Search Results (3)

The transplantation of Zen from China to Japan during the Kamakura period (1185–1333) depended on a series of intrepid seekers, who journeyed beyond conventional geographical and societal boundaries to discover and appropriate religious customs and beliefs while staying on the mainland that spread and eventually thrived on the islands. The only way to learn the intricate ways of Zen theory was to experience first-hand the relevant people, practices, places, and ritual performances in the Hangzhou/Ningbo region of the northern Zhejiang province. This article first provides a brief synopsis of travelers to and from Hangzhou, including Japanese pilgrims and Chinese émigré monks in addition to some prominent teachers and learners who did not journey but nevertheless exerted a tremendous impact on the transmission process. Then, it analyzes elements of Chinese Chan that were brought across the waters by Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253), who ventured to gain enlightenment in the 1220s. He later claimed that he implemented “for the first time in Japan” 日本国最始 practical and conceptual religious techniques, including diverse personal, material, ritual, textual, rhetorical, and societal components. Although a major transmitter of Chan, Dōgen made significant innovations based on his vision of the ideal Zen community, recast for the structures of medieval Japanese society. Full article

The concept of ‘religion’ as modern, European-derived, and therefore problematic in premodern and Asian contexts is well established, but leaves us with a problem: if the church/state sacred/secular dynamic is a modern misconception even in England, as Fitzgerald argued, then how should we go about examining the central place of specific institutions, behaviour, and belief in the workings of medieval Japanese society that have formerly been classified or understood as ‘religious’? Abandoning ‘religion’ as a separate field of study from the ‘secular’ in Japanese history has the paradoxical effect of drawing attention to the pervasive centrality of activity, performance, mentality, and observance to every aspect of medieval life. Elements of practice, performance, and the sacred were essential, core, components of the functioning of public and private governance from the imperial system to local landholding. The great temple shrine complexes of the medieval period were centres of organisation, authority, and legitimacy, which are best understood not as ‘religious’ complexes which were also ‘economic’ and ‘political’ powers, but as institutions whose authority cannot be separated out into separate (modern) categories of ‘economic’, ‘judicial’, or ‘religious’ authority. Such distinctions cut across the deeply interconnected nature of law, landholding, family, lineage, place, and belief in the period, the networks and systems by which medieval life was ordered, but they also cut across the way that they were perceived by those living within them: the ways in which people thought, behaved, and interacted with each other. In order to understand the workings of what we think of as medieval Japanese society, we must understand these connected systems as composed of elements that might look ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ to modern eyes, but which were complementary, indivisible, even, in the period. Full article

This article asks what religious violence is and why it is relevant. It questions common assumptions by focusing on how monastic violence unfolded in premodern Japan. It argues that there was nothing that set this particular form of violence apart in terms of what the clerics fought for, their ideological justification, who fought, or how they fought. Although myths prevail on the largely fictive figure of the sōhei, or “monk-warriors,” closer scrutiny indicates that their depiction first emerged as a coherent literary concept in the early Tokugawa period. Regarding the ideological framework in which incidents of so-called monastic violence took place, the paper demonstrates that the individuals involved in such conflicts—including the clerics—cannot be dissociated from their own socio-historical context. This is because the medieval Japanese setting was based on rules of cooperation that also implied competition among various elites. The paper further complicates our understanding by showing that the central issue is not why specific violent events involving clerics occurred, but rather what constituted the mental framework—or mentalité—of the age, and how it allowed religious institutions to play such a prominent role. Full article