The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Sōtō Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan (review)

In the conclusion to his study of the new religion Mahikari, written more than two decades ago, Winston Davis reminds us that, in Japanese religious history, the so-called "little tradition" is in fact the "great tradition"; that is, it is the popular religious tradition that stresses practical activity and concrete benefits, rather than the textually based, more philosophical traditions often associated with the major institutions, that dominates.¹ Duncan Williams's excellent social history of So¯to¯ Zen in the Tokugawa period reinforces this view in a dramatic way. Although the study of Zen has most commonly focused on its famous masters, their recorded sayings, and the institutional settings in which Zen was practiced, as Williams states in chapter 1, "this book reveals the religious life of mid-level or typical So¯to¯ Zen priests and the ordinary people who came into contact with them" (p. 3). By taking this approach, Williams is able to show how So¯to¯ Zen participated in what he calls the "common religion" of Japan and how it became the single largest school of Japanese Buddhism by the early eighteenth century, boasting more than 17,500 temples by that time.

In chapter 2, Williams reviews the political and institutional context within which all Tokugawa Buddhist sects existed, noting how the anti-Christian campaigns of the Tokugawa shogunate led to a temple registration system that gradually encompassed the entire Japanese populace. Although the temple registration system is a standard topic in all discussions of To-kugawa Buddhism, Williams provides rich detail in his treatment of it and demonstrates how the Buddhist clergy took advantage of the system to advance their claims on lay registrants. Once the temple registration system was instituted in the seventeenth century, the great number of So¯to¯ temples then in existence, many of them small and insignificant, grew as they went about registering parishioners. These temples also set forth their expectations of their parishioners, which included attendance at the temple on certain days, payment for funerals and memorial services for the dead, and donations. Such expectations were sometimes enforced with threats of being moved "off register" (p. 25). Williams describes the heavy social, financial, and spiritual penalties that would result from being moved off a temple's register.

In this chapter, Williams also provides the best discussion in English of the system by which kaimyo¯ or posthumous names were granted, with special attention to the ways in which the system reinforced social discrimination. Posthumous names indicating high rank were reserved for the rich and well placed in society. Those at the bottom of society, the outcastes and disabled, received discriminatory funeral rites and posthumous names, though it was possible for some in these lower ranks of society to buy their way toward respectability. Williams acknowledges the positive role the temples played in commemorating the dead, but he also recognizes that the "coercive aspect of temple membership, initially created and spread by So¯to¯ Zen priests who were affiliated with the anti-Christian campaign, was just as im-portant to the establishment of the sect as was its appealing ritual practices" (p. 37).

Williams examines death rituals, "the central practice at So¯to¯ Zen temples" (p. 38), in chapter 3. The rituals took into account pre-Buddhist attitudes toward the dead as polluted and included a combination of Zen, esoteric, and Pure Land Buddhist elements. Williams explains the development of the ritual from medieval to Tokugawa times as well as the timing of the services from the forty-ninth day after death through the thirty-third year, when the deceased was in theory to have become "fully liberated and have gone to a Buddha land, or become a Buddha" (p. 49). Williams gives special attention to death rituals for women and attitudes toward women that were informed by the Ketsubonkyo¯ (Blood pool hell...