Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan

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...

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Buddhism · Christianity · Ethnology · Modernization theory · Order (exchange) · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Prayer · Social life · Social order · State (computer science) · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies