In Japan, persons who have had abortions but believe that a fetus has more value than merely disposable matter may act on that belief, most commonly by making a ritual apology to the spiritual aspect of the fetus, referred to as a mizuko or “child of the waters.” R. Zwi Werblowsky wrote a scathing attack on the practice of mizuko kuyô across the board, claiming that it has been nothing more than a scam from beginning to end. And now, in Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan, Helen Hardacre has given us a study which, in essence, makes much the same claim. The issues Hardacre raises are important, not just for an understanding of Japanese religion but because of what they may tell us about the state of our own debates in North America. By this I mean not only our debates about abortion but also about religion, especially as expressed in societies different from our own.

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