Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System. By Nam-lin Hur. Harvard University Press, 2007. 409 pages. $55.00.
摘要
Having previously dealt with two mainstays of temple life, prayer and play in and around Edo's famous Sensōji temple (Hur 2000), Nam-lin Hur now turns to arguably the most significant aspect of Buddhism in the Tokugawa period—death. Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan details the development of funerary Buddhism and what the author calls the “funerary patron household” system (danka seido) from its beginnings in the first half of the seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth century (9). Hur provides the most extensive historical study in English to date of the broad array of factors that transformed Japanese Buddhist institutions into organs of state surveillance meant to counter the “threat” of Christianity. This book will be of great interest not only to historians and scholars of Japanese religions, but also to those interested in questions of Buddhist modernization, the foundation of the modern Japanese family state, and temple realities from the early modern period to the present day.
Hur outlines several goals for the book: to describe how Buddhist temples became the bulwark against Christianity through terauke, or “temple certification” [not “registration” as it is frequently translated by scholars (16)]; to trace the institutionalization of the danka system; and to show how that system, though pervasive and overwhelming, was nevertheless a site of contestation and negotiation between the shogunate, temples, and Buddhist households (28). In so doing, the author aims at bringing together what he considers previously fragmented or compartmentalized scholarship into a coherent, comprehensive narrative of Buddhism in this period. This work, particularly in the detail it offers on …
