FAS Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation utilizes a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective to uncover how intellectual and material exchange between China and Japan led to monastic revival movements in both countries. Grounded in the shared commentarial tradition on monastic rules in the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya (Chi. Sifenlü, Jpn. Shibunritsu 四分律), I interpret how Buddhists negotiated the tension between fidelity to the original Vinaya and their localized social reality, which led not only to renewed monastic daily practice but to new religious movements on a larger scale. The revitalized intellectual tradition of monastic rules on the continent was transmitted to Japan through cultural exchanges by Buddhist clerics. Nonetheless, communication did not take place only through texts. I also trace the movements and networks of people, ideas, and material culture through woodblock prints, picture scrolls, portraits, statues, relics, etc. Against the backdrop of a shared sense of the Final Dharma period, Vinaya merged with practices for rebirth in the Pure Land. I explore the understudied connection between the combined practices of the Vinaya and Pure Land from the continent to Japanese Pure Land schools. In an effort to stay true to the origin of Buddhism, Buddhists created a new body of texts, doctrines, objects, and practices; re-defining monasticism and casting a long shadow on the post-medieval period. My study revolves around the pivotal figure of Yuanzhao (1048-1116), a Northern Song Vinaya master, demonstrating how his reinterpretation of Daoxuan’s (596-667) commentaries on the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya has inspired and informed the monastic revival movements in medieval China and Japan. The project explores critical issues for Buddhist monasticism, including theoretical conceptualization for the formation of the religious self by means of receiving and observing Buddhist precepts, and ways to organize communal daily life according to monastic rules. It provides a multifaceted perspective for understanding the significance of Buddhist monasticism as situated within the central connecting points of doctrine, everyday practice, soteriology, material culture, community identity, and social embeddedness. The establishment of the Vinaya school in medieval China is one direct result of a resurgent interest in the commentarial tradition of the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya. Through the efforts of Yuanzhao and his disciples, the teaching of the Vinaya eventually acquired an institutional presence in Song China, while its impact was also felt through the vibrant cultural exchanges between Buddhists in China and Japan during the 12-14th centuries—a topic that scholars have not given sufficient attention. Yuanzhao’s vast volumes of commentaries in woodblock printing were carried back and studied in Japan through the endeavors of nissōsō (Japanese monks who studied in the Song). This new imported knowledge of the Vinaya became the motivation for religious movements of revival of Buddhist precepts in medieval Japan, led by eminent monks such as Shunjō, Kakujō, Eison, and Ninshō. Rooted in the commentarial tradition of the Vinaya, a cross-regional Buddhist community— rather than a sectarian school— was formed.

This dissertation analyzes prison chaplaincy (kyōkai) in Japan from the Meiji period (1868-1912) to the present day focusing on the chaplaincy activities of Shin Buddhist sects, Christian churches, Shintō shrines, and new religions like Tenrikyō. The sources for this study are drawn from archival research, interviews with chaplains, and site visits to prisons and religious institutions. I argue that the Japanese model of prison chaplaincy is rooted in the Pure Land Buddhist concept of doctrinal remonstration. I trace the history of Japanese prison chaplaincy by examining the development of chaplaincy discourse and the politics surrounding it. I found the discourse of chaplaincy to be a form of theodicy that derives an existential meaning from the crime and rehabilitation process. The chief limitation of this discourse is that its interpretation of crime focuses solely on the private troubles of individuals without considering criminal conduct as a reflection of broader public issues. An analysis of the politics surrounding the prison chaplaincy shows that the development of chaplaincy reflects the changing place of religion in Japanese society. Religion has been conceived as both a private affair and a public benefit that the state has a vested interest in promoting. The chaplaincy reflects both of these qualities in that chaplains are specialists in matters of the heart whose work is thought to contribute to the peace. I found that the practices of individual chaplains exceed the limitations of their discourse as they attempt to help their charges as best they can, often going beyond the requirements of their official responsibilities.

This dissertation examines relic worship (i.e., worship of the bones of the historical Buddha) in thirteenth through fifteenth-century Japan. Through material objects and manuscripts, it shows that relic worship during this period often combined various religious traditions into one reliquary and relic ritual. This project is inspired by one question in particular: how can we understand the complexities of medieval reliquaries within the Japanese religious landscape? I answer this by focusing on three important temples taken here as case studies. Using reliquaries and relic related art, this project looks at reliquaries in the context of the textual sources and art that exist from this time. Many of the reliquaries examined in this dissertation are little-studied national treasures from Japan's medieval period, currently housed in the Nara National Museum, in Nara, Japan.

In regards to female monastics and relics, this period marked the first instance of relics magically appearing at nunneries in vast numbers. These new appearances, I argue, helped to create a differently gendered religious geography by linking certain landscapes and peoples—e.g., nunneries, female monastics, and female courtiers—to this Buddhist world of real and imagined relics. This change in the ownership of relics empowered nuns in ways that were unprecedented in Japanese religious history, while granting peripheral temples and female monastics a promise of salvation in a period when the Buddha’s teachings were thought to be nearly lost (i.e., mappō). This study examines these histories of religion, society, thought, and gender dynamics through the prism of relics and their worship.

This study reclaims the investigation undertaken by Xuanzang (602-667 C.E.) 玄奘, the translator and peripatetic scholar-monk of the Tang Dynasty, and his translation team, into the nature of dying. It conforms to the chronology of the translation and exegesis of the Buddhist texts, including the ancient Āgamas, the recorded discourses of the Buddha, the Mahāvibhāṣa, the Great Abhidharma Commentary, and the foundational works of the subsequent Abhidharma and Yogācāra scholars, undertaken by Xuanzang, and his coterie of scholars and translators, from 645 to 660 C.E. In his comprehensive analyses and translations of the Indic texts on dying, and in his compilation, Demonstration of Consciousness-only, Xuanzang examines the Buddhist teachings on no-self, karma, and reincarnation. In his analysis of the scriptures, he attempts to reconcile the core commitments to the Buddhist doctrines of karma and reincarnation with the tenet of no-self. With the Buddhist theory of the indriyas, attested in the ancient Āgamas, Xuanzang determines that no enduring or permanent self is lost in dying. The corpus of Abhidharma and Yogācāra Buddhist texts translated by Xuanzang and his coterie describes how, by cultivating the skillful indriyas, the spiritual faculties of sentient life, the karma of a sentient being can be improved, as well as the quality of dying and the afterlife. This study uses a source criticism research methodology to investigate the contributions made by Xuanzang on the subject of dying without a self. It finds that within their exegeses and translations of the Abhidharma and Yogācāra texts, Xuanzang and his collaborators, restore the Buddhist tenets of no-self, karma, and reincarnation, and provide the doctrinal basis for deathbed rituals that are practiced across East Asia today.