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East Asian Languages and Societies Commons

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Full-Text Articles in East Asian Languages and Societies

Zen And The Art Of Resistance: Some Preliminary Notes, James Mark Shields Feb 2022

Zen And The Art Of Resistance: Some Preliminary Notes, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

In the Western and oftentimes Asian imagination, Buddhism generally—and Zen more specifically—is understood as being resolutely disengaged, attaching itself to a form of awakening that is not only, as the classical phrase has it “beyond words and letters,” but in the modern summation by D. T. Suzuki, perfectly compatible with any and all forms of political and economic “dogmatism,” whether capitalist, communist, socialist, or fascist. Of course, as numerous scholars have shown over the past century, on the level of historical actuality, Buddhist and Zen teachers and institutions have long participated in (usually hegemonic) economic and political structures. The …


Case Study: Religion, Socialism And Secularization In Modern Japan: The New Buddhist Fellowship, James Mark Shields Mar 2021

Case Study: Religion, Socialism And Secularization In Modern Japan: The New Buddhist Fellowship, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

No abstract provided.


Awakening Between Science, Art & Ethics: Variations On Japanese Buddhist Modernism, 1890–1945, James Shields Jan 2012

Awakening Between Science, Art & Ethics: Variations On Japanese Buddhist Modernism, 1890–1945, James Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

The half-century between the publication of the Imperial Rescript on Education (kyōiku chokugo 教育勅語, 1890) and the bombing of Pearl Harbor (1941) was one of tremendous institutional and intellectual tumult in the world of Japanese Buddhism. Buddhist sects and scholars were not immune to the changing political and cultural winds. While it is true that by the late 1930s, the majority of Buddhist leaders and institutions had capitulated to the status quo, preaching, in the words of Joseph Kitagawa “the virtues of peace, harmony, and loyalty to the throne,” the previous decades show anything but a continuous progression towards …