Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism (review)

Reviewed by: Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism Andrew Bernstein (bio) Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism. Edited by Jacqueline I. Stone and Mariko Namba Walter. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2008. x, 382 pages. $52.00. The nine essays in this volume examine how different incarnations of Japanese Buddhism built continuity in their dealings with death over the last one thousand years. For all the talk about impermanence and nonattachment, Buddhism succeeded in Japan, as elsewhere, by convincing believers to trust in the constant, saving power of the "three jewels"—the dharma, the Buddha, and the monastic order (the nature of each of these differing, of course, from sect to sect). Not only did Buddhist clerics extend the hope of permanent salvation to individuals who took refuge in the three jewels—the flip side being continual suffering/damnation to those who did not—they also encouraged the formation and maintenance of bonds between the living and the dead. In the introduction, the editors stress that this emphasis on continuance and stability should be seen neither as a corruption of an originally pure Buddhist doctrine nor as an accommodation to uneducated lay persons, but as an influential strand of Buddhist thought in its own right, present in virtually all Buddhist traditions from a very early date and coexisting, although in tension, with normative teachings about impermanence and nonattachment. (p. 9) This reviewer would go one step further by replacing "present in virtually all Buddhist traditions" with "central to virtually all Buddhist traditions" and by dropping the potentially misleading "normative" that describes "teachings about impermanence and nonattachment." After all, a growing body of scholarship published over the last two decades—which happily includes essays in this volume—demonstrates that an "emphasis on continuance and stability" in both the face and wake of death was fundamental to Buddhism's success throughout Asia and that many of the apparent tensions between established doctrines and real-death exigencies were far less problematic [End Page 193] for Buddhist institutions than they were, in fact, productive for and even of them.1 Another recently published compendium of studies on Buddhism and death for which Stone served as coeditor, The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations, aptly characterizes the tension between "teachings of impermanence" and "discourses and practices stressing the continuity of the deceased" as not merely a "real and near ubiquitous feature of Buddhist funerary contexts" but as "itself constitutive [italics added] of Buddhist approaches to death."2 This language better communicates the fundamental message that Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism for the most part successfully conveys: funerary beliefs and practices are not parasitic accretions clinging to an originally "pure" Buddhism but have been integral to Buddhism from ancient times to the present. As the editors emphasize early in the introduction, accepting this perspective entails rejecting the "modernist assumptions" of Tamamuro Taijō, author of the pioneering and still justly influential Sōshiki bukkyō (Funeral Buddhism). Published in 1963, Tamamuro's book successfully launched the serious academic study of mortuary practices in Japanese Buddhism yet at the same time pointedly criticized the clerical establishment's reliance on funeral rites as a symptom and cause of spiritual degeneration.3 In fact, Tamamuro's study not only reflected ongoing debate over the continued relevance of Buddhist funerary rites but also helped literally to define its terms, as the title sōshiki bukkyō quickly became a catchphrase encapsulating stereotypes of ossified Buddhist institutions, out of tune with people's spiritual needs in this life and preoccupied solely with death. (p. 2) Stone and Walter add, appropriately, We, the editors of this volume, have no interest in pursuing the modernist critique (except as an object of study), and while we find the roots of the [End Page 194] contemporary Buddhist near-monopoly on death rites to be a fascinating subject, we do not necessarily read their history as a trajectory of Buddhist decline. (p. 2) Having disowned Tamamuro's declensionist narrative, the editors do adopt the thematic and chronological ambition of Sōshiki bukkyō, which traces widespread developments across various sects and over the course of centuries. Their embrace of the longue durée is foreshadowed in

Afterlife · Buddhism · Theology · History · Philosophy · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

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