Discourse and Ideology in Medieval Japanese Buddhism

Richard K. Payne, Taigen Dan Leighton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780415359177
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134242092
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

The medieval period of Japanese religious history is commonly known as one in which there was a radical transformation of the religious culture. This book suggests an alternate approach to understanding the dynamics of that transformation. One main topic of analysis focuses on what Buddhism - its practices and doctrines, its traditions and institutions - meant for medieval Japanese peoples themselves. This is achieved by using the notions of discourse and ideology and juxtaposing various topics on shared linguistic practices and discursive worlds of medieval Japanese Buddhism.

Collating contributions from outstanding scholars in the field of Buddhist Studies, the editors have created an important work that builds on preliminary work on rethinking the importance and meaning of Kamakura Buddhism published recently in English, and adds greatly to the debate.

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INTRODUCTION

Richard K. Payne, with Taigen Dan Leighton

Among students of Buddhism and East Asian religions the medieval period of Japanese religious history is commonly known as one in which there was a radical transformation of the religious culture. The received tradition regarding this transformation typically focuses on formulaic expressions of polarized interpretations of the teachings of the Kamakura era founders of those forms of Buddhism that dominate the religious culture of modern Japan. Although this view has been called into question repeatedly over the past half century, it still holds sway over much of the field. This collection of essays suggests an alternate approach to understanding the dynamics of that transformation.

Considering this process of cultural change in medieval Japan,¹ we can ask: what constituted the change in religious culture of the time, and what does the change comprise? This question is intentionally constructed to blur the cause and effect structure of the familiar treatments of the era. The notion of cause and effect has an appealing clarity. Perhaps borrowed into historiography from classical Newtonian physics, its metaphorical significance has been obscured by its very clarity. It creates an artificial clarity out of the vagaries of human motivations.

For example, the idea of mappō is often asserted to have been a causal factor in the changes in the religious culture. Yet one also needs to consider the question of why the idea of mappō appealed to people in the era. Why did it become an organizing principle? The usual narrative goes like this: increase in war, pestilence, and famine leads to acceptance of mappō doctrine, which leads to the rise of the “new Buddhisms.” To say that the era was actually marked by an increase in war, pestilence, and famine fails to take into account two important considerations. First, was this actually any different than preceding eras? And, second, to what extent did the idea of mappō contribute to the recording of these different events because they were now interpreted as forming part of a significant pattern?

How we study change of a religious culture depends – obviously, once we think of it this way – upon what we think religion is. Two of the most pervasive theories are that religion is sui generis (a self-generated system) or that it is simply another word for worldview (Weltanschauung). Both of these have in recent decades come under serious and, in the view of many, convincing criticism. A third common understanding is that religion is primarily a matter of personal transformative experience – a view unsupported by the centrality of social and cultural dimensions of religion in defining what constitutes a personal transformative experience.

While the emphases of the essays collected here differ, some focusing on the views of individuals, others on practices, they all share an awareness that religion is not “a thing apart,” that it is not sui generis. Religion – to the extent that it is an identifiably distinct social, or intersubjective, object – is understood as a member of a complex web of social practices and competing institutions. It is not a singular entity existing as an element within that web, but instead is itself an intricate network. Likewise, the constitution of that web or network is a dialectic – the structure of the web determines the possible ways in which religion can exist, while at the same time religion replicates and restructures the web of which it is a part. Clarified identification of what nodes and links of the web comprise religion is a consequence of analysis and reflection, rather than an inherent characteristic of any particular node or link.

Kocku von Stuckrad has specifically suggested that the value of attention to discourse is that it shifts our conception of what it is that we are examining when we concern ourselves with religion. He argues against the understanding that religion and its study are about inner states of mind – including beliefs and believings – suggesting instead that it is about social agents, who seek either to attain or to maintain positions of power and security.² Such an agonistic view of religion is a consequence of avoiding not only the emphasis on inner, mental states, but also the denatured, ahistorical conception of religions as the transmitters of profound teachings about the human condition, or as vast reservoirs of ancient wisdom.

Theoretical background: Wuthnow’s Communities of Discourse

In his Communities of Discourse Robert Wuthnow investigates the relation between ideology and social structure in three different instances – the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the rise of European socialism. Key to his approach is the way in which he phrases his question. He asks: why do some ideologies survive, while others do not? More broadly, Wuthnow identifies his question as “the problem of articulation.”³ By this he means “the ways in which ideas are shaped by their social situations and yet manage to disengage from these situations.”⁴ The “problem of articulation” entails:

a study of the ways in which social conditions in each period made cultural innovation possible, of variations in the extent to which each movement (as a carrier of its own distinctive ideology) became institutionalized in different societies, and of the ways in which the resulting ideologies were shaped by and yet succeeded in transcending their specific environments of origin.⁵

Although Wuthnow is concerned with European social movements, we can easily apply his approach to Japanese religious movements. The same question applies. All ideologies originate in some particular socio-historical context. Why do some of them come to be influential in other times and places? This is a key issue for contemporary, postmodern cultural criticism, which in many instances tends to give sole credence to the local, seeing any other perspective as simply the work of a hegemonic metanarrative. By analogy, we can consider the instance of geometry, which – while originating among the Greeks – has become a panhuman system of thought. To say that there is something uniquely “Greek” about it, and that it is therefore not relevant or applicable outside the social context of its origin, is to commit the genetic fallacy. A useful terminological distinction that avoids either discounting the articulation discussed by Wuthnow or simply reasserting the “local/ universal” dichotomy is that which has been employed by Miyazaki Fumiko and Duncan Williams, who contrast “local” with “translocal.”⁶

Asking why some ideologies move beyond the context of their origin while others do not implicates an understanding of history that requires going outside of the notion that the survival of certain ideologies is in any way “natural,” due perhaps to their superiority in one way or another. This is related to the view identified elsewhere as “retrospectivist historiography.” This refers to the writing of history as if our own understandings, concerns, beliefs were the goal of a process of historical development – as if history is teleological, a straightforward progress leading naturally, indeed inevitably, and unequivocally to us.⁷ In a much narrower usage, this is known as “the Whig intepretation of history,” from Herbert Butterfield’s book of the same name. According to Berkhofer, Butterfield “named such an interpretation after those optimistic nineteenth-century English gentlemen who believed that the history of the world was providentially intended to culminate in their times, which translated meant their England, their way of life, and ultimately their class.”⁸ He goes on to note that this approach to history continued into the modernization or developmental theories of social scientists in the second half of the twentieth century. It also clearly appears to continue to inform the historiography of religions, particularly where sectarian identity is involved.⁹

The perspective entailed by Wuthnow’s approach to cultural change, however, requires an awareness that there are many alternative ideologies in competition with one another at any one time. In the case of medieval Japan there was, for example, the Ji-shū movement of Amida-centered Buddhism, inspired by Ippen. While popular and influential in its own time, and competitive with other forms of Amida-centered Buddhism such as Pure Land (Jōdo-shū) and True Pure Land (Jōdo Shin-shū), the Ji-shū faded, so that at present it is represented by at most a handful of temples. In Wuthnow’s perspective this is to be explained not in terms of any “broad theories of cultural change,” but by examining specific historical events and social contexts. “Understanding the social contexts of each ideological movement then provides a basis from which to examine the internal structure of each ideology itself in order to illuminate the processes of articulation and disarticulation.”¹⁰

Another theoretical shift that Wuthnow makes concerns culture – understanding what it is, and where it is located. Again, while Wuthnow is concerned with culture understood generally, we can apply his approach to religious culture specifically. Following an extensive critique of sociological and anthropological understandings of culture, Wuthnow concludes that culture cannot be understood as an abstract entity existing somewhere independently of its instantiation:

Rather than consisting of internalized habits of mind or generalized value orientations, culture has come increasingly to be understood in public, observable symbols. Moreover, these symbols are not static, dehumanized accretions but are constituted in action. Practice is the key word. Culture is produced: it comes about through a series of actions, is expressed in action, and through action shapes the relations of individuals and societies.¹¹

This understanding of culture leads to recognition of the need to attend “to speakers and audiences, discursive texts, the rituals in which discourse is embedded, and the social contexts in which it is produced.”¹² The lived practices of followers are more to the point in the actual religious culture than are theoretical doctrines or simply their pronouncement by leading exponents. At the same time, this approach leads to a focus on institutions as the primary locus in which culture is “produced, enacted, and disseminated.”¹³

Thus, attention is given not to abstract, universal social laws, but to specific, historically located institutions and agents:

To understand how an ideology is shaped by its social environment, one must therefore examine the specific circumstances under which these expressions come into being, the audience to whom they are enunciated, the slogans and other materials that are available at the time for incorporation into discursive acts, the roles of speakers and audiences relative to one another and in relation to positions of power, and even the financial resources that make publishing activities possible. Examining these contexts of ideological production enables one to establish with greater clarity why a particular constellation of ideas comes to be institutionalized successfully in a particular setting.¹⁴

In opposition to the idea of abstract, universal social laws, this particularity calls into question the entire project of making analogies between the history of Japanese Buddhism and the history of European Christianity. For example, the frequently made analogy between Kamakura era Buddhism and the Reformation, which has of course already been repeatedly critiqued but which remains a fairly standard image, implicitly assumes a universal pattern of progressive development – one that is implicitly modeled on the European term of the comparison.¹⁵ The question may be raised: aren’t there in fact similarities between the two? Yes, there are. However, there are two problems with justifying the analogy on the basis of there being similarities. First, and most simply, there are also differences. Second, similarities only emerge when two things are looked at from some particular interpretive perspective. The existence of similarities in itself is meaningless, and only takes on meaning when placed in relation to some particular theory.

Why discourse? Why ideology?

Why use the vantage points of discourse and ideology to examine medieval Japanese Buddhism? Before trying to answer that question, we should note that these terms are also meant as pointers toward a range of topical approaches that together involve a shift of historiographic concern from the exclusive focus on doctrines (a theological model) to a focus on religious praxis¹⁶ within a social environment, what might be called a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Metaphor and theory of cultural change
• 3: The sangoku-mappv construct
• 4: Texts, talismans, and jewels
• 5: Awakening and language
• 6: Buddhist ceremonials (kvshiki) and the ideological discourse of established buddhism in early medieval japan
• 7: The body of time and the discourse of precepts
• 8: Swords, words, and deformity
• 9: “not mere written words”
• 10: The lotus sōtra as a source for dvgen’s discourse style
• 11: Empty-handed, but not empty-headed
• 12: “rely on the meaning, not on the words”
• Appendix