The essays collected in this volume for the first time foreground the fundamental role Asian actors played in the formation of scholarly knowledge on Buddhism and the emergence of Buddhist studies as an academic discipline in Europe and Asia during the second half of the nineteenth century. The contributions focus on different aspects of the interchange between Japanese Buddhists and their European interlocutors ranging from the halls of Oxford to the temples of Nara. They break the mould of previous scholarship and redress the imbalances inherent in Eurocentric accounts of the construction of Buddhism as an object of professorial interest. Contributors are: Micah Auerback, Mick Deneckere, Stephan Kigensan Licha, Hans Martin Krämer, Ōmi Toshihiro, Jakub Zamorski, Suzanne Marchand, Martin Baumann, Catherine Fhima, and Roland Lardinois.

This volume excavates the genealogy of xin 信--a term that has become the modern Chinese counterpart for the English word "faith." More than twenty experts trace its religious and non-religious roots in several traditions, including Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, Muslim, Christian, Japanese, popular religious, and modern secular contexts.

Japan was the first Asian nation to face the full impact of modernity. Like the rest of Japanese society, Buddhist institutions, individuals, and thought were drawn into the dynamics of confronting the modern age. Japanese Buddhism had to face multiple challenges, but it also contributed to modern Japanese society in numerous ways. Buddhism and Modernity: Sources from Nineteenth-Century Japan makes accessible the voices of Japanese Buddhists during the early phase of high modernity. The volume offers original translations of key texts—many available for the first time in English—by central actors in Japan’s transition to the modern era, including the works of Inoue Enryō, Gesshō, Hara Tanzan, Shimaji Mokurai, Kiyozawa Manshi, Murakami Senshō, Tanaka Chigaku, and Shaku Sōen. All of these writers are well recognized by Buddhist studies scholars and Japanese historians but have drawn little attention elsewhere; this stands in marked contrast to the reception of Japanese Buddhism since D. T. Suzuki, the towering figure of Japanese Zen in the first half of the twentieth century. The present book fills the chronological gap between the premodern era and the twentieth century by focusing on the crucial transition period of the nineteenth century. Issues central to the interaction of Japanese Buddhism with modernity inform the five major parts of the work: sectarian reform, the nation, science and philosophy, social reform, and Japan and Asia. Throughout the chapters, the globally entangled dimension—both in relation to the West, especially the direct and indirect impact of Christianity, and to Buddhist Asia—is of great importance. The Introduction emphasizes not only how Japanese Buddhism was part of a broader, globally shared reaction of religions to the specific challenges of modernity, but also goes into great detail in laying out the specifics of the Japanese case.

Though fascinated with the land of their tradition’s birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth century. In the richly illustrated Seeking Śākyamuni, Richard M. Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism. Jaffe shows that Japan’s growing economic ties to the subcontinent following World War I fostered even more Japanese pilgrimage and study at Buddhism’s foundational sites. Tracking the Japanese travelers who returned home, as well as South Asians who visited Japan, Jaffe describes how the resulting flows of knowledge, personal connections, linguistic expertise, and material artifacts of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism instantiated the growing popular consciousness of Buddhism as a pan-Asian tradition—in the heart of Japan.

This book is a study of the formation and the practice of Buddhist canons and an attempt to present as fully as possible the panorama of Chinese Buddhist faith. The book uses textual and archaeological sources, including Dunhuang texts, and adopts multiple perspectives such as textual evidence, historical circumstances, social life, as well as the intellectual background at the time.

Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 offers a panoramic study of Chinese reflections on “progress,” its multifaceted expressions, contesting interpretations, highly optimistic implications, but also the criticism it encountered.

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