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Articles 1 - 30 of 40
Full-Text Articles in Japanese Studies
A Buddhist Critique Of Harmony, James Mark Shields
A Buddhist Critique Of Harmony, James Mark Shields
Faculty Contributions to Books
No abstract provided.
Cultural And Religious Perspectives On Suicide And Healing, Arielle Friedman
Cultural And Religious Perspectives On Suicide And Healing, Arielle Friedman
be Still
This essay is built off of a paper I wrote in a college global health course on culture and mental illness. I have always been fascinated by cultural interpretations of illness & believe that as a future physician, it is my responsibility to educate myself and others on the complex interplay between religious ideologies & recognition/management of biological disease in order to provide appropriate patient-centered care.
Transformation Of Buddhist Musical Practices From The 7th-13th Centuries As A Response To Political And Social Disorder In Medieval India, Stephan I. Duran
Transformation Of Buddhist Musical Practices From The 7th-13th Centuries As A Response To Political And Social Disorder In Medieval India, Stephan I. Duran
Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal
This article gives an account of the development of Buddhist musical practices on the Indian subcontinent from their earliest, datable instances, to the disappearance of Buddhist institutions from India proper, demonstrating the persistence of descendant traditions of Sanskrit Buddhist chant and song in contemporary Japanese, Tibetan, and Newar esoteric Buddhist communities. It is argued that the Buddhist musical theory and praxis of these three cultural spheres both preserve features of ancient and medieval Indian Buddhist music and sonically illustrate the transition from political and social order to de-centralized social organization, a shift that took place between the 7th and …
Houses Built For Gods: Articulations Of Urban Hokora In Kyoto, Steele Engelmann
Houses Built For Gods: Articulations Of Urban Hokora In Kyoto, Steele Engelmann
Anthropology Undergraduate Honors Theses
Amidst the urban landscape of Kyoto, Japan, there are thousands of hokora, small neighborhood shrines. This study uses social theories of pilgrimage and space to examine the articulation of hokora, community, and personal desire. As sites of local pilgrimage, hokora form networks of communal, but also individual, aspirations across the urban spiritual landscape of the city. This thesis argues that communities are connected to the larger social structures of Kyoto through hokora. As such, neighborhoods are reproduced and displayed through their hokora’s entanglements with the urban, social, and religious landscapes of Kyoto. Therefore, this study deploys an ethnographic approach to …
A Century Of Critical Buddhism In Japan, James Mark Shields
A Century Of Critical Buddhism In Japan, James Mark Shields
Faculty Contributions to Books
This chapter introduces the central arguments of Critical Buddhism as a lens by which to view the course of “modern” Buddhism in Japan, particularly as it relates to politics. It traces philosophical and political precedents for Critical Buddhism in the context of Japanese modernity, by focusing on several progressive Buddhist figures movements from mid-Meiji through early Shōwa, including the New Buddhist Fellowship and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism. I argue that previous attempts to centralize criticism as a basic Buddhist precept were unsuccessful in part do to an inability to distinguish the Buddhistic components of their thought and practice, …
Zen Internationalism, Zen Revolution: Inoue Shūten, Uchiyama Gudō And The Crisis Of (Zen) Buddhist Modernity In Late Meiji Japan, James Mark Shields
Zen Internationalism, Zen Revolution: Inoue Shūten, Uchiyama Gudō And The Crisis Of (Zen) Buddhist Modernity In Late Meiji Japan, James Mark Shields
Faculty Contributions to Books
In addition to the birth and development of “Imperial Way Zen,” late Meiji Japan witnessed the emergence of a number of young lay Buddhist scholars, priests and activists who attempted, with varying success, to reframe Buddhism along progressive and occasionally radical political lines. While it is true that groups such as the New Buddhist Fellowship (Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai, 1899–1915) were made up mainly of young men associated with the two branches of the Shin (True Pure Land) sect, several of its members did affiliate themselves with Zen, such as Suzuki Daisetsu (1870–1966) and Inoue Shūten (1880–1945). While the former’s work …
Dawn Of A Silver Millennium: Millenarianism, Futurity, And Utopia In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Matthew Dentice
Dawn Of A Silver Millennium: Millenarianism, Futurity, And Utopia In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Matthew Dentice
Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference
The story of Sailor Moon, told and retold in countless forms in the thirty years since the original manga’s publication, is imbued with a cosmic sense of time. The modern-day protagonists’ personal journeys are tightly interwoven with the distant past of the Silver Millennium and the far future of thirtieth-century Crystal Tokyo. But only the manga is fully willing to grapple with what the future means for its own present moment. Written in the early 1990s during Japan's "Lost Decade," Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon dramatizes the angst that accompanies the imminent arrival of a new millennium. As the Sailor Guardians …
Zen And The Art Of Resistance: Some Preliminary Notes, James Mark Shields
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 …
Review: André Van Der Braak, Reimagining Zen In A Secular Age: Charles Taylor And Zen Buddhism In The West., James Mark Shields
Review: André Van Der Braak, Reimagining Zen In A Secular Age: Charles Taylor And Zen Buddhism In The West., James Mark Shields
Other Faculty Research and Publications
No abstract provided.
Placing God: Defining “Post-Christianity” For Contemporary Japanese Christians, Leryan Anthony Burrey
Placing God: Defining “Post-Christianity” For Contemporary Japanese Christians, Leryan Anthony Burrey
Master's Projects and Capstones
This work suggests that we consider a new, working definition of post-Christianity. This new paradigm is in response to Western Christian thought being too dominant a force that fails to take into enough account other global experiences— like those of Japanese Christians. These reflections are based on scholarly opinions claiming that Christianity is a “global culture,” and ultimately argues for more international inclusivity in Western Christian thought and institutions, especially regarding the Asia-Pacific. Moreover, this paper illuminates how iitoko dori allows Christian thought to peacefully coexist in Japan’s greater society. The research also explores specific Japanese cultural practices that make …
“Publishing Goals Of Hanseikai Zasshi” (1887) And “Living The Pure Life” (1887). Translations With Introduction And Commentary, James Mark Shields
“Publishing Goals Of Hanseikai Zasshi” (1887) And “Living The Pure Life” (1887). Translations With Introduction And Commentary, James Mark Shields
Other Faculty Research and Publications
No abstract provided.
ポスト汎神論から超物質主義へ―鈴木大拙と新仏教―, James Mark Shields
ポスト汎神論から超物質主義へ―鈴木大拙と新仏教―, James Mark Shields
Faculty Contributions to Books
In modern Western thought, pantheism remains a powerful if controversial undercurrent. Recent re-evaluations of the work of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) point to pantheism’s radical implications for metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics. Pantheism (Jp. hanshinron 汎神論) also has significant valence within Japanese Buddhist modernism, particularly in the work of scholars and lay activists who articulated the outlines of a New Buddhism (shin bukkyō 新仏教) from the 1880s through the 1940s. For these thinkers, pantheism provided a “middle way” between materialism and idealism, as well as between theism and atheism. In the postwar period, lapsed radical turned Buddhist Sano Manabu …
Savoring The Moon: Japanese Prints Of The Floating World, Madison B. Dalton
Savoring The Moon: Japanese Prints Of The Floating World, Madison B. Dalton
Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current
Guided by the Director of the Madison Art Collection and Lisanby Museum, Virginia Soenksen,I served as the Curatorial Assistant for the Lisanby Museum’s forthcoming exhibition Savoring the Moon: Japanese Prints of the Floating World. The exhibition will highlight the Madison ArtCollection’s impressive Japanese woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e style. Ukiyo-e translates to“pictures of the floating world.” This style proliferated in Japan during the Edo period (1603 - 1868) and Meiji period (1868 - 1912), with visual themes that ranged from flora and fauna, Japanese ceremonies, kabuki actors, mythology, courtesans, and cultural pastimes. The estate of Charles Alvin Lisanby gifted over …
Gomyō And Kūkai In Early-Heian Intra-Buddhist Conversations, Ronald S. Green
Gomyō And Kūkai In Early-Heian Intra-Buddhist Conversations, Ronald S. Green
Philosophy and Religious Studies
This paper is about the relationship between the famous Japanese esoteric Buddhist Kūkai and the less-famous Gomyō, who you've probably never heard of but maybe should have. My paper responds to the work of two recent scholars, Fujii Jun, who says that Kūkai was a Sanron (Japanese Mādhyamika) priest, and Matsumoto Gyoyu, who speculates about the origins of and thinking behind certain passages in Kūkai's Jūjūshinron. The paper points to the intellectual significance for Kūkai of his close relationship with Gomyō and other Yogācāra scholars of his day, and how this is reflected in the Jūjūshinron and Kūkai's thought broadly. …
Carrying Buddha Into The Streets: Buddhist Socialist Thought In Meiji Japan, James Mark Shields
Carrying Buddha Into The Streets: Buddhist Socialist Thought In Meiji Japan, James Mark Shields
Faculty Contributions to Books
No abstract provided.
Osvobození Jako Revoluční Praxe: Opĕtovné Promyšlení Buddhistického Materialism, James Mark Shields
Osvobození Jako Revoluční Praxe: Opĕtovné Promyšlení Buddhistického Materialism, James Mark Shields
Faculty Journal Articles
In this article, first published in English in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics 20 (2013), pp. 461–99, James Mark Shields analyzes the possibilities and problems of a “Buddhist materialism” constructed along Marxian lines, by focusing in particular on Buddhist and Marxist conceptions of “liberation.” Although it is only in recent decades that scholars have begun to reconsider and problematize Buddhist conceptions of “free- dom” and “agency,” the thought traditions of Asian Buddhism have for many centuries struggled with questions related to the issue of “liberation”—along with its fundamental ontological, epistemological and ethical implications. With the development of Marxist thought in …
Future Perfect: Tolstoy And The Structures Of Agrarian Buddhist Utopianism In Taishō Japan, James Mark Shields
Future Perfect: Tolstoy And The Structures Of Agrarian Buddhist Utopianism In Taishō Japan, James Mark Shields
Faculty Journal Articles
This study focuses on the role played by the work of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) in shaping socialism and agrarian-Buddhist utopianism in Japan. As Japanese translations of Tolstoy’s fiction and philosophy, and accounts of his life became more available at the end of the 19th century, his ideas on the individual, religion, society, and politics had a tremendous impact on the generation coming of age in the 1900s and his popularity grew among young intellectuals. One important legacy of Tolstoy in Japan is his particular concern with the peasantry and agricultural reform. Among those inspired by Tolstoy and the narodniki lifestyle, …
Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism And The 'Religious Secular', James Mark Shields
Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism And The 'Religious Secular', James Mark Shields
Faculty Journal Articles
The secularization thesis, rooted in the idea that “modernity” brings with it the destruction—or, at least, the ruthless privatization—of religion, is clearly grounded in specific, often oversimplified, interpretations of Western historical developments since the eighteenth century. In this article, I use the case of the New Buddhist Fellowship (Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai 新仏教同志会) of the Meiji period (1868–1911) to query the category of the secular in the context of Japanese modernity. I argue that the New Buddhists, drawing on elements of classical and East Asian Buddhism as well as modern Western thought, promoted a resolutely social and this-worldly Buddhism that …
The Scope And Limits Of Secular Buddhism: Watanabe Kaikyoku (1868–1912) And The Japanese New Buddhist 'Discovery Of Society', James Mark Shields
The Scope And Limits Of Secular Buddhism: Watanabe Kaikyoku (1868–1912) And The Japanese New Buddhist 'Discovery Of Society', James Mark Shields
Faculty Contributions to Books
Although New Buddhism is a term sometimes employed to refer to the broad sweep of reform and modernization movements in Japanese Buddhist thought and practice beginning in the 1870s, the term shin bukkyō refers more specifically to a broadly influential movement of some two dozen young scholars and lay Buddhists active in the last decade of the Meiji period (1868–1912). Founded in February 1899 as Bukkyō Seito Dōshikai (Buddhist Pure Believers Fellowship or Buddhist Puritan Association), the group changed its name to Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai (New Buddhist Fellowship) in 1903. Notto Thelle refers to the NBF as “the most consistent …
Theories Of The Self, Race, And Essentialization In Buddhism In The United States During The “Yellow Peril,” 1899-1957, Ryan Anningson
Theories Of The Self, Race, And Essentialization In Buddhism In The United States During The “Yellow Peril,” 1899-1957, Ryan Anningson
Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)
This dissertation is an intellectual history tracing developing notions of the Self in Buddhism through Buddhist publications during the years from 1899-1957. I define this time period as the Era of the Yellow Peril, due to common views in the United States of an Asian “other” which formed a larger clash of civilizations globally. 1899-1957 was marked by pessimism and dread due to two World Wars and the Great Depression, while popular and academic cultures argued for the validity of race sciences, and the application of these “sciences” through eugenics. Buddhism in the United States was created through a global …
Peasant Revolts As Anti-Authoritarian Archetypes For Radical Buddhism In Modern Japan, James Mark Shields
Peasant Revolts As Anti-Authoritarian Archetypes For Radical Buddhism In Modern Japan, James Mark Shields
Faculty Journal Articles
The late Meiji period (1868-1912) witnessed the birth of various forms of “progressive” and “radical” Buddhism both within and beyond traditional Japanese Buddhist institutions. This paper examines several historical precedents for “Buddhist revolution” in East Asian—and particularly Japanese—peasant rebellions of the early modern period. I argue that these rebellions, or at least the received narratives of such, provided significant “root paradigms” for the thought and practice of early Buddhist socialists and radical Buddhists of early twentieth century Japan. Even if these narratives ended in “failure”—as, indeed, they often did—they can be understood as examples of what James White calls “expressionistic …
Opium Eaters: Buddhism As Revolutionary Politics, James Mark Shields
Opium Eaters: Buddhism As Revolutionary Politics, James Mark Shields
Faculty Contributions to Books
There is no one, single answer to the question: What is or are ‘Buddhist politics’? Rather than seek general historical trends or broad tendencies, in this chapter I explore the meaning and implications of the modern, Western conception of ‘politics’ as understood in relation to key features of Buddhist doctrine. In particular, I pose the question of whether we might fruitfully conceive at least certain interpretations of Buddhism—or perhaps, of Dharma—as politics, rather than ‘religion’ or ‘philosophy.’ I argue that twentieth century progressive Buddhists Seno’o Girō (1889–1961) and B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) were not so much in conflict with …
Review: Ōtani Ei'ichi, Kindai Bukkyō To Iu Shiza: Sensō, Ajia, Shakaishugi (The Perspective Of Modern Buddhism: War, Asia, Socialism) (Perikansha, 2012)., James Mark Shields
Review: Ōtani Ei'ichi, Kindai Bukkyō To Iu Shiza: Sensō, Ajia, Shakaishugi (The Perspective Of Modern Buddhism: War, Asia, Socialism) (Perikansha, 2012)., James Mark Shields
Other Faculty Research and Publications
No abstract provided.
Review: Hwansoo Ilmee Kim, Empire Of The Dharma: Korean And Japanese Buddhism, 1877–1912., James Mark Shields
Review: Hwansoo Ilmee Kim, Empire Of The Dharma: Korean And Japanese Buddhism, 1877–1912., James Mark Shields
Other Faculty Research and Publications
No abstract provided.
KūKai's Epitaph For Master Huiguo: An Introduction And Translation, Ronald S. Green, Chanju Mun
KūKai's Epitaph For Master Huiguo: An Introduction And Translation, Ronald S. Green, Chanju Mun
Philosophy and Religious Studies
No abstract provided.
From Topos To Utopia: Critical Buddhism, Globalization, And Ideology Criticism, James Mark Shields
From Topos To Utopia: Critical Buddhism, Globalization, And Ideology Criticism, James Mark Shields
Faculty Contributions to Books
No abstract provided.
Seno'o Giro: Life And Thought Of A Radical Buddhist, James Mark Shields
Seno'o Giro: Life And Thought Of A Radical Buddhist, James Mark Shields
Faculty Contributions to Books
No abstract provided.
Introduction To Against Harmony: Radical Buddhism In Thought And Practice, James Mark Shields
Introduction To Against Harmony: Radical Buddhism In Thought And Practice, James Mark Shields
Faculty Journal Articles
No abstract provided.
Zen And The Art Of Treason: Radical Buddhism In Meiji Era (1868–1912) Japan, James Mark Shields
Zen And The Art Of Treason: Radical Buddhism In Meiji Era (1868–1912) Japan, James Mark Shields
Faculty Journal Articles
In the early decades of the twentieth century, as Japanese society became engulfed in war and increasing nationalism, the majority of Buddhist leaders and institutions capitulated to the status quo. At the same time, there was a stream of ‘resistance’ among a few Buddhist figures, both priests and laity. These instances of progressive and ‘radical Buddhism’ had roots in late Edo-period peasant revolts, the lingering discourse of early Meiji period liberalism, trends within Buddhist reform and modernisation and the emergence in the first decade of the twentieth century of radical political thought, including various forms of socialism and anarchism. This …
Political Interpretations Of The Lotus Sutra, James Mark Shields
Political Interpretations Of The Lotus Sutra, James Mark Shields
Faculty Contributions to Books
The Sutra on the White Lotus of the Sublime Dharma (Sk., Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra; Ch., Miàofǎ liánhuá jīng; Jp., Myōhō renge kyō), commonly known as the Lotus Sutra, is arguably the most influential sutra of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and certainly one of the most revered sacred texts in East Asia. Via parables and short stories, the twenty-eight chapters of the Lotus Sutra indirectly present a number of core doctrines of the early Mahāyāna, the form of Buddhism that first emerged in India and West Asia roughly five centuries after the death of the historical Buddha Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563–486 …