Japanese Temple Buddhism: Worldliness in a Religion of Renunciation (review)

In their 1998 book Practically Religious (University of Hawai'i Press), Ian Reader and George Tanabe seek to adjust what they view as an imbalance in the study of Japanese religion, namely, how its tendency to neglect the role of worldly benefits contributes to a one-sided understanding of Buddhist practice. Arguing that worldly affirmation is as important as worldly denial, they accent the complementarity, not the contradiction, between the search for practical benefits and the goal of enlightenment, emphasizing that one misconstrues the complexity of Buddhist tradition if one discounts the centrality of either.

In some respects, Stephen Covell's book is in the same vein of thought as the Reader-Tanabe study but presents in its more limited focus one tradition, Tendai Buddhism. Yet Covell's analysis has implications throughout what he calls "Temple Buddhism," his term for the so-called established Buddhist sects. In part because of his own direct experience, Covell supplies the reader with considerable detail of temple life as it reflects the larger incongruity between the worldliness of ordinary temple life and Temple Buddhism's "rhetoric of renunciation" (p. 19). His principal thesis lies in identifying these as "two inseparable yet antagonistic halves: that of renunciate priests who seek to maintain traditional practices and images (world-renouncers), and that of priests who live a more secularized life and seek to serve the needs of their local communities (danka-temple priests)" (p. 194).

While there are parallels with the main thesis of the Reader-Tanabe volume, the Covell book underscores the clash between the polarities of renunciation and worldliness as well as the attempts by Temple Buddhism to reconcile the two. In doing so, Covell covers ground that has not been explored in such detail before. Paradoxically, this clash and the persistent attempts to achieve reconciliation are obstacles to a thorough rethinking of the role of temple priests as spiritual guides and educators, as well as ritualists in a variety of modes. In common parlance, the conventional role of priests for some time has been labeled "funeral Buddhism" even though this fails to do justice to the many roles that priests play in the average temple. Perception often passes for reality, however, and one gathers from Covell's depiction that the reality itself is in need of major reexamination. In his words, "their lack of effort to expound the Buddhist Dharma is seen as evidence of their secularization or degeneration into ritual professionals" (p. 171).

Beyond the introduction, this volume contains eight chapters, which may be grouped in the following manner. Chapters one through three set up the basic dilemmas facing Temple Buddhism today and how it arrived at its perceived corrupted state. Covell includes a major focus on the danka membership system of individual temples and the role of the laity in them, a system that has been radically threatened by social, economic, legal, and religious developments over the last 60 years. As this is an exceedingly complex development, it deserves further attention by future scholars. While this book is an important addition to the understanding of the subject, one hopes that it may stimulate further and more intensive case studies of individual temples in a number of different Buddhist sects in Japan.

Chapters four through six detail the nature of the priesthood in the contemporary scene, citing evidence of how it has become trapped over time between "lofty goals and shifting realities" (p. 108), as well as by Temple Buddhism's many efforts to bridge "the gap between the rhetoric of renunciation," an ideal espoused by priests and lay people alike, and the reality of priests and their wives engaged in ordinary temple activity of rituals and economic realities (p. 139). Covell suggests, but does not develop at length, the criticism that this may be a false dichotomy in part because throughout the world in many religious traditions one finds that the life of renunciation is a...