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The sun shone hot and bright on the clearing between the Light Up Your Corner Hall and a grove of trees overlooking Konponchûdò, one of the great halls on Mt. Hiei. A couple of hundred chairs sat empty in the scalding heat as those gathered to attend the annual Gathering to Pray for World Peace, held in commemoration of the religious summit meeting on Mt. Hiei, slowly drifted in but still lingered in the shade under the eves of the hall or the outstretched limbs of the tall pines. The director-general of the Tendai sect, clad in black robes, stood, sweat glistening from his bald pate, in front of a microphone to announce the beginning of the thirteenth annual gathering. Slowly, attendees made their way to their seats. The priests manning the reception table offered them hats from two large cardboard boxes. Once seated, the director-general offered an opening speech in which he reminded members of all faiths that it was their duty to care for the suffering of humanity and that they had to act out of respect for the sanctity of human life. Soon thereafter, more than one hundred participants from the Tendai Youth Gathering on Mount Hiei (Tendai Seishònen Hieizan no Tsudoi) marched to the stage led by troop leaders carrying Tendai banners. As each member reached the stage, he or she hung a prayer for peace on the stage wall facing the audience. Those in attendance represented members of many different faiths, including Christianity, Buddhism, Shinto, and Islam. They gathered to offer a prayer for world peace and to listen to speeches by leaders of Japan’s religious communities . The gathering has been held each year in commemoration of the original religious summit meeting on Mt. Hiei held in 1987. The original summit was a triumph of ecumenical cooperation and has been a point of pride for the Tendai sect. A link to photos of the 1997 tenth anniversary of the religious summit meeting on Mt. Hiei is displayed prominently on the sect’s home page.1 In 1987, the original religious summit meeting drew more than fifteen hundred participants from around the world, representing a wide array of religious affiliations. Participants attended meetings and activities for two days on Mt. Hiei and in the Kyoto area. The summit, which was based on an even larger event held in 1986 by the Vatican, served to place the Tendai sect at the center of efforts by Temple Buddhist sects to shift attention away from local problems and negative stereotypes and toward an image of Epilogue The World of Householding World-Renouncers Temple Buddhist priests as engaged at the international level in the struggle for world peace, environmental protection, and care for the needy. The association of the priests of Temple Buddhism with Vatican representatives, for example, (prominently displayed and noted in Tendai literature ever since), served a legitimating function by showing Buddhist priests recognized as concerned religious professionals by an institution widely regarded as legitimately religious.2 The summit was a success in large part due to the strong friendship between Yamada Etai, then the head priest of the Tendai sect, and Niwano Nikkyò, then the head of the Risshò Kòseikai, whose strong international ties helped bring together the participants. Later Tendai sect leaders, however, have not been as aggressive as Yamada and have lost some of the early momentum. The 2000 gathering, described above, as well as the previous gatherings, now serve a more ceremonial than proactive agenda, though every few years a larger-scale and more proactive gathering is still held. When the speeches of the thirteenth annual gathering were finished, the sun-scorched participants filed down to the parking lot to catch a bus either to the local train station to go home or to take them to the reception for drinks and conversation. The entire ceremony lasted a little over one hour. As with the Light Up Your Corner Movement, the open call for priests, and the temple wife ordination ceremony, the religious summit and the Gathering to Pray for World Peace demonstrate a clear desire on the part of Tendai sect leaders to create new roles or to re-create old ones to meet the needs of contemporary Japanese and to maintain their religious authority and legitimacy. These attempts, however, also shed light on the difficulties still confronting the sects of Temple Buddhism today. The Tendai sect, like all sects of Temple Buddhism, is faced with weak...

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