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Reviewed by:
  • Discourse and Ideology in Medieval Japanese Buddhism, and: Did Dōgen Go to China? What He Wrote and When He Wrote It
  • Joseph S. O'Leary
Discourse and Ideology in Medieval Japanese Buddhism. Edited by Richard K. Payne and Taigen Dan Leighton. London: Routledge, 2006. 271 pages. Hardcover $120.00/£65.00.
Did Dōgen Go to China? What He Wrote and When He Wrote It. By Steven Heine. Oxford University Press, 2006. xviii + 298 pages. Hardcover £60.00; softcover £14.99.

These two books show that the study of medieval Japanese Buddhism, at least among U.S.-based scholars, is a field where steady and valuable progress continues to be made. The progress lies not only in the study of little-known texts, such as the obscure corners of Dōgen's oeuvre explored in the book by Steven Heine, or the Buddhist Shinto Reikiki and the Tendai Kankō ruijū, dealt with by Fabio Rambelli and Jacqueline Stone respectively, in the Payne and Leighton volume. Nor is it due only to the examination of disciplines and rituals, pursued in acute analyses by James L. Ford and Mark Unno in the same collection. Rather, as in a predecessor volume, Re-Visioning "Kamakura" Buddhism, edited by Payne (University of Hawai'i Press, 1998), what is most innovative is the setting of Buddhist matters in a broad social and literary context, along with the construction of intelligent and imaginative problematizations that bring the material into a revealing perspective. The authors of both books are well versed in the topics of "discourse" and "ideology," as discussed by postmodern theorists such as Foucault and Zizek, but they draw on the theoretical reservoir discreetly and adroitly, and always in a way that sheds light on the medieval Japanese material.

The less convincing essays in the Payne and Leighton volume are those that go straight for the theoretical jugular. Dale Wright surely builds too much on the Nietzschean image of truth as a "mobile army of metaphors" when he says: "Since language runs through all cultural domains, none more so than the religious, linguistic and discursive change is the most telling condition for larger cultural transformation. Metaphor, I claim, is the primary instrument for this kind of social transformation" (p. 26). Richard Payne's quest in ancient India for the theoretical [End Page 389] foundations of medieval Japanese Buddhist handling of language is foredoomed by the complexity of Indian tradition and of the relation of Indian to Japanese thought, as Payne himself seems to sense. It is best to confine oneself to clear lines of influence, as in Kūkai's reception of Indian tantric texts or the influence of Mādhyamaka, already heavily filtered by the Chinese tradition. Kūkai's teaching that Buddha Mahāvairocana actively preaches the dharma, for instance, is grounded in specific Indian sources, but to say that it is "based on a history of religious and philosophic ideas about the relation between language and awakening that reaches back to India" (p. 80) is to open the door to sweeping simplification. Vague debates about the oscillation between the views that language can express the highest religious truth and that it cannot, counterposed to an alleged stereotype of Buddhism as a religion of utter ineffability and silence, do not advance real insight. "The range of conceptions regarding the efficacy of extraordinary language that were the intellectual milieu from which the Shingon tradition formulated its praxis" (p. 82) is not likely to be illuminated by reaching after pan-Indian axioms, such as the somewhat tentative and speculative thesis of Johannes Bronkhorst that in India "words and the things they denote constitute a single unity" (p. 83). When the West is brought in as well, the discussion collapses under its own weight:

The foundational character of this view for the formation of Indic thought, including Buddhism—together with the neo-Platonic and Romantic presumptions regarding the barrier language and conceptual thought establish to direct perception of reality implicit within Western religious thought—suggests that a careful re-evaluation of our understanding of Buddhist views of language is called for.

(pp. 83-84)

Surely all Buddhist scholars know that Buddhism has a plurality...

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