The Clear Mirror: A Chronicle of the Japanese Court during the Kamakura Period (1185-1333)

2000 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 218
Author(s):  
Robert Borgen ◽  
George W. Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Kamakura Period

The Longue Durée of Deathbed Rites

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline I. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Buddhist Temple ◽  
Kamakura Period ◽  
Funeral Practices ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
The Ideal

During the Kamakura period and beyond, deathbed practices spread to new social groups. The ideal of mindful death was accommodated to warriors heading for the battlefield and was incorporated into war tales. It was reinterpreted in emergent Zen communities by such figures as Enni, Soseki, and Koken Shiren; within the exclusive nenbutsu movements, by Hōnen, Shinran, Shinkyō, and others; and by Shingon adepts such as Kakukai, Dōhan, Chidō, and others who advocated simplified forms of A-syllable contemplation (ajikan) as a deathbed practice naturally according with innate enlightenment. Amid the thriving print culture of early modern times, new ōjōden and instructions for deathbed practice were compiled and published. These often show a pronounced sectarian orientation, reflecting Buddhist temple organization under Tokugawa rule; they also reveal much about contemporaneous funeral practices. Deathbed practices declined markedly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a casualty of modernity and changing afterlife conceptions.

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