The Religious Traditions of Japan, 500-1600 (review)

As Richard Bowring notes in his preface to The Religious Traditions of Japan, 500-1600, earlier histories of Japanese Buddhism or of Japanese religion, such as by Alicia and Daigan Matsunaga or by Joseph Kitagawa,¹ have long outlived their usefulness. Bowring's work, although it does not prominently address theoretical issues, offers scholars and students an important, up-to-date, and comparatively in-depth English-language history.

Part I, "The Arrival of Buddhism and Its Effects (c. 538–800)," draws upon the early mytho-histories, chronicles, and useful historical maps to outline the earliest history of Buddhism and religion, more generally, in Japan. The discussion offers a glimpse of the experiences of Buddhism at court by considering the meaning of the famous seventh-century "'Beetle-wing' cabinet" of Hōryūji (tamamushi-no-zushi), including its allusions to female salvation and possible implications for determining the character of the audience. Given the title, Buddhism constitutes the implicit framework within which Bowring envisions early religion in Japan, but the second chapter discusses the creation of dynasty through the help of "native beliefs"—focusing especially on the production of the Jingikan bureau and the "invention" of a divinely sanctioned royal past. The next chapters address the relationship between Buddhism and the early government, aesthetic productions, and close connections with East Asia and Central Asia. Bowring boldly forefronts material culture by attending to the establishment of great "monuments" in Nara that testified to both Buddhism and the Buddhist sovereign: the temples Kōfukuji and Tōdaiji, and especially the Great Buddha at the latter temple. He then turns to problems such as karmic literary representation, the unique status of the deity Hachiman (first kami-"bodhisattva"), and the prominence of royal women in Buddhist patronage.

Part II, "From Saichō to the Destruction of Tōdaiji (800–1180)," which corresponds roughly to the Heian era (794–1185), draws attention to the immense enterprise of appropriating religion from continental East Asia and to development of a domesticated "Japanese" Buddhism and a related system of (kami-) shrine veneration. After considering the religious contexts of East Asia at the beginning of the ninth century, the narrative focuses on Saichō and Kūkai. The author provides a useful treatment of the early organizational, ritual, and Buddhological developments in these lineages as well as the particularly antagonistic relationship between Tendai and the Nara lineages.

Bowring's discussion in "Buddhism and the State in Heian Japan" (chapter seven) offers an informative overview that focuses on the activities of Tendai figures such as Ryōgen in acquiring esoteric ritual knowledge but also on related patronage of the powerful northern Fujiwaras. On the religious arena of court life, Bowring offers an insightful discussion of the literature of the Heian era, of which he is a brilliant scholar, drawing attention to the implications of didactic collections and the centrality of the court ritual calendar and to the prominence of efforts of court women to gain Buddhist salvation.

The next chapter evaluates the relationship between kami-shrines and the Heian-era government. After examining Kasuga shrine with an emphasis on its patronage by the northern Fujiwaras, the narrative examines jingūji shrine-temples and related "cataloguing" of the kami within a Buddhist framework—and the development of a system of official shrines, which symbolized royal sovereignty. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between the royal family and the Ise and Kamo shrines. The last two chapters of Part II turn, respectively, to the increasing prominence of Pure Land devotional practice and the novel developments in the "time of strife" in which major shrine-temple complexes gained increasing power and related lineages became more and more contentious. Bowring draws upon the work of Mikael Adolphson, a variant of Kuroda Toshio's, to discuss the emergence of these complexes as "power bloc[s]" (p. 219) that variously vied with or cooperated with each other while at the same time dealing with comparable...