Interpreting Amida: History and Orientalism in the Study of Pure Land Buddhism. Galen Amstutz

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-290
Author(s):  
David W. Chappell
Keyword(s):  
Pure Land ◽  
Pure Land Buddhism

Genshin's Ojōyōshū and the Construction of Pure Land Discourse in Heian Japan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert F. Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Historical Background ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Central Portion ◽  
Substantial Portion ◽  
Pure Land ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Heian Period ◽  
Pure Land Buddhism ◽  
Time Part ◽  
India And China

The Ōjōyōshū, written by the Heian period Tendai monk Genshin (942-1017), played a pivotal role in establishing Pure Land Buddhism in Japan. This book is a study of the central teachings of the Ōjōyōshū. Furthermore, in order to situate this text in its historical background, a substantial portion of the volume is taken up with discussions of the development of Pure Land Buddhism before Genshin’s time and to Genshin’s event-filled life. Part One provides a brief survey of Pure Land Buddhism in India and China and then treats how it developed in Japan before Genshin’s time. Part Two focuses on the main events of Genshin’s life. Part Three turns to two main issues taken up in the Ōjōyōshū: its Pure Land cosmology and its nenbutsu teaching. In his description of the Pure Land cosmology, Genshin describes, in often graphic detail, the suffering inherent in the six realms of transmigration, including hell, and urges his readers to seek birth in Amida Buddha’s Pure Land, a realm beyond suffering. Furthermore, in the central portion of the Ōjōyōshū, Genshin presents a systematic analysis of the nenbutsu, or the practice of focusing one’s mind on Amida, which is the central practice for attaining birth in the Pure Land.

Chinese Pure Land Buddhism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles B. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Pure Land ◽  
Pure Land Buddhism

The Politics of Pure Land Buddhism in India

Numen ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galen Amstutz
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Social History ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Pure Land ◽  
Pure Land Buddhism

AbstractPure Land Buddhism achieved its primary influence in East Asia because it supplied a nonmonastic, autonomous source of religious authority and practice to middle elites in those cultural regions. In contrast Pure Land failed to achieve any success in India. The explanation for the marginalization of Indian Pure Land is probably sociopolitical: Pure Land teachings tended to bypass not only the authority of the Hindu brahmins, but even the authority of Buddhist renunciate orders. Indian social history did not produce any significant middle elites concerned with such non-gurucentric religious authority. As a result, Buddhist India did not produce any innovations in the upâya of religious institutionalization in Buddhism.

Materiality and Spiritual Economies in Premodern Japanese Buddhism: A Problem in Historical Change

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galen Amstutz
Keyword(s):  
Good Deal ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Pure Land ◽  
Japanese Buddhism ◽  
Pure Land Buddhism ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Cognitive Shift ◽  
Jodo Shinshu

Abstract The recent emphasis on materiality in religion has encouraged a good deal of attention to materiality in Buddhism, but that attention has fallen entirely on Buddhist traditions with conventional monastic orientations. Yet the major Japanese Buddhist school known as True Pure Land Buddhism (Jōdo Shinshū) has also historically possessed a highly important, if different, material dimension, for which one touchpoint has been its merchant members called Ōmi shōnin who flourished in later premodern Japanese history. After alluding to the difficulty of isolating the ‘material’ in any religious culture, the article sketches the transition in Christian materialities in Europe which marked a cognitive shift from medieval modes of thinking (exteriorized, animistic-monistic, oriented to relics and ancestor religion) towards modern modes (interiorized, oriented to abstraction and the psychological individual). Against that paradigm, almost all premodern Buddhist materialities, including those in Japan, can be seen as medieval in nature. However, Jōdo Shinshū was a departure employing an innovatively interiorized doctrine. From that perspective, both Europe and Japan were highly complex civilizations displaying a long-term medieval-to-modern shift, which impacted the material manifestations of religions by gradually replacing older economies of ritual exchange with more modern-looking economies of preaching, religious publication and commercial life. Western scholarship has resisted appreciating these issues in an Asian setting.

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