Michihiro Ama Department of Languages University of Alaska Anchorage
摘要
While there is abundant scholarship on the postwar reconstruction of Japanese religion and identity, the development of Japanese religion beyond its national borders after World War II is relatively understudied. This paper aims to expand the scope of scholarship on modern Japanese Buddhism by treating changes that affected Japanese Buddhism in the United States during the postwar period as an extended experience of Buddhism in Japan. It analyzes the work of Tana Daishō (1901–1972), an Issei Shin Buddhist minister who spent the second half of his life in the U.S., using Robert Bellah’s concepts of “facilitated variation” and “conserved core processes.” Tana wrote and compiled a set of books in Japanese as a doctrinal exegesis and expressed his vision for the development of Shin Buddhism in the United States. In his discussion of this future adaptation, however, he always referred to the Japanese tradition as the basis of comparison and justification. He set out to recover “archaic” Shin Buddhist symbols while taking into account the differing cultural conventions of Japan and the United States. By situating the study of modern Japanese Buddhism in a transnational context, I hope to clarify a broader spectrum of the Japanese Buddhist experience during the mid-twentieth century.
目次
INTRODUCTION A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF TANA DAISHŌ TANA’S WORKS THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HONGANJI SHIN BUDDHISM AS A FAMILY RELIGION REDEFINING SHIN BUDDHIST BENEFITS DEFINING “PRACTICE” FOR AMERICAN SHIN BUDDHISTS CONCLUSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES
