2009 Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture. Tamamuro Fumio is Professor Emeritus at Meiji University, and is the leading authority on early modern Japanese Buddhism.
This essay examines the historical conditions for the establishment of the templeparishioner or danka system. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact beginnings of this system. While there are medieval precedents, the broad development of the relationship between a temple and its parishioners as established through funerary rituals is primarily a phenomenon of the early modern period. I argue that there are roughly five distinct phases to the development of the templeparishioner system: the proto-temple-parishioner system during the medieval period, the beginnings of the temple-parishioner system in the first half of the seventeenth century, the establishment of the temple-parishioner system in the second half of the seventeenth century, the establishment of the registration of religious affiliation, and the emergence of fully developed funerary Buddhism after 1700.
