Engaged Buddhism in japan Vol.1

Engaged Buddhism In Japan

Volume 1: An Engaged Buddhist History of Japan from the Ancient to the Modern

Jonathan S. Watts

9786168209554

15 USD / 520 TBH

336 pages

Published by INEB, IBEC

Publication April 2023

Distributed by Kledthai Co., Ltd.

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This volume is the culmination of sixteen years of research and engagement in the growing Socially Engaged Buddhist movement of Japan.

Volume I provides an essential presentation of historical themes that make Japanese Buddhism so unique and hard to understand for even other Buddhists in Asia. Volume I also provides a critical and comprehensive survey of Socially Engaged Buddhism in the modern era, which for the postwar period has never been fully documented.

Volume II (to be published September 2023) presents the new Socially Engaged Buddhist activities of 21st century Japan, a dynamic movement arising out of the social crisis of Japan’s “disconnected society” (mu-en shakai).

These volumes are the third major publication of the Engaged Buddhism Project of the International Buddhist Exchange Center @ Kodosan in Yokohama, Japan. They follow its two volumes dedicated to the Northeast Japan tsunami and nuclear disaster in This Precious Life: Buddhist Tsunami Relief and Anti-Nuclear Activism in Post 3/11 Japan (2012) and Lotus in the Nuclear Sea: Fukushima and the Promise of Buddhism in the Nuclear Age (2013).

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan S. Watts has been developing the Engaged Buddhist project at IBEC as well as the Japan Network of Engaged Buddhists (JNEB) since 2006. He began working with the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) in 1990 after graduating from Princeton University in 1989 with a B.A. in comparative religions and political science. In 1996, he helped form the INEB Think Sangha, an activist-oriented engaged Buddhist think tank, to develop Buddhist perspectives on contemporary social issues, and joined the INEB Executive Board in 1999. From 1999 to 2018, he served as a research fellow at the Jodo Shu Research Institute in Tokyo, editing the volume Buddhist Care for the Dying and Bereaved (Wisdom Publications, 2012). He presently teaches contemporary Japanese Buddhism at Keio University and supports the Rinbutsuken Institute’s Buddhist Chaplaincy training program.

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CONTENTS

Volume 1:

An Engaged Buddhist History of Japan from the Ancient to the Modern

Introduction: Axialization and the Potential of Socially Engaged Buddhism

Part I

The Historical Struggle of Buddhism to Axialize Japan in the Pre-Modern Era

1 Buddhism’s Entry into Japan and the Nara Period (646–794)

2 Esoteric Buddhism as Socio-Political Ideology in the Heian Period (794–1185)

3 Buddhist Axialization in the Kamakura Period (1185–1333)

4 Religio-Ideological Conflict and the Rising of the Masses in the Muromachi Period (1333–1558)

5 The Brahmanistic and Confucian Turns of Buddhism in the Tokugawa Era (1603–1868)

Part II

Archaic Modernity and the Foundations of Socially Engaged Buddhism in Prewar Japan

6 Archaic Continuity across the Tokugawa and Meiji Periods

7 The Meiji Buddhist Enlightenment

8 Axial Challengers: Buddhist Socialism and the Lotus Sutra in the Taisho and Early Showa Periods

9 Descent into Holy War and the Conversion (tenko) to Imperial Way Buddhism

Part III

Defining Peace and Internationalism in the Liberal Utilitarian State: Socially Engaged Buddhism in Postwar Japan

10 The Sudden Turn Towards Peace in the 1940s and the Question of Principled Social Change

11 The Lotus Sutra, Confrontational Buddhism, and Social Protest in the 1950s

12 Responsibility and Autonomy in Japanese Social Ethics in the 1950-60s

13 Confronting the Past and Defining a New Buddhist Internationalism in the 1970s-80s

14 Towards a Global Buddhist Civil Society in the 1980s-90s

Conclusion

The Promise of Principled Protest and the Buddhist Resolution to Modernity

Afterword

Towards an Autonomous Buddhist Social Ethics and a Dharmic Civil Society

Appendices

Works Cite

Index