What are the social and political contours of an ostensibly "religious" persecution? What "historical" figurations are necessary to the production of the eminently persecutable? The determination of that which is religious necessarily includes the careful exclusion that which is not religious; history may indeed by a "record of the past," but precisely because it is merely a record it invariably strives to become the record. Those whose lives are lived, and terminated, within the parameters of this defined conception of the social may merit the appellation of "martyr." "Heretics," by their very existence, suggest the relativization of that which purports to constitute itself as an unqualified totality. Their death, sought by those who would be martyrs, nevertheless defines other, contrary claims of definitions of the absolute.Within the dissertation I deal not only with certain individuals whose lives are constructed as both that of martyr and of a heretic (for clearly the slightest shift of doctrinal or political determination serves to re-constitute the one as the other--martyrs and heretics are frequently the same person). Rather, I discuss the position of an entity known as "Buddhism" as it undergoes the transformation from that which stands outside the socio-political and (within Meiji Japan) thus religious "norms," to that which contributes significantly to the very production of those norms. The five chapters of the dissertation are constructed to reveal, in other words, the move of Buddhism from the position of a national heresy to that as a bastion of national heritage. Chapter one is a discussion of Tokugawa era conceptions of history, nationalism and political economy as related to the persecution of Buddhism; chapter two is a discussion of the early Meiji persecution of institutional Buddhism; chapter three presents the government's continued attempt to regulate both the "social" and "religious" through the Ministry of Doctrine (Kyobusho); chapter four presents Buddhism's attempt to enter the international discourse on religion via participation in the 1893 World's Parliament of religions in Chicago; and chapter five discusses the form and formation of distinctly Buddhist histories and their position amidst the broader concerns of 19th century historiographical exercises. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)
