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Seventeen distinguished experts on Japanese religion provide a fascinating overview of its history and development. Beginning with the origins of religion in primitive Japanese society, they chart the growth of each of Japan's major religious organizations and doctrinal systems. They follow Buddhism, Shintoism, Christianity, and popular religious belief through major periods of change to show how history and religion affected each-and discuss the interactions between the different religious traditions.
Author : Jason Ānanda Josephson Publisher : University of Chicago Press Page : 402 pages File Size : 22,62 MB Release : 2012-10-03 Category : History ISBN : 0226412342
Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call “religion.” There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed. More than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson’s account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of “superstitions”—and thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition.
First Published in 1930, History of Japanese Religion shows the interaction of various forces which manifested their vitality more in combination than in opposition. A saying ascribed to Prince Shotoku, the founder of Japanese civilization, compares the three religious and moral systems found in Japan to the root, the stem and branches, and the flowers and fruits of a tree. Shinto is the root embedded in the soil of the people's character and national traditions; Confucianism is seen in the stem and branches of legal institutions, ethical codes, and educational systems; Buddhism made the flowers of religious sentiment bloom and gave the fruits of spiritual life. These sentences outlines the scheme of the work and achievement that has long maintained a high reputation among students and scholars. This important and frequently cited book has been out of print for many decades and thus increasingly difficult to access. It is therefore a privilege as well as a pleasure to make it available once again in a complete and unabridged reprint of the original. This is a must read for students of religion, Japanese culture and Japanese history.
Masaharu Anesaki's History of Japanese Religion continues to be a much-cited pillar of Japanese studies and is now available in digital format. The original draft of the present book was an outcome of the author's lectures at Harvard University during the years 1913-15, when he had the honor of occupying there the chair of Japanese Literature and Life. In response to the encouragement given by several friends at Harvard, the author tried to put the material of the lectures into book form and redrafted it from time to time. The history of Japanese religions and morals shows the interaction of various forces which manifested their vitality more in combination than in opposition. A saying ascribed to Prince Shotoku, the founder of Japanese civilization, compares the three religious and moral systems found in Japan to the root, the stem and branches, and the flowers and the fruits of a tree. Shinto is the root embedded in the soil of the people's character and national traditions; Confucianism is seen in the stem and branches of legal institutions, ethical codes and educational systems; Buddhism made the flowers of religious sentiment bloom and gave the fruits of spiritual life.
Tracing Japan's religions from the Hein Period through the middle ages and into modernity, this book explores the unique establishment of Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism in Japan, as well as the later influence of Roman Catholicism, and the problem of Restoration--both spiritual and material--following World War II.
Joseph Kitagawa, one of the founders of the field of history of religions and an eminent scholar of the religions of Japan, published his classic book Religion in Japanese History in 1966. Since then, he has written a number of extremely influential essays that illustrate approaches to the study of Japanese religious phenomena. To date, these essays have remained scattered in various scholarly journals. This book makes available nineteen of these articles, important contributions to our understanding of Japan's intricate combination of indigenous Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, the Yin-Yang School, Buddhism, and folk religion. In sections on prehistory, the historic development of Japanese religion, the Shinto tradition, the Buddhist tradition, and the modem phase of the Japanese religious tradition, the author develops a number of valuable methodological approaches. The volume also includes an appendix on Buddhism in America. Asserting that the study of Japanese religion is more than an umbrella term covering investigations of separate traditions, Professor Kitagawa approaches the subject from an interdisciplinary standpoint. Skillfully combining political, cultural, and social history, he depicts a Japan that seems a microcosm of the religious experience of humankind.
Author : Paul L. Swanson Publisher : University of Hawaii Press Page : 488 pages File Size : 13,67 MB Release : 2005-10-31 Category : Religion ISBN : 9780824830021
For updates online, visit the Nanzan Guide site at Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture. The Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions combines, for the first time in any language, state-of-the-field theoretical and critical discussions with concrete resources students and scholars need to conduct research on Japanese religions. Even seasoned scholars typically approach their research in an unsystematic manner, becoming familiar with a particular area of inquiry while remaining largely unaware of what exists in the rest of the field. This inefficient method hinders particularly less-experienced researchers and circumscribes their lines of inquiry. The Nanzan Guide provides both beginners and specialists with a reference that will serve as a basic introduction to Japanese religions and allow them to conduct research more proficiently and in greater depth. Overlapping and thought-provoking chapters, written by leading specialists, offer a variety of perspectives on the complicated and multifaceted field of Japanese religions. The essays are divided into four sections: religious traditions (Japanese religions in general, Shinto, Buddhism, folk religion, new religions, Christianity); the history of Japanese religions (ancient, classical, medieval, early modern, modern, contemporary); major themes (symbolism, ritual and the arts, literature and scripture, state and religion, geography and environment, intellectual history, gender); and "practical" essays (finding references and using libraries, working with archive collections, conducting fieldwork). A chronology of religion in Japanese history is also provided.
This anthology reflects a range of Japanese religions in their complex, sometimes conflicting, diversity. In the tradition of the Princeton Readings in Religions series, the collection presents documents (legends and miracle tales, hagiographies, ritual prayers and ceremonies, sermons, reform treatises, doctrinal tracts, historical and ethnographic writings), most of which have been translated for the first time here, that serve to illuminate the mosaic of Japanese religions in practice. George Tanabe provides a lucid introduction to the "patterned confusion" of Japan's religious practices. He has ordered the anthology's forty-five readings under the categories of "Ethical Practices," "Ritual Practices," and "Institutional Practices," moving beyond the traditional classifications of chronology, religious traditions (Shinto, Confucianism, Buddhism, etc.), and sects, and illuminating the actual orientation of people who engage in religious practices. Within the anthology's three broad categories, subdivisions address the topics of social values, clerical and lay precepts, gods, spirits, rituals of realization, faith, court and emperor, sectarian founders, wizards, and heroes, orthopraxis and orthodoxy, and special places. Dating from the eighth through the twentieth centuries, the documents are revealed to be open to various and evolving interpretations, their meanings dependent not only on how they are placed in context but also on how individual researchers read them. Each text is preceded by an introductory explanation of the text's essence, written by its translator. Instructors and students will find these explications useful starting points for their encounters with the varied worlds of practice within which the texts interact with readers and changing contexts. Religions of Japan in Practice is a compendium of relationships between great minds and ordinary people, abstruse theories and mundane acts, natural and supernatural powers, altruism and self-interest, disappointment and hope, quiescence and war. It is an indispensable sourcebook for scholars, students, and general readers seeking engagement with the fertile "ordered disorder" of religious practice in Japan.
Shinto - A Short History provides an introductory outline of the historical development of Shinto from the ancient period of Japanese history until the present day. Shinto does not offer a readily identifiable set of teachings, rituals or beliefs; individual shrines and kami deities have led their own lives, not within the confines of a narrowly defined Shinto, but rather as participants in a religious field that included Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian and folk elements. Thus, this book approaches Shinto as a series of historical 'religious systems' rather than attempting to identify a timeless 'Shinto essence'. This history focuses on three aspects of Shinto practice: the people involved in shrine worship, the institutional networks that ensured continuity, and teachings and rituals. By following the interplay between these aspects in different periods, a pattern of continuity and discontinuity is revealed that challenges received understandings of the history of Shinto. This book does not presuppose prior knowledge of Japanese religion, and is easily accessible for those new to the subject.
Author : Ichiro Hori Publisher : University of Chicago Press Page : 294 pages File Size : 15,52 MB Release : 1974 Category : Social Science ISBN : 0226353346
Ichiro Hori's is the first book in Western literature to portray how Shinto, Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist elements, as well as all manner of archaic magical beliefs and practices, are fused on the folk level. Folk religion, transmitted by the common people from generation to generation, has greatly conditioned the political, economic, and cultural development of Japan and continues to satisfy the emotional and religious needs of the people. Hori examines the organic relationship between the Japanese social structure—the family kinship system, village and community organizations—and folk religion. A glossary with Japanese characters is included in the index.