Jōkei and Buddhist Devotion in Early Medieval Japan. By James L. Ford. . Oxford University Press, 2006. 317 pages. $75.
摘要
Jōkei and Buddhist Devotion in Early Medieval Japan, which on the surface is a conventional study of the eminent Buddhist priest Jōkei (1155–1213), actually adds another important installment to our revision of Buddhist history in medieval Japan. Jōkei appeared in twentieth-century scholarship largely as an opponent of the newly emerging Pure Land Buddhist movement of the charismatic master Hōnen (1133–1212). Specifically, Jōkei was the reputed author of a nine-point critique of Hōnen's movement, in which the Kōfukuji temple in Nara, a bastion of Japan's Buddhist establishment, petitioned the imperial court in 1205 to suppress the movement. Author James L. Ford argues that this depiction of Jōkei is one-dimensional, omitting many aspects of his religious life that were more representative of medieval Buddhism than Hōnen's movement was. It is only because Pure Land Buddhism later became a dominant force in Japan that Jōkei, who was far more eminent in his own day than Hōnen was, has been eclipsed. Ford thus proposes to use Jōkei as a prism through which to elucidate medieval Japanese Buddhism and to critique the vexed concept of Kamakura Buddhism that has held sway in modern scholarship.
Through most of the twentieth century, the prevailing view was that Japan underwent a kind of reformation in the Kamakura period (1185–1333) resulting in new, progressive forms of Buddhism that displaced older, established ones. Hence, there emerged a twofold taxonomy, cited widely in Japan and subsequently the West, of new Buddhism (including the Pure Land movement) and old Buddhism (including the Hossō school of the Kōfukuji temple). New Buddhism was considered clear, comprehensible, and straightforward in its religious practices and thus accessible to all people. In contrast, old Buddhism was portrayed as doctrinally abstruse, institutionally rigid and hierarchical, and religiously inaccessible to most. By this account, Hōnen represented the rising …
