Seeking Sakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism by Richard M. Jaffe

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Front Cover

Back Cover

Seeking Sakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism

Author:

Richard M. Jaffe

ISBN:

9788194783091

Binding:

Hardcover

Year:

2024

Pages:

326 with 33 b/w figures and 1 table

Size:

16 x 24 x 2 cm

Weight:

621 grams

Price:

INR~~1995~~1796.00

eBook available at:

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About the Book

Though fascinated with the land of their tradition’s birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth century. In the richly illustrated Seeking Sakyamuni, Richard M. Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism. Jaffe shows that Japan’s growing economic ties to the subcontinent following World War I fostered even more Japanese pilgrimage and study at Buddhism’s foundational sites. Tracking the Japanese travelers who returned home, as well as South Asians who visited Japan, Jaffe describes how the resulting flows of knowledge, personal connections, linguistic expertise, and material artifacts of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism instantiated the growing popular consciousness of Buddhism as a pan-Asian tradition—in the heart of Japan.

About the Author

Richard M. Jaffe

Richard M. Jaffe is associate professor of religious studies at Duke University. He is the author of Neither Monk nor Layman and editor of the Selected Works of D.T. Suzuki.

Editorial Reviews

“In this superb book of transnational history, Richard Jaffe uncovers the role that South Asia played in the shaping of modern Japanese Buddhism. Using a wide array of primary sources, he brings to light the forgotten stories of those scholars and seekers who make arduous journeys across the oceans, seeking the traces of the Buddha in the land of his birth. Seeking Sakyamuni is a landmark work of scholarship: rigorously researched, sharply analyzed, and beautifully written. It richly illuminates the religious and intellectual history of Asia, the world’s most populous and most prosperous continent.”
—Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi

“Seeking Sakyamuni will entice and reward readers working on many corners of the Buddhist world. Revealing a 19th- and 20th-century history of complex Buddhist, commercial, and political networks and entanglements within and beyond Asia, Jaffe teaches us much about the more recent history of Japanese Buddhism. Simultaneously, he reveals the central role of intra-Asian engagements in the creation of new modes of Buddhist organization and expression in Japan as well as India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. Richard Jaffe’s longstanding interest in Buddhist objects and aesthetic forms greatly enriches this study, reminding scholars of modern Buddhism not to neglect the changing visual and spatial arguments that reflected and shaped Japanese Buddhist mobility in Asia.”
—Anne Blackburn, Cornell University

“Japanese Buddhism, like all religions, confronted a rapidly changing world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and had to remake itself in order to survive. The prevailing view has been that it did so by appropriating European models of religious learning and practice. Seeking Sakyamuni offers an important corrective to this view, demonstrating that South Asia—India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia—loomed large in Japan’s new construction of Buddhism. Through thick description of Japanese scholarpriests residing long-term in South Asia, of wealthy Japanese tourists making “pilgrimages” to India’s Buddhist sites, of Japanese architectural innovations gesturing to Indian motifs, of South Asian monks participating in Japanese scholarly enterprises, and of much more, Jaffe shows that India left a visible imprint on Japan’s new Buddhism. This was not the result of a one-way transfer of religious culture in any particular direction. Rather, it was part of the creation of many modern Buddhisms out of cultural flows from East Asia, South Asia, and the West, which were ‘entangled, circulatory, and intercrossing.’”
—James Dobbins, Oberlin College

“An exceptionally well-researched and insightfully presented account of Japanese Buddhist travelers to South Asia during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the overall reception and impact of Indian Buddhism on the understanding and production of Japanese Buddhist temples, texts, and various aspects of intellectual and material culture in the modern period.”
—Steve Heine, Florida International University

“Richly documented, engagingly narrated, and methodologically innovative...”
—Journal of the American Academy of Religion

“Searching implies looking for a thing knowing it exists and focussing on finding it out. However, the act of seeking seems to come with a deeper connotation of finding a new purpose, an enriched understanding, and a fulfilment of the seeker. Seeking Sakyamuni is a book of extensive and intensive research by Richard M. Jaffe in seeking the transnational history of the role of the Indian subcontinent in the formation of modern Japanese Buddhism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book also works as a corrective to the prevailing notion that the rise of Indian Buddhist studies in Japan was the result of the importation of European and American scholarship in Japan. Contrarily, it was predominantly the outcome of the interpersonal, scholastic, spiritual, and artistic connection of Japanese Buddhism to South Asia through the educated clerics and laity who travelled to South Asia, mainly India, and brought back relics, images, artworks, and texts; thus bringing a new understanding of Buddhism.

As the book evidently presents to the readers, the contributors of this newer and deeper comprehension of Buddhism were vivid in their nature. Some of them were oriented in presenting the ritualistic mode rather than its rational face, while the others were contrarily trying to embrace the monastic, hierarchic brand. A third but smaller group was trying to discover the true practices as taught by the Buddha. Coming closer to the land of the origin on Buddhism, gave them new exposure to engage and educate themselves and carry forward their understanding and insight to Japan in the pursuit of modernisation of the ism.

This often appeared to be in sharp contrast with their understanding of Buddhism in the pre-modern period, when Japanese direct contact with India was extremely rare. The longing was intense, but the distance and difficulty of travel to India was overtasking. Remembrance of the Buddha (nenbutsu) was the way to meet him. Such a surrealistic connection gave rise to its own challenges. The findings of the pioneering travellers from Japan to India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that have been meticulously researched and documented in this book often helped to clear the cobwebs of the previous understandings. The new understanding was based on the availability of information brought by these Japanese travellers from South Asia, heightened by new technologies like steamships, textile mills, mass printing, reinforced concrete construction, and photography. The evolving political and economic concerns also facilitated these pathways of closer ties between the two lands. This also gave rise to the pan-Asianist spirit in Japan, encouraging to build up a transnational solidarity with other Asians.

The readers will find in this book a historical canvas portraying the formation of modern Japanese Buddhism with shapes and colours from the Indian subcontinent, the land of its origin, giving rise to forms of mobility and exchange that transcend borders of nations and enchant the beholder with a thrill of experiencing the ever dynamic and subtle movement of man’s spirit of seeking.”
—Prabuddha Bharata, September 2024: Vol. 129, No. 9

Customer Reviews