Williams Duncan Ryûken. The Other Side of Zen. A Social History of Sōtō Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan

Princeton University Press, 2005. — 261 р. — ISBN 0-691-11928-7Until the 1980s, scholars of Japanese Zen Buddhism in the West almost al-ways focused on three major approaches to Zen. Zen was taken as a form of mysticism, as an Eastern philosophy, or as a part of Japanese culture. Ex-amining meditation, the philosophical writings of well-known Zen masters, or “expressions of high culture” such as the Zen garden or the tea cere-mony, these scholars tended to isolate the Zen Buddhist tradition from both its sociohistorical context and the broader Japanese religious landscape in which it was embedded. Zen was portrayed as a pure and timeless truth, un-tainted by the social and political institutions of medieval and early modern Japan. Furthermore, both popular and academic writing about all three major Japanese Zen schools—Sôtô, Rinzai, Ôbaku—presented Zen as a unique tradition, set apart from other Japanese Buddhist and non-Buddhist religious traditions. In the case of the Sôtô Zen school, the subject of this book, such scholarship advanced the understanding of Zen philosophy, po-etics, or meditation but failed to illuminate how the Zen school participated in the broader social and religious landscape of late medieval and early modern Japan. Edwin O. Reischauer, the well-known Japanologist, was one of the first critics of these approaches. He stated in 1981, “It is ironic that Zen philosophy, which is commonly characterized as being beyond words, has inspired millions of words in English print, whereas Zen institutions, though vastly important in many aspects of medieval Japanese civilization and in no way beyond description in words, have drawn so few.”1During the past twenty years, a small but significant scholarly response to Rei-schauer’s criticism has emerged in the West. These scholars, based on the postwar research of Japanese historians of the Zen school, have begun to examine the establishment and development of Zen Buddhism in Japan as a social and political institution.2 Following this newer scholarly lineage, this book uses the work of these scholars to address the question of how Sôtô Zen managed to grow from only several thousand temples in the early sixteenth century to 17,548 tem-ples by the early eighteenth century and become the single largest school of Buddhism in Japan.3The answer to this question cannot be found in the writings of the sect’s founder Dôgen (1200–1253), or in what is often pre-sumed to be the sect’s primary activity, Zen meditation. Instead, the enor-mous growth of Sôtô Zen temples must be explained by an exploration of the broader political and religious life of the late medieval and early modern periods as well as the social role played by Buddhist temples in the ordinary layperson’s life.